SUDDENLY, at a friend’s home, 22/01/2018. Best known for her 1991 single ‘Rise Up’, which reached number four in the singles chart during the height of the poll tax protests, Cliodhna Jean Campbell lived a life of political integrity. Despite her undoubted beauty in her younger years the Ayrshire-born musician was never a comfortable fit with the pop-music establishment, which perhaps fed into her famously acrimonious divorce from music mogul and Big Rock Festival founder Danny Mansfield in the late 1990s. Notably outspoken on a number of causes, Campbell claimed in interviews she was ‘married to the fight’. In 2011 she was a high-profile witness for the prosecution in the case against undercover police officer Michael Carrington, accused of infiltrating a group of anti-globalization activists. Campbell claimed to be one of the women he had slept with and deceived under the guise of an environmental activist.

In later life, shunning her initial success as a pop musician, she began travelling Europe and became a regular on the folk-music circuit performing invigorated takes on folk and traditional standards, and was acclaimed for her 2007 album of the songs of Robert Burns, The Northern Lass, although many traditionalists complained about the hip-hop, blues and grime influences in the instrumentation.

Campbell was public on her Twitter account and in interviews about her struggles with depression and regularly played concerts to raise awareness around mental health issues. She had no children and is not survived by family.

NEIL MUNRO

See story, page 8.

NEIL

Glasgow, 22–23 January 2018

Neil sat there in the office, the near-empty vastness of it like a shock blanket around him. He’d tried calling her immediately but the email had been sent almost three hours earlier while he’d been on deadline, and now her phone slipped straight to voicemail. Her dirty laugh and a ‘go on then, leave us a message.’

Neil,

Goodbye.

Remember me well. Please.

Clio x

What else could it be?

What did you do, with something like this? He looked around the office, where the skeleton crew of kids were packing up, heading out, yapping insults at each other as they went. Tell any one of them and they’d jump on it as an easy story, expect him to do the same.

He realized that seven minutes had gone by since he’d put down the phone. Those seven minutes could have made all the difference, and he’d just been staring at his screen. He called 999.

‘Police. I think I want police. Or maybe ambulance. Yes, ambulance.’

‘Can you tell me the nature of your inquiry, sir?’

‘I’ve just – an old friend has emailed me. She emailed me a few hours ago – I’ve just seen it. And it’s a suicide note, I think. And I don’t know what to do. She’s not answering her phone. I don’t know what to do.’

‘All right, sir. Can you give me your friend’s address?’