Erik Hell (filmmaker): Emily Alexander and I met at university, where we were quite good friends. We were a bit of an odd pair. She was 'the American girl', I was 'the cross-dresser'. Wore a lot of girls' clothes at the time, makeup and skirts. I certainly wouldn't say we were picked on, but we both got a good amount of gentle ribbing for our idiosyncrasies. So it's only natural we would end up speaking to each other at some point. If I recall correctly, we were out with friends and we were literally shoved together by a mutual acquaintance who decided that it was important that we speak to each other.
Emily was very embarrassed by the drunkenness of our friends, and so the two of us stepped outside for a breather and started talking, whence Emily immediately told me off for doing my eyeshadow wrong. I don't want to impart undeserved gravity to the situation, but I believe it was at that moment when I realized Emily Alexander and I were probably going to be very good friends indeed.
We wrote some songs together, with both of us on guitar, and we did some really ridiculous semi-drunken performances of 80's hits on school benches and in train stations. I'm sure you haven't lived until you see a scruffy Scarlett Johansson lookalike and a big Manc fucker in a skirt belt Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive" to a bunch of tube passengers who are doing their best to mind their own business. I'll say it was rather impressive.
We met Tristain at uni as well. I really think the most accurate description would be that Emily bothered him into talking to us. I've no idea how they met, I think it was one of those things that just happened. Anyhow, he found out we were musicians, and he decided we should start a band, the three of us. So now add to this bizarre duo a tall pale bloke with eighteenth-century hair. You know, like, curls down past his shoulders that he wears tied back with a ribbon.
Natalie Leonard: Tristain told them that he'd been writing songs for the last five years, and he wanted to talk about forming a band with all of them. For Emily and Erik, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Emily especially had always wanted to be serious about music. She probably felt a bit trapped just playing shitty drunken pop covers—okay, maybe they weren't shitty, the covers themselves, but the songs they picked were not exactly brilliant material. So when she found out that Tristain was quite serious about music, she was excited, and somehow convinced Erik to start playing the drums. Erik seemed happy enough, because he could still sing with a microphone in front of the drum set. So all of a sudden they went from singing "We Built This City (On Rock And Roll)" to three-part harmony.
Tristain played the bass. He revealed lyrics that delicately interwove political theory and nihilistic philosophy. They started the train station busking racket back up, except that now people were paying attention, because they had proper amps and were much less drunk. Tristain I believe never drank because he thought it impaired his judgment. In fact he's said that drink is the opiate of the atheists. Although I did see him drink absinthe in a photo once. Anyhow.
Charlotte Dean (assistant professor of philosophy, University of Wales at Swansea): After spending their time busking for money in Tube stations, the band began to promote themselves as a serious group. It was largely goth clubs where they played, which is how I discovered them. At the time I was a bit into the scene myself—it's that attempt at finding meaning in the emptiness that is teenage life. There was something in the mystique of the band that appealed to me. Tristain was...how do I put it? I mean, first off, philosophy has always been my interest and it was his as well, so that was something that I saw as connecting me to the band.
Laura Green (marketing consultant): Tristain Wilder had layers upon layers. He created an image of himself as unflappable, coolly intelligent. We were sure though that there was some vulnerable core inside of him that perhaps we could reach, or that simply he shared with us, that by truly understanding his lyrics, we could connect with him, we could find some inspiration for our own lives. We all fell for it. It was quite clear, immediately, that some of us were to become very devoted to this band. We formed a small but tight group. We watched everything they did carefully. We wanted to find it within ourselves, we wanted to find that brilliance, that ability to be so effortlessly cool. We copied his poet shirts and his polished brogues. We tied our hair with ribbons and read musty-smelling books with names like Hume and Sartre and Karl Marx on the spine.
It was a bit 'all surface, no feeling' wasn't it? But no, I think there was some feeling in there, some idea that suddenly, by trying to be like Tristain, we had a purpose.
Natalie Leonard: Tristain was coming up with all these names for the band that were probably one part ridiculous and one part ahead of their time. Actually I've found that one of the most common responses to hearing the name Knave of Hearts is, why would you call yourselves knaves? People don't think of it as a playing card, they think of it as an old-fashioned profanity. Ha ha. But anyhow. Tristain had things like "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and "Shantih Shantih Shantih", but Emily and Erik really wanted something more palatable. They finally agreed on Quoth The Raven Nevermore because it was from Poe, which is literary enough I suppose (laugh), and yet everyone recognizes it and knows where it's from, and they really do associate it with a kind of nihilism, don't they?
