Thank you for the music

A sleeve note on his posthumous CD, the CD of his life, says that he "made the decision to leave us all behind", but the stark and terrible truth is that he killed himself.

All remain devastated. None understands. They carried in his coffin - amplifiers up loud, crowds overflowing the crematorium - to the music of This Charming Man, sung by The Smiths.

"Robert was an utterly charming man, a totally caring man," says Sylvia Luke, his mum, but he was a quiet man and a perfectionist and nothing, his grieving parents reason, is ever perfect.

Amid the farewells, his last note had contained a simple message: "Please do something with my music."

It's what Sylvia, her husband Brian and their daughter Katie, are determined to do. If music be the food of love, Rob Luke plays on.

He was, on any interpretation, a remarkable young man, gifted with a natural rhythm from the days he'd sit on his dad's knee, drumming up a storm on the back of a Littlewood's catalogue.

For his seventh Christmas, they bought him a junior drum kit. "He said it was all he'd ever wanted," recalls Sylvia. "I can still see him in his dressing gown, still see his face. The joy in his voice, you've no idea."

A year later young Rob gave his first public performance, playing carols outside Sainsbury's in Durham to raise funds for Spennymoor Junior Band, of which he'd become a member.

When for his ninth birthday he received his first real drum kit and continued ever thereafter to play out of its skins, neighbours in High Shincliffe - near Durham - were still said to be accepting of his enthusiasm, without percussive repercussions.

At the primary school Christmas concert, however, it wasn't a timid rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with which young Robert regaled them but a drum solo called Eye of the Tiger. "Everyone," says Brian, "was pleasantly startled."

He'd also become a percussionist with Spennymoor and Ferryhill town bands, seven years ago led Ferryhill on stage at the Royal Albert Hall - "not a nerve in his body," says Sylvia - and had played in 250 brand band concerts before deciding that the tempo was too restrictive. Rob the composer wanted to find alternatives.

He'd also accompanied 58 theatrical performances after being spotted by Iain Wilson of the Spennymoor Youth Theatre Group, life and light in many a dark pit.

Then he bought his first guitar, a cream coloured Fender Squire, and was soon accomplished on that, too. Minus a sixth string, it now hangs on the wall of his parents' new home in Crook.

"It broke just before he died and we hadn't replaced it," says Brian, a retired police officer. "No one else will be playing that now."

He mastered drums, bass and lead guitar, vocals and what his parents call tinkering about before transforming the family study into his recording studio.

He studied music at the Johnston School in Durham, at New College and at Newcastle University, had twice appeared at The Sage in Gateshead and was writing what was said to be the most powerful and meaningful numbers of his life when suddenly, towards the end of his first university year, it all ended.

It could have been the day the music died, too, but Brian and Sylvia Luke are so determined that it will live on that they have produced Rob's first CD, simply called beach.

There are 19 tracks, one for each year of his life - from Duran Durham to Easter Diary, from Tynemouth Photographs to Angel. "They're all complex, nothing was simple with Robert," says his dad. "We want people to appreciate his diversity, and his versatility.

"It's a wonderful legacy he's left us. This is the least we can do in the circumstances."

Brian had also taken him to watch Sunderland football matches, watched proudly as he kept goal in High Shincliffe junior school's league championship winning team.

"It has been produced the way it would have been if he'd been a star," he says. "It had to be top quality, as good as it would have been if he'd been The Beatles. He deserved it."

The sleeve lists credits when they're due. Music: Rob Luke, lyrics: Rob Luke, vocals and harmony: Rob Luke, lead guitar... Like Rob, it's unique.

"He was reluctant to share his music with other people because he was never 100 per cent satisfied with it," says his dad. "It was all to do with the perfection thing.

"If I'd been that good, I'd have had all the windows open and been playing 24 hours a day, but Robert wasn't like that. He was modest and selfless and never went looking for praise."

Sylvia Luke says her son didn't realise how talented he was. "That was the trouble, he would never acknowledge his ability. To be so talented and so unassuming isn't a combination you find much today."

They found almost 60 recorded tracks, plan a second CD to mark his 21st birthday in May next year, attracted around 100 sponsors - mostly friends from High Shincliffe - to make the first one possible.

"I listen to it with mixed emotions," says Sylvia. "I love what he has done but it's very hard, especially when you hear his voice.

