No Rock And Roll Fun

INDIEOBIT: Sad news reaches us via James of chachacha.com:

Top Welsh indie pop singer song writer Matthew Jay has committed suicide.

No joke, sadly.

Apparently he threw himself out of a window. Obviously must have been distraught at being dropped back in April and having his offical www.matthewjay.com website being taken down.

No idea if this has been on popbitch or holymoly already. I doubt anyone on those sites cares... I saw him supporting Starsailer way back when and he struck me as half decent - my editor at the time fell in love with him and so I spent a great deal of my working hours listening to his 'Draw' album.

Googling on his name, we were a bit spooked that the second suggestion (after the now-sealed official site) was for a review we wrote of the band's (they had a PJ Harvey style naming convention) Summer 2001 gig at the Liverpool Lomax for Ink Magazine:

[...] Matthew shares that if next single doesn’t get a top 75, there might not be any more. But ‘please don’t send me away’ deserves much more than the shallows of that end of the chart – heartfelt and desperate, its fate should be under the skin, not skimming the surface. Sweetly, politely, but with a sense of time passing, this sums up the band’s message: there’s nowhere you can go where there’s nobody, but that doesn’t stop you being alone.