While he made his name in one of Liverpool’s most iconic bands, decades after they split up, Frankie Goes To Hollywood guitarist, Brian Nash, 62, decided to follow a completely different career.
After living in London with his wife, Clare, for over three decades after originally growing up in Norris Green, Brian had been working as an electrician for years following the band’s split. However, it was over six years ago that he decided to become a celebrant, plying his trade across Merseyside. He told the ECHO: “I moved back here in September 2019, and in November, I went and did a course for a week, learning how to do the funerals and the weddings and naming ceremonies. Then in March 2020, I got my first funeral from Co-op Funeralcare and I got really good feedback from them.”
He added: “They gave me another one, and I got really good feedback from the next family. Then COVID happened, so it kind of went mad because all of the churches were closed, so there were no priests or vicars doing any funerals because there was nowhere to do them. That kind of blew it up a little bit, and it went a bit crazy during the first 90 days of COVID. There were a couple of days where I was doing three a day, which was a bit much.
“But it was also quite difficult as well because I had to do all of the interviews over the phone with the family members. I couldn’t go and see anybody because everyone was isolating, so that made it quite hard because when I go in to see a family, I hope that I can make them feel at ease almost immediately because of the way I am, and it’s harder to get the trust of people over the phone. But I’ve been doing it six years now and I’m doing about a hundred a year, so I must be doing something right.”
It was after attending the funerals of close friends in recent years that he first considered becoming a celebrant. He told the ECHO: “There was a good friend of mine, a guy called Phil Harris, who was a musician, in the band called Ace. When he died, his daughter asked me to write a eulogy for him, so I did. Then someone from the same circle of friends passed away and I did their eulogy, and afterwards, both people had said, ‘Oh, you really captured them well,’ which I should have really, because I knew them both very well.”
He added: “I’d been writing a blog and doing bits and pieces for a few years and I’d written an autobiography, so I kind of had a style of how to write and I wasn’t daunted by sitting down there and knocking out a couple of pages of words about someone. So, it was something that I was comfortable doing. It wasn’t like the big challenge was whether I could do the work or not or write about people or communicate with people.”
While he was confident in his own ability to be able to provide a fitting service, he said that it was successfully getting the support from the Co-op funeralcare that set him on his way. He said: “It was about whether funeral directors trusted me to do the job, because it’s the front of their operation, really. All of the stuff that they do leads up to that 40-minute ceremony on the day, and that’s a big thing to trust someone with because this is your business. You’re not going to give it to someone who you’re not sure about.”
He added: “So, the fact that I was given an opportunity was great. And then it’s just gone on from there. It’s got to the stage now where I’ve been doing it for so long that people will go to a funeral director when they’ve lost someone and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I saw this fellow, he did my mate’s nan’s funeral,’ or ‘He did my mate’s dad’s funeral.’ ”
However, while his role usually ends by delivering eulogies in front of grieving mourners, he said that he is there by each family’s side throughout the bereavement process. He said: “When you go to see a funeral director, they will get a feel for who the person is and ask the family questions and get a vibe for what they want the funeral to be like, and then they match the family with a celebrant. So, I tend to (get paired with) working-class people. I don’t really get any posh people. I don’t know what that says about me, but I always remember one of the early ones that I did, after the funeral, this girl said, ‘When you said ‘sound,’ you’re just like like us.’ ”
He added: “But the best thing about it for me about doing the job is that I’m confident in how good I am at doing it now. If I go to see a family, I know that when I walk through the door, they don’t really know what’s going to happen. And so most people have no experience of what to do with a funeral. So when I turn up at the house, I know that by the time I’ve left, they’re going to feel a whole lot better about what’s going to happen.”
As he looks back over the last six years since he took his first steps in his career as a celebrant, he said that he finds it exceptionally rewarding, he said: “I’m sending people through the curtains now who were in their 80s, who would have done their courting while watching The Beatles, you know, going to Litherland Town Hall to see The Beatles, going to Mathew Street to see The Beatles. People who grew up in post-war Liverpool, which was an extremely tough time for everybody. Everybody thinks that as soon as the war was over, it was all chocolates and bananas, and you know, rationing went on for nine years after the war finished, so it was tough.”
He added: “Invariably, given that I do a lot of work for working-class families, these people are sometimes one of 12 children, you know, that all lived in a two-up, two-down off Netherfield Road or Scottie Road. So, it’s super interesting. And also, these families who were all when they did the slum clearances after the war, for example, being the lost tribes of Everton, who were all moved out to Kirkby and Runcorn and Widnes and all of these towns on the periphery of Liverpool.”
