![]() He graduated from art school in Sheffield, where tales of his happenings are legion: like the pop-up “art cafe” he set up on Hunter’s Bar roundabout, where he ended up feeding the police who had turned up to see what the commotion was.įor most of the 00s, Steve was lead guitarist and chief songwriter in glam-rock outfit Pink Grease, who had an NME-certified reputation as a scorching live outfit. He was already a legendary character: socially incandescent and liable to spout off spontaneous wild fantasia. I first met him – and was slightly cowed by him – in our teenage years in the Avenues area of Hull. Reconstructing his vision was all the more intimidating given what a creative firebrand Steve had been. NME favourite … Steve Booth in Pink Grease at Reading in 2004. ![]() Cue several hours of anecdotes about the beautiful havoc and joy he had wreaked in life. A few weeks later, those who knew Steve made space in their lockdown schedules for his Zoom wake. But I wasn’t alone in disbelief and grief. ![]() It didn’t seem possible that this could happen to someone as exuberant as Steve. He had a combination of what is known as a cytokine storm, where the body’s immune system attacks itself, and silent hypoxia. He caught Covid in January 2021 and, after remaining nearly symptomless for several weeks, died suddenly overnight. Just over a year later, Steve was dead, at the age of 44. Then I sloped off into Soho’s bleary lights. That slanted smile split his face and he gave me a hug. Moseying outside, still chatting, we agreed that art – and the struggles to make it happen – could fit in somewhere amid all of this. But on that occasion, we barely discussed the film, drifting instead into life’s bigger business: his attempts to move out of his artists’ squat, his mum’s recent illness, my dad’s death. ![]() We had met to talk about End Credits, a martial-arts short film we had written, and that he was due to begin shooting. The last time I saw Steve Booth was in September 2019, outside the Curzon cinema, where he worked, on Shaftesbury Avenue, London. ![]()
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