Black Rose have announced the death of Chris Watson, who played guitar for them in the early 1980s and then again for seven years from 2003.
The two spells are the detail worth holding on to. He was in the band from 1981 to 1984, in the stretch when the new wave of British heavy metal was being made and, for most groups, ending. Then he came back in 2003 and stayed until 2010, long after the scene he had joined had become a historical label rather than a thing happening around him.
Very few people do that. The ones who formed these bands in Middlesbrough and Sheffield and Wakefield in 1980 mostly stopped, and the second wind that carried some of them back came after twenty years of ordinary work.
Black Rose have kept going since forming in 1980 and are on Pure Steel Records, with five albums and Killing Machine as the most recent, out last year. The band gave no further detail.