I mean, I've read that poem over loads of times and the real soul of it is that happiness is gone, that the loss of love and human connections will lead us all into madness. The raven is this mocking image. They wouldn't just call themselves 'The Raven' because the raven is kind of an arse, isn't he? But Quoth The Raven Nevermore—it's that line, that symbol of insanity, of hopelessness and, y'know, the end of love.
Emily Alexander: Tristain was...
No. I'll just say being in Nevermore was a formative part of my life. I'll just say that we went into it having no knowledge of anything except our own idealism. We thought we had an idea of how to make the world look at itself in a mirror. We felt like—and I think it was because we were teenagers, we felt like the world had replaced our souls with this lingering, growing emptiness, and that we wanted to replace that emptiness with a will to create.
What Tristain was, was the soul. He had been...hurt, by this world, and not by his family or his circumstances but because inside him there was a lot of pain.
None of us could fix it.
Christopher Alexander (software developer): Emily was really close to him. I think she too felt like she'd been chewed up and spit out by the world, and that tends to draw people together even if you're from really different backgrounds.
Lindsey Hale (speech and language therapist): She loved him.
Emily Alexander: We somehow managed to sign onto an indie label called Dead Dolls—a truly awful name now that I think of it—and released an EP. No one cared, except for the small group of fans who followed us and posted on our message forum. Then on a whim we decided to record a cover of the Police's "King of Pain"—it was sort of a joke among us, Erik would start singing "that's my soul up there" every time Tristain said something really upsetting, and it would lighten our mood. So we decided we'd actually record the song. I mean the black lipstick contingent liked it enough—not that there's anything wrong with wearing black lipstick, I have done myself once or twice...
Erik Hell: It surprisingly worked. We performed it on the BBC and then we toured the UK and Ireland.
Emily Alexander: Touring...was awful.
Apparently I get panic attacks when I have to go on stage.
Apparently Tristain was inclined to drink too much and... (cough) Um...he would do some stuff. Like...burn his arms with cigarettes. Like...there were times when he would just curl up on his bed and make these awful noises like he was crying without tears.
(long silence)
It did a lot of bad shit to me. It ruined my relationship. I left him—his name was Julian—because...because I was caring for Tristain. Because I felt like Tristain was...the only...right, yeah.
I decided I didn't want to perform onstage again and we should make a studio album. We could do all sorts of electronic wizardry, and we didn't have to play shows outside the area around our uni. Tristain was in hospital for a while and got himself sorted out, he said.
Erik Hell: We got back from the tour and we had been about to write a new album. I was down the pub when I found out. Watching footy. Emily phoned, and she was incoherent. I went over.
Natalie Leonard: On October 12th, 2002, Tristain hung himself in his room. He had left a note that said "I'm sorry," that's all.
Emily Alexander: I didn't talk to anyone for days, I just paced my house.
Charlotte Dean: When I found out about Tristain, I just remember feeling empty. Like all I wanted to do was collapse on my bed. I couldn't even bring myself to cry. I can't say why it is that I had developed such a close emotional attachment to someone I never knew personally, had never even spoken to other than once when he replied to a question I posted on the Internet forum. You might say it's a selfishness, like it's just my own grief at losing a source of happiness for me, but I don't think it was that. It was a very weighty sadness, perhaps the sadness that the world had lost Tristain. That the world couldn't keep him.
Laura Green: I can only imagine that anything we felt was felt a million times over by Bill and Mallory Wilder. He was their only child. You have to know that they did everything they could. They made sure that he was getting psychiatric care, they always encouraged him to follow whatever path he chose in life. I believe it means that there are some things, some disturbances in the mind, that no amount of love and care can fix. That the pain comes from within the self, and so does the ability—the desire to work past that pain. And if you don't have that...sometimes the only option looks like ending pain in a different way. But I don't believe it's ever really the only option. I believe that's the state of mind you have to be in before you take a drastic action.
Emily Alexander: I never wanted to be in a band again. Much less did I ever want to be in a band like Nevermore. I don't know how it happened, but somehow I ended up managing a band very much like Nevermore. Same dark, penetrating intelligence. Same goal—make people think critically about their world.
Alan Léonin: I ain't a thing like him. I—I'm not. I'm tired of hearing it. I'm bloody tired of it. I'm—fuck it, I bloody well am not Tristain Wilder, because I'm—I don't mean to be an arse about it but I'm better than that, and I don't do what he did, I know who loves me and cares for me and I have to give back, I can't just become wrapped up in myself the way he did.
Emma Marx-Hall: Oh now, don't start comparing us to them. We're not like any other band that's ever existed, or ever will.
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