Columns

Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay, I just came to say...

...I just came to say goodbye to my oldest and dearest friend. Tony Tyler, who passed away in the early morning of 28 October, just four days short of what would have been his 63rd birthday, was one of this magazine's most familiar, distinctive and beloved contributors. TT, as he was fondly known, had been around since the very second issue of MacUser back in 1985, serving in a variety of capacities before settling down in his natural home on this page, where he regularly delighted and tormented readers with his unique blend of surreal wit, pomposity-pricking satire, grumpy-old-sod cantankerousness, Apple-baiting critique and sheer enthusiasm for the joys of the Mac.

TT's status as a pioneer of Mac journalism was beyond doubt. He had one of the first Macs to arrive in the UK, but even before the Mac balloon went up, TT was firmly established in the digital world, having founded and edited Big K, the UK's first computer gaming magazine. He followed every stage of Mac development, from its original incarnation as a funny little floppy-driven scale model of a 1950s TV set made out of melted-down Milky Bars with 128K of memory and no hard drive, right up to the present day. He once described the Mac as 'the greatest single tool for the expression of human creativity ever developed'.

TT was quite capable of reviewing a new software package - his specialist areas were word processing, music software and what used to be called 'desktop publishing'

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and is now just publishing - but his best games were played as a columnist, which is how most MacUser readers will remember him. It was one of the greatest pleasures of my journalistic life to appear opposite Tony in alternate issues of MacUser, especially since he frequently appeared in my own columns as 'MacGuru', the tetchy, grey-bearded Gandalf of computing, a role for which he was uniquely qualified.

So who was Tony Tyler outside of these pages? A very tall man, standing six foot five on a good day, with a resonant, languid, baritone drawl. Beneath his haystack 1966-Beatle mop was a craggy face with a light-up-the-room grin. His life before MacUser had been rather more than moderately colourful. A renegade-posh Scouser, he had hung out in Hamburg with the pre-famous Beatles; served in the army and been the last British soldier ever to be wounded in action by a musket-ball; sold Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green the Gibson Les Paul guitar later owned by Gary Moore and now informally valued at $2 million; enjoyed a Number One hit in Italy as the organist on the Italian-language version of A Whiter Shade of Pale; authored books on Tolkien and the Beatles that simualtaneously topped the New York Times bestseller lists and spent five years on the New Musical Express as features editor and later assistant editor...

...which is where he was when I first met him in 1972, hanging out on the NME's behalf at some dodgy rock festival. TT stood out in the crowd not just because of his prodigious height and booming voice, but because he was the only guy in a sea of leather, denim and greatcoats who was wearing anorak, rollneck and corduroys, and whose moustache was more RAF than Zappa.

At the NME, others may have been the brains of the paper or its most public faces, but TT was its heart and soul: without his combination of rigorous professionalism and anarchic, irreverent wit, there's no way the paper could have become what it did during Tyler's watch. The qualities he valued most in others - wit, erudition, compassion, generosity and integrity - were the same ones he himself displayed.