It has been almost seven months since the passing of Architects founding guitarist Tom Searle after losing his battle with cancer at the young age of 28. At that time we heard the band would continue their planned tour dates in support of their album All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us that released just three months before his death. Now, for the first time drummer Dan Searle opened up about the loss of his twin brother and bandmate. Dan reached out to Daniel P. Carter asking to be interviewed on his podcast Someone Who Isn’t Me to speak out once and for all about his brother’s passing.
Carter agreed to this interview and decided to let Dan steer the dark and heavy podcast.
Dan started by stating:
“I don’t want people to think that you asked me looking for some kind of story.”
The interview is incredibly heartbreaking, you can hear Dan moving around different tangents making us aware that there was so much he wanted to share. Dan made it seem that Tom didn’t think he was going to die as they were optimistic about the future. He discussed Tom’s lyrics in “Gone With The Wind,” that led fans to think he was giving up:
“This is what no one really understands that didn’t know him. There was so much talk of the future. Even I look back at those lyrics. Now I read them and think, Tom had given up? With any lyrics, it’s a snapshot, a snapshot of a moment. And tom wrote those lyrics right after his cancer came back. He felt like medicine struggles with cancer. And he felt the answer is inside of me because people do get better. All I read was about cancer for a year and a half.”
He continued:
“I spent all of my time writing, reading, thinking, talking about cancer, unless I was with him.”
Later in the interview, Dan discussed Tom’s final performance with the band (transcribed by Rock Feed)::
“We went to the hospital after those album release shows. They told him it was bad and they wanted to keep him in and he said nah, I’m going on tour tomorrow. Sorry. I don’t care. And so we played Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park. It was crazy, like, Tom had to have oxygen on the bus. My girlfriend was on tour just to look after him.”
He continued: “Rock Am Ring was the first show and it just seemed impossible that he would play. And he just meditated all day, pretty much, four or five hours. Holed up, and had his guitar on him and he walked on stage and he just stood there. But it was just like, sheer determination. And there was a massive storm. Loads of people got struck by lightning. And it was honestly one of the best shows we ever played.”
“And the last show he ever played was the next day. It was Rock Im Park and he just seemed so ill. It just seemed like there was no way he was gonna do it and then… I had been on the bus with him. I walked back to the dressing room and told the guys we’re going to have to work out a way to do this as a four piece. I had been working on trying to sort it out so we could have his guitars on tracks… so we could make the show happen. Then he just walks into the dressing room like hey guys, wassup like seemingly fine.”
Dan later revealed Architects will continue and they have a few songs written prior to Tom’s passing.
He wrote on the band’s Facebook, urging fans to listen to this unedited podcast.
“Recently I sat down with my friend, Dan Carter, to talk publicly for the first time about Tom’s death. For whatever reason, I felt the need to let people know certain things about the way Tom handled his illness, especially during the last year of his life. It’s easy to draw conclusions about the way in which he approached his situation based on how other people you know may have dealt with cancer, but it’s also easy to be misled from the truth by lyrics that he wrote too. That’s not to say that his lyrics weren’t genuine, but that they were simply a snapshot of a moment in time, a healthy way to exorcise his darker moments, and a way for him to find peace whilst in a position that creates so much distress.
I wanted to make sure that this conversation took place in a format that was unedited and available to anyone, for free, anywhere in the world. I know a lot of people cared about Tom, and I know that his death hit people hard, all around the world. I felt that there were things that those people deserved to know.
This conversation was something that I approached Dan about doing. He kindly and graciously agreed to meet with me, and I thank him enormously for facilitating the opportunity to do something that I really felt I had to do. Honestly, it was much harder than I had expected. I get emotional throughout, so please bear with me whilst you listen, it was sometimes a challenge to say what I wanted to say.
Much love to you all and thank you for your support.
Dan x”
Listen to the full podcast on acast or iTunes.
