UPDATE: Messages of love and support are pouring in from the music community and Tom’s peers. A charity has also been set up to raise funds for Martlets Hospice who took great care of Tom.
ORIGINAL STORY: Tom Searle, the guitarist and keyboardist of UK metalcore band Architects, has passed away from cancer.
His twin brother and the drummer of the band Dan Searle took to Facebook to share the sad news revealing that Tom had passed away after living with cancer for the past three years.
“Many of you will be aware that Tom has been absent from various shows over the past 15 months and I can now let you know that this was due to various surgeries that he had to have to treat the cancer,” he wrote.
Despite how sick he was, Tom wished to carry on, performing with the band right up until his final show in June.
“He got on stage and performed his last two shows at Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park, which took him an incredible amount of strength but those are two shows that we will never forget,” Dan wrote.
On 8th June, the band was forced to cancel European festivals and a US headline tour because Tom became extremely ill and was put into a medically induced coma that doctors did not expect him to come out of. He, however, defied the odds and woke again.
“Tom cancelled the air ambulance that was due to take him home and we got the Eurostar train home. Classic Tom Searle,” Dan recounted.
Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worst in the last two weeks but Dan said he spent his final two months, “fighting with everything he had.”
Dan and Tom started the band together in 2004 and have since released seven albums. Their last release All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us peaked at number two here in Australia, marking their highest chart position ever.
Dan isn’t sure what’s going to become of Architects now calling the band, “just an evolution of the band that we started all the way back then, over half my life ago.”
“The band will never be the same and there is simply no denying it.”
Despite the uncertainty, he has confirmed that the band will travel to Australia in a few weeks to support Bring Me The Horizon.
As for whether they will continue to make new music without Tom, Dan isn’t sure.
“We want to carry on, that is important to say, and we will strive to do so, but we will not release any music unless we truly believe that it is something that Tom would have been proud of,” he wrote.
“Whether or not we can achieve that is something that we will have to discover in time.”
He’s asked people to donate to The Martlets Hospice in the UK who took care of Tom in his final days which you can do so here.
Watch: Architects – A Match Made In Heaven
