Shock rang through the dance music world this weekend, as news broke that Jackmaster had died, aged just 38. Squaring his death with the image of a man who, in his pomp, felt like the most lively performer and plausibly most alive person on the planet, is raw. He was a huge talent who had a major impact on the careers of thousands of artists, as well as the listening habits of countless more fans.

But talking about Jackmaster necessitates a complicated—and, for those of us who counted him as a friend or associate, traumatic—negotiation between competing memories. There are two Jackmasters in the public eye. We owe it to him, and ourselves, to be real about that.

There is Jackmaster, AKA Jack Revill, one of the most magnetic DJs and on-the-money tastemakers the UK has ever produced, loyal to a fault, who went out of his way to offer a leg-up to seemingly everyone he met. People adored this Jack. There is also the superstar DJ, Jackmaster, whose golden boy status evaporated after a high-profile incident in the summer of 2018, where he admitted to sexually inappropriate behaviour while blacked-out on GHB. Following that, a significant number of people backed away.

To nullify the highs and minimise the lows, smoothing the extremities of a rollercoaster life into a palatable paste now that he's gone, is not true to the actual Jack Revill. As a generation of musicians and clubbers grow older, to lose a masthead who was responsible for soundtracking those golden years, forging a huge volume of connections and opportunities as he went, is wrenchingly sad.

Yet there is a clear reason why the bulk of eulogising posts and assorted media—booth selfies, tour highlights, afters clips, paeans to his incredible ear—conclude around the same period. How to sympathetically get arms around someone whose memory harbours both joy and pain? What could he have done differently? What could we have done differently?

Understandably, most don't have the energy to put themselves through the ringer right now. The paralysis and apprehension after news circulated on Saturday evening had shifted by Sunday, as people slowly found their words and trended towards consensus. There's still a lingering block; allusions to drifting apart are about as far as people want to go.

Across the weekend I heard from hundreds of Revill's friends, fellow musicians and well-wishers across the globe, as well as those who didn't know him or whose primary association with him was bad behaviour. In private conversations, no matter the stance or proximity, a similar takeaway emerged: the heaviness was being intensified by the lack of adequate language to express grief and reflect on Revill's life. So here's a step toward navigating this together.

If you were a participant in the club scene from roughly 2006 to 2018, Jackmaster was an icon. Sporting a highly time-and-place quiff and a sharp wit, he was pure box office. Through Numbers, the label he cofounded, Revill had a direct role in some of the century's best music: SOPHIE, Glass Swords, "Bax" and beyond. To watch Revill tear through a quadruple reload of Rustie's then-unreleased "Ultra Thizz" in 2011 seemed, without embellishment or rose-tinted specs, to be the apex of DJing as entertainment.

The moment when the late '00s folded into the early '10s is valorised for good reason: nights out were exceptional, the links between city scenes iron-clad and people freely trading entire catalogues worth of (not always legally acquired) tunes led to dazzling cross-pollination at production and DJ level. Through distribution deals at Rubadub, touring and simply joining the dots between a generation on the rise, Revill was a connecting node at the heart of it. His eye for talent was second to none.

As a regular on the club circuit up and down the country by the time his career took off, Revill's reputation was staked on approachability, and he stayed faithful to that. Here was an increasingly famous person you could interface with, possessing insane patience for having their ear chewed off, responding to fan DMs, or passionately debating Lory D and Sheila E. on socials and forums. It didn't hurt that he was charismatic and legitimately very funny at a time when many big-league DJs telegraphed self-seriousness.

Revill boosted Glasgow's status as a vital conduit of electronic culture—stumping not only for Numbers and Rubadub, but also Sub Club, Optimo, LuckyMe, Monox and more on the world stage—and comprehensively owned the transitional phase between physical mix CDs and digital streams. You can conjure specific memories of Fatima Yamaha (opening Tweak-A-Holic #1) and Fleetwood Mac (powering down the Numbers Christmas party), as well as the bold Skepta-into-Radiohead closer on FabricLive.57; although, he later admitted with a grin, that transition was a total bungle.

He jumped out of a plane ahead of going back-to-back with Armand Van Helden on Boiler Room, and I can tell you for a fact he was more terrified about impressing Van Helden.

To his core, Revill's advocacy for music, and people, was voluminous. It's not difficult to see how he became one of the most popular DJs in the world. When Resident Advisor's annual DJ poll stopped ahead of the 2017 edition, it left Jackmaster frozen in time as the #2 DJ in the world—which scans as strange today. There will be many out there, including those who came of clubbing age after 2018, who might be perplexed or even incensed by the weekend's outpouring of fondness. It's not hard to parse why the tempered language in Saturday's press riffed on some variation of "controversial," "flawed," or, in our case, "prominent."

The incident which marred Jackmaster's name remains inexcusable; Revill said as much at the time. It brought into cold light the extent to which his consumption habits were affecting him. The sour note is that many cheered on his indulgences as an extension of his aura: sashaying through city after city and festival after festival like a gadabout, hoovering up pints and extracurriculars.

Misdirection around what took place at Love Saves The Day made the situation worse. Without relitigating the specifics, rumours swirled for an entire week that repurposed Revill's behaviour as little more than another cheeky notch on the belt of a sesh king, while some around him circled wagons and hoped the controversy would just ebb away.

It was a callow way to deal with sexual impropriety. It's hard to know the outcome had a frank mea culpa been delivered from the start. But for those with a professional duty of care to leave the situation simmering in the comments was a dismal approach to handling public welfare. By the time full details emerged, the fiasco had become so inflammatory that no one was in a charitable mood. Revill rebuilt his career in a different lane, but his public image saw no great repair.

The act took place in parallel to conversations around equalising initiatives and safety practices which began changing dance culture for the better. That was, as the victim's statement noted, the entire point of Revill fronting up publicly. This wasn't smoking-area chit chat; Revill addressed it, apologised, sought to get clean and paid the professional price. He attempted to go down a path of rehabilitation that many in the industry would not tread. To mumble obliquely now about the intermission between Revill being a legend of the scene and someone many had tuned out from is disingenuous.

Grappling with all this is uncomfortable. Yet it doesn't compare to the distress of those affected, nor the women who may have felt unsafe in Revill's company thereafter, or anyone who subsequently questioned the allegiances and blurred morality of the men they'd previously trusted. The truth is that many of the promoters, artists, writers and industry professionals posting tributes over the past 48 hours either deplatformed or disengaged from Revill after 2018. Maybe that's you. It would be facile to pretend it wasn't RA, too.

I've penned obituaries and breaking news before, but never have judgement calls over language felt so tricky. There is a jarring chasm between warm souvenirs of a man I owe a great deal of early-career work and ecstatic dance floor outings to, and the starkness of the timeline. There may still be disquieting developments to follow. Reporting