RIP Val Kilmer (1959-2025)

The night I met Val Kilmer was, weirdly enough, at a Mazzy Star gig at the Union Chapel in London. OK, it wasn’t actually at the gig, and I didn’t actually meet him, but we were both there at the same time that night in 1996.

It was the after-show party where I encountered him, in some scuzzy underground bar next to Highbury & Islington Station.

I remember going to the bar and seeing this guy standing at the side in pink-tinted teardrop glasses; he seemed to be on his own and looked slightly awkward, as if he was waiting for a friend; or, alternatively, as if he knew nobody in the room.

Which may well have been the case.

At first I was not sure who he was, because Val was already a big Hollywood star by then – Top Gun, Batman Forever, True Romance, Heat and the underrated Kill Me Again – so it seemed unlikely he would be hanging on his own in this sweaty subterranean bunker.

But he had recently played Jim Morrison in The Doors. So it seemed entirely plausible that if he was in London he might have wished to see Mazzy Star. After all, we were around the same age and I liked The Doors and Mazzy Star myself.

Anyway, we didn’t speak, and I never saw him again, and with hindsight he may well have been friends with one or more of the band, who are/were LA natives like him.

It was the second time I saw Mazzy Star live; the first had been three years earlier at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, where I remember struggling to see a thing from the upstairs balcony, largely because of the band’s aversion to the spotlight.

The only illumination came from a small lamp over David Roback’s keyboard and some subtle backlighting; all I could see of Hope Sandoval was a silhouette of a tiny figure hidden behind a curtain of hair.

When she wasn’t singing she demurely dipped her head behind the microphone stand and occasionally tapped a tambourine against her A-line miniskirt. It was mesmerising and slightly otherworldly and also disappointing that they did not play the best song from the album they were promoting.

Nor did they play it when I saw more of them three years later – with Val – and I have since learned that they did not like to play it much at all. But it is one of the most beautiful love songs of all time, with a plangent melancholia that can reduce the listener to tears (this one, anyway), and Hope’s haunting vocals are just the sweetest sound.

There are two official videos for Fade Into You – one in colour, another in moody monochrome (below) – and the song has been used in many movies. But this is the first time I’ve seen them (properly) performing it on Later… With Jools.