Woodside

Woodside was two mates from Alsager: Tom Lovatt on guitar, bass and vocals, and Ben Carter on guitar and drum machine.

We'd been chasing rock superstardom since we were 16, in a front room on Pikemere Road, and in late 1997 it became Woodside. We recorded with Barney Smith at ODC Greenway Studios, and in 2002 our EP, A Northern Town, was on the shelves at HMV Manchester, part of a promotion with the Night & Day Café. Not bad for two lads from a small Cheshire town.

In 2012 we came back for a reunion set at the Alsager Music Festival. That's where the phoenix comes from: Woodside, rising from the ashes.

Tom died suddenly in May 2014, aged 35, from SADS, a heart condition he never knew he had. A Northern Town was played at his funeral, and that summer we released it online to raise money for the British Heart Foundation.

Tom

Tom could sit down and play and sing almost any song, on piano, guitar or bass. He was the funniest person any of us have ever met. He had an enormous head full of brilliant, useless facts, and his friends doubt they will ever win a quiz again without him. He once drove two hours through the rain to a gig in Lancaster, found his stage shirt lying in the road under the van, and played the whole set in his Mr T T-shirt.

He taught me to play guitar. I'd run over to his house just to get him to tune it. A Northern Town was about growing up in Alsager, our lives and our girlfriends at the time. It was always our anthem, and we'd joke that it would make us famous. It was the thing we were most proud of.

A friend said it best: "So clever, so funny, so witty, so talented. So calm, so relaxed, so measured and so kind."

Tom's family set up a memorial fund with Cardiac Risk in the Young, which pays for heart screenings for young people in Alsager. You can give in his memory at https://www.c-r-y.org.uk/tom-lovatt/

Watch: In memory of Tom Lovatt (1979–2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCOLVqQe3k

We were best mates for twenty years. Tom, thank you for the laughter, thank you for everything you did for me, thank you for being my friend.

— Ben