“Looks like you finally got your wings, Tom,” I whispered between sobs. At that moment, it wasn’t too hard to imagine him with angel wings and a halo, taking off into the night sky. Through blurred vision, I saw him on stage with a smile on his face, his arms open wide and head back, a ray of yellow light around him. I hadn’t even realised I was crying at this point.ĭuring the end section where Tom stops singing and gives the floor to the entire audience, I began to whimper. By the time he had reached the chorus, my cheeks were wet with tears. Then, the first line: Well, it started out down a dirty road… My eyes started to prickle a little. I had managed to keep it together until almost the end of the DVD, but when Learning to Fly came on, something inside me just snapped.Īs Tom played the opening riff on his acoustic guitar, I felt a shiver down my spine and a lump in my throat. I decided to watch Tom’s 30 th anniversary “Live from Gatorville” concert. That Saturday evening, my boyfriend was working a late shift at the hospital, and I was at home alone. Why Tom? I asked myself over and over again. My numbness slowly transformed into anger, frustration, resentment. Many of my favourite musicians were no longer living, yet never before had I experienced the loss of a musician I had loved in my lifetime. I’d come home with my feet covered in blisters, my body aching with tiredness, but I’d still get up the next day and do it all over again.Īs I walked, I was haunted by a lyric from Tom’s 1999 song Swingin’: After that night in Vegas and the hell that we went through. All I can remember is just walking and walking and walking aimlessly around my city, as if somehow I could turn back time and revive Tom if only I walked fast enough.
The next few days or so passed in a blur. The band were in fine form, and I was so excited about the prospect of seeing them in the UK the following year. I had been following the whole thing avidly on social media. He had just finished his 40 th anniversary tour a few days before. He passed away at 8:40pm PDT with his family and bandmates around him. Tom Petty had suffered a cardiac arrest at his Malibu home and despite the best efforts of medical staff, they could not revive him. Sadly, at around 5am, the news that I had so desperately feared was confirmed. I stayed awake all night on a high state of alert, constantly refreshing the phone and each time saying a silent prayer to myself that Tom would be okay. It was around midnight by this point, but I knew that it wasn’t worth trying to get to sleep. Most news outlets were understandably focused on this story, but this just hindered my ability to find out what exactly had happened to Tom. While some reported that Tom Petty had died, others said he was in a life-threatening condition in hospital or that he had been found unconscious and was being treated at home.įinding a clear answer was made worse by the fact that America had experienced a terrible mass shooting earlier that very same day: the Las Vegas massacre. As I read, it quickly became clear that the events were fuzzy and not clear cut at all. I started flipping through as many other news sites as I could possibly think of: BBC, CNN, New York Times, Yahoo, NBC, The Independent. “No, it can’t be,” I said to myself, shaking my head in disbelief. “Give me that!” I cried, snatching his mobile phone from his hand where he had been reading the newspaper.įrantically, I scrolled through the breaking news section of The Guardian until I came across the headline: Tom Petty: US rock musician dies aged 66. “What?!” I shouted somewhat agitatedly, thinking this was one of those jokes typical of his black sense of humour. Those four words hit me like a tonne of bricks when my boyfriend uttered them to me around 10:30pm on October 1, 2017.
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