"Even before we knew about the message, we'd thought about how we might remember him in some way. Robert was a very private person, but he is allowing us to do this, which is wonderful.

"We are hoping that one day we will be able to listen to it and feel uplifted, but now it's just quite sad."

Taken by Katie, the CD cover photograph shows Robert's guitar on South Shields beach, where generations of the Luke family had played happily. As they were setting it up, an unexpectedly large wave swept over them and the guitar.

They believe that the resultant image depicts a profile similar to several earlier members of the family.

Rob will also be remembered when Spennymoor Youth Theatre Group dedicates to him the production of Seussical the Musical at Durham Gala Theatre from October 24-27.

Since they need a drummer, his place will be taken by his father. "I could always put a bit of rhythm together but it was he who inspired me and overtook me," says Brian Luke.

"He mightn't be part of the production, but for me our Robert will sing forever."

Cows with the wow factor

RIGHT tracks beyond argument, these columns' appreciation of how Durham County Council has converted former railway lines into cycle-ways and footpaths is well documented.

A couple of weeks back, however, we were positively stopped in them - tracks, that is - by some wonderful, bovine sculptures which appeared to be made from bits of JCB.

They were alongside the old line behind Beamish Village, between Chester-le-Street and Stanley. Who on earth was responsible, the Eating Owt column wondered, and why hadn't he been recognised?

"He" is a she, reports Helen Grindley from Shadforth, near Durham, and Sally Matthews's animal magic is much more widely appreciated than we had supposed.

Helen used to live near Beamish. "I walked, ran and cycled past them regularly and I think they're brilliant, so lifelike.

"It always amused me that one of them would almost always have fresh grass in its mouth. I wonder who fed them?"

Sally actually completed the sculptures, for Sustrans - the sustainable transport people - in 1989-90. Work began in Beamish Museum tram shed - "they had a small herd of shorthorn cows, which was good" - but when they needed the shed in the winter, she moved to a pipe works at Hebburn.

"There were no cows, but the welding equipment was heaps better," says Sally.

Recently she was back in the North-East, working with photographer Kate Bellis on a book and exhibition chronicling hill farming at Tarset, Northumberland. "The farmers were fantastic," she says.

She works with everything from wood to steel, and from copper to cow muck. Critics described her approach as "utterly unsentimental".

The only problem is that the back line to Beamish is a pretty out-of-the-way place to shunt such delights. However temporarily, Sally's silly cows deserve a altogether bigger field.

STILL somewhere up the junction, we note that the clock from Shildon West shunters' cabin, pictured below. has been for sale on eBay, the Internet auction site.

When Shildon had England's biggest rail sidings, it might hardly have been given the time of day. Now it's a collectors' item. "Anything from that period is going to be worth a lot of money," says watch and clock maker Steve Bowran, from his wonderful tick-tockery in Darlington.

He also had a pocket watch in recently with "Old Shildon" inscribed on the front. Another little gold mine.

The West shunters' cabin clock was made around 1870 by Potts, of Leeds. It had an oak case, iron dial, white enamel face and a "fusee" movement. It sold for 735, payment on-line. No tick.

THE At Your Service column - these things are, of course, interchangeable - joined a couple of weeks back the monthly service at St Matthew's, Waskerley, a once-thriving railway village on the moors west of Consett. It increased the congregation to three.

The report stirred particular memories for 81-year-old Freda Kirkbride, now in Thornaby, who moved to Waskerley with her parents in the 1930s.

They'd been in Shildon, which - as might be imagined - seemed palatial by comparison. Waskerley had oil lamps, netties, middens and an awful lot of snow.

Her father was porter, ticket collector, lamp lighter and sometimes station master at Burnhill, nearby. "Sometimes we kids were allowed into his 'office' and stamped Burnhill Station on anything we could lay our hands on," recalls Freda.

"We lived in Cross Row, the snow one winter drifting up the bedroom window and my mother worried that we'd all drown when it melted. Do you know, we loved it."

A FINAL railway note. The Q6 locomotive so patiently restored at Darlington by the North East Locomotive Preservation Group has an press day - full working order - next Thursday on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. "Directors' coaches, bar, something to eat," promised Fred Ramshaw of NELPG and, alas, the column will have shuffled off elsewhere. We return on September 13.