Tim’s many friends in and around the music industry will be saddened by the news that he passed away recently after a period of ill health.

I first met him in the beer garden of The Half Moon in Putney before a Buck & Evans gig; the fact that we were both wearing Gov’t Mule tour t-shirts prompted a conversation which resumed every time we bumped into each other afterwards. That happened surprisingly often and his camera and grey ponytail were invariably among the first things that I spotted at gigs.

Many of those shows were at smaller venues like The Borderline and The 100 Club, which allowed Tim to moan at length about how unhelpful the red and pink lighting was to photographers like himself! His pictures were taken for his own enjoyment, but were sometimes used with his permission by bands who were impressed with his work; to my knowledge he never accepted payment for his photos and he was uncomfortable about even accepting merchandise in exchange for them.

A few months after our first meeting I accepted a short notice request to write my first gig review for the Wrinkly Rockers Club; I was also asked if I knew a good photographer for the event; thus was Tim welcomed into the WRC fold and we “worked” as a team several times.

Tim’s musical tastes and mine met in Blues and Classic Rock, but were diverse in other ways; his were on the heavy side, so I’m not sure that he ever really understood my deep love for Jazz. However, when I told him that I regularly visited Jazz clubs in Sweden and Denmark, it took him on a trip down memory lane, as he was raised and educated in the Stockholm area.

Tim regularly regaled me with tales of the bands he’d heard in Sweden in his youth; hell, his very first gig as a boy was Jimi Hendrix! I thought he was going to injure himself laughing when I reluctantly admitted that my own first concert experience was The New Seekers!

He obviously caught the photography “bug” early too, with the open air gigs at Stockholm’s fairground (or Tivoli) Grona Lund being among his happiest memories; he rediscovered and posted on social media some stunning shots from a Bob Marley & The Wailers show, for example.

After moving to London, Tim found employment in the central London recording studios, including Trident, where he worked his way up from teaboy to engineering duties, meeting a who’s who of stars along the way. As a result Tim became a name-dropper extraordinaire in his later years, but he was also happy to admit to the occasional clanger, like when he’d failed to recognise the star artists, even when he’d been standing next to them (Carole Decker of T’Pau and Rory Gallagher were among his more embarrassing “oversights”)!

It wasn’t uncommon for Tim to attend up to a handful of gigs most weeks, so his extended absences in 2025 raised concerns and I eventually tracked him down in his local hospital in the early autumn. A heart attack had been followed by a stroke, which had affected his mobility, his retentive memory and his ability to communicate. It’s difficult to see a friend’s capacities reduced so markedly, but visits from familiar faces were clearly welcomed by him, both at the hospital and, later in the West London care facility where he was moved for further assessment. Sadly, a second coronary proved final, but at least Tim’s spirit is free again and a kind soul is now at peace.

Tim is survived by his sister Sarah, who lives in Sweden, but hopes to visit London later this year and to arrange an opportunity for Tim’s friends to get together to remember him. I’ll pass the details to the WRC when known.

Gary Smith