This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
The career of those celebrated Eighties pop sensations The Grand Design (four No. 1 UK albums, three US ditto) came to an abrupt end on 15 January 1991 — the date that their drummer Kevin Waterlow was found dead in his hotel bedroom, halfway through a tour of the southern states, after consuming two bottles of vodka and a fistful of Codeine tablets.
The rest of the tour was cancelled, and after a few desultory attempts to reignite the flame that had led Rolling Stone to christen them “this decade’s foremost sonic assassins”, the grieving survivors called it a day. Gary Lomax, the band’s versatile lead guitarist was at this point about to celebrate his thirty-second birthday.
The first fruit of the self-enforced leisure was a volume of photographs entitled Backstage with Lomax
Clearly a bright future beckoned, with or without his bandmates. But whereas the others — Ashley Dexterside (bass) and Derek Grist (vocals and rhythm guitar) — hastened to join supergroups, cut solo albums and jam with Guns N’ Roses, Gary stayed his hand.
He had had enough, he told a reporter from Sounds, of “all this malarkey”. He was, in any case, already a multimillionaire with a growing family and a substantial property portfolio. Although he wished Ash and Derek well in their endeavours, he intended to find something else to do.
The first fruit of the self-enforced leisure was a volume of photographs entitled Backstage with Lomax, accompanied by an exhibition at a gallery in Mayfair. Mick Jagger attended the opening, and the book, which consisted of snaps taken during overseas tours and a Bombay street-scene or two, was reasonably well received.
“Gary Lomax, not previously known for possessing any chops beyond the fretboard, has added a dimension to himself,” the Daily Telegraph pronounced. Backstage shifted all of 350 copies, and Gary ended up paying most of the production costs himself, but he described the experience as “a real thrill — you can’t go on playing the guitar forever”.
The little Lomaxes, meanwhile, were growing up, and Mrs Lomax had started an interior design franchise. What should he do next? Ash and Derek had already written accounts of their time in the band with varying degrees of luridness, but Gary had no interest in this increasingly fashionable genre.
Bad Track, published on the cusp of the millennium, turned out to be not a memoir but a novel, in which a lonely and frustrated musician brooded on the unsatisfactory nature of a life in which “the coolest sounds were always coming from the next room”. The book sank without trace.
Since that time, Gary’s second career has proceeded in fits and starts: a half-share in an antiquarian bookshop; a script for a film of Bad Track, devised as a tax write-off and never released; several appearances on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.
A Grand Design retrospective in Mojo the other month went so far as to characterise him as a “latter-day Renaissance man”. Gary, shown the article by his wife, shook his head, oppressed by a terrible feeling that since Kevin drank himself to death he has simply been filling time.
