Always Remembered: John Mills

JOHN MILLS

24/03/1971 - 31/05/2014

It’s hard to believe it’s eight years today that we lost club member and second team manager John Mills to Leukaemia on 31^st May 2014.

John helped to secure promotion for the seconds in his period as manager whilst playing a 3-4-3 formation for much of his time in charge. John was a determined man who believed in his methods and methodically implemented his strategy.  When playing he was renowned for taking up the back post on attacking corners and scored many a tap-in.

I couldn’t sum Big John up as much as his good friend and current club member David Agnew did, so I will leave these words here.

‘I first met John Mills when he became the bass player in the band I drummed for, Panda Kopanda. I was still a teenager, while he had hit his thirties. He’d already had something of a career in music, touring around with the Mandelbrot Set, and having the occasional Turkish holiday paid for by reluctant cover-band work. But he fitted into Panda Kopanda almost instantly, and rapidly became an integral part.

John and I shared a similar approach to music. He had no time for posturing and the general wankery that most bands had at their fore. Although not an especially shy man, John preferred to scuttle as far away as possible from the stage lights and go about his business.  He wasn’t a showman, and as any gigging musician will tell you, if you’re not a showman then you better just concentrate on being good. And he was good. And he made me better; honestly, I’m sure I hit a few thousand misplaced kick drums that managed to escape unnoticed just because he could read me and make sure his notes were just as precisely misplaced. We were rarely out of sync - that was down to him.

But it was outside of the gigging realm that John really showed his hand. The Pandas proudly referred to ourselves as a D.I.Y band. It belied how much of the process rested in one man’s hands. If you’ll excuse it, we were more of a He.I.Y band - three quarters of us went about our business the way any musician would, but it was John who recorded, produced and mixed all our output from his family home in rural Saintfield. As a band who tended to choke under the red light, it really was a massive benefit to have someone with skills, the vision and crucially, the patience to polish up some heaving turds. He followed intuition rather than textbooks; using bags of cutlery instead of tambourines, recording drunken revellers at closing time for atmospherics, or just throwing things out of windows to see if they sounded good. John was never short of ideas. He directed some of our music videos as well. Our video for ‘About My Temper’ was all shot in still frame, and he had every phonetic utterance worked out precisely for the lip-syncing - that was his clarity of vision, and his meticulousness.

When John died Facebook was awash with tributes. Some who had known him only through the band, then there’s those who knew him only from his spell as manager at Newtown Forest Football Club (local music’s club of choice, comprising representatives from Axis Of, Mojo Fury, Radar, No Dancing, Sea Pinks (me!) & others). More came from his working background at Stage Crew. He built stages for Tenants Vital, did sound for Belfast Festival events, operated the confetti cannon for Bjork. He had many fingers in many pies, but all these tributes from friends, clients and workmates said roughly the same thing. John was easy company. Good humoured though never overbearing. He was a courteous man, who had time for people. He was thorough, and professional, and had exceptionally soft hair. And if you wanted someone to pack two amps, two guitars, a bass, a keyboard, some drums, merchandise, sleeping bags and ruck sacks into the back of a Volvo 240, then he was your man as well. 

There’s always a danger with these posthumous tributes that you whitewash the person of their faults and create some farcically exalted version of them. John was no saintlier than any of us. But, with roughly 350 people attending his funeral (so many that they had to pipe the service out through the speakers outside to a sizeable crowd who couldn’t get in), it’s reasonable to assume that he was much more loved than loathed. I’m sure he didn’t envisage he had such popularity. Clearly, he meant something to an awful lot of people, distant and close.’

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