(PUBLICATION-NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS)
He was taken to the hospital suffering from a severe headache and immediately slipped into a coma. He was put on a life support machine and did not regain consciousness.
Fellow band members Robin Proper-Sheppard and Ronald Austin said, 'To try and sum up one persons life seems impossible to us. He always seemed to know what you were thinking and feeling, just as now we are sure he is standing over us saying, "guys, don't make life so hard on yourselves". That's the sort of person Jimmy was with everyone.
'Jimmy absolutely loved life and had such a positive attitude that made everyone around him so happy to be part of his life. He believed that no matter what tragedy should befall one or what pain lies hidden beneath the surface, you are never alone. This love of everyone and everything is how we think Jimmy would have wanted to be remebered'.
Jimmy Fernandez was born in Los Angeles and grew up in San Diego where, with child-hood friends Sheppard and Austin, he formed THE GOD MACHINE. The band moved to London on 1990, signing to Fiction records in 1991, releasing three EPs and an album 'Scenes from the second story'. They had recently completed a new album which will be released later this year. Jimmy Fernandez's funeral will takeplace in San Diego next week.
REST IN PEACE
NIGHT & DEITY - album review - Melody Maker (17TH September 1994)
Some things were never meant to be. After years of struggle against the vicissitudes of life in London and the tragic death of Jimmy Fernandez, THE GOD MACHINE have decided to call it a day. Cathy Unsworth pays her last respects.
It's hard to express feelings of loss in the printed word, still harder to pay adequate tribute to absent friends. As the title of the album suggests, 'ONe last laugh..' is a more powerful testament to Jimmy Fernandez, the bassist who died in May this year at the tragically early age of 28, than any words could say. In the space of two albums and four EPs, THE GOD MACHINE reached higher, felt deeper and created more intense eternal visions with their music than any of their contemporaries would ever have dared.
This album is their peak, a thing of terrible, harrowing beauty that dips deep into the terrifying Pandoras box of the human psyche to grapple with the raw nerve endings of existence. It brings back from the darkness in one howl of rage pain and understanding the flaming torches of redemption, with a musicthatspans the worlds of the living and the dead. It surpasses Soundgardens 'Superuknown', Smashing Pumpkins 'Siamese Dream' even the back catalogue of Janes Addiction to whom they were initially compared.
'One last laugh..' was recorded in Prague, and not for nothing does 'The unbearable lightness of being' spring to mind. In the shadowlands of Europe THE GOD MACHINE found the perfect surroundings for their haunted dreams, a place where secrets linger around dusty old architecture and winding streets, a place that has known the awful extremeties of human evil: 'cut myself cos i can't see the beauty' is the opening line. 'Tremelo song' makes a sound like chandeliers falling, as Robin, Jimmy and Ron turn guitar, bass and drums into one gilded eternity. You can sense the urgency and frantic release sought through the hypnotic 'mama' 'alone' where the guitars burn with absolute power, and the tense, lingering spaces in between, where the piano and strings soothe and tear in equal measure. And all the time Robins voice slices through you, evoking an alienation and loss you would never wish to feel: 'you said life could be painless well imsorry but thats not what i found' he accuses on 'painless'.
And so THE GOD MACHINE move onwards through the rooms in your mind, unlocking doors where secrets fly around like ghosts. 'The devil song' looks over its shoulders at a fork-tailed shadow moving ever closer, the clamouring of voices at its climax coming from an old, two-reel tape recorder Robin found in a junk shop in Prague. 'The hunter' is a thing of sensual aching beauty a waltz with that devil in an old forgotten ballroom, while 'evol' is the scariest evocation I've heard since Killing Jokes 'revelations' frightened the life out of my 13-yr old brain.
'Boy by the roadside' is too painful to actually put into words, but the album drifts off to a beautiful piano elegy, 'the sunday song' which sounds like the refrain from a ghostly carnival. Three years ago, on a rainy night in Kings Cross, THE GOD MACHINE told me that the 'purity' EP was recorded as if it was going to be their last record. Their futures were so unsure at the time that they had to put everything into the one moment they thought they had. 'IT'S BETTER TO DIE ON YOUR FEET THAN LIVE ON YOUR KNEES' they said.
Thank-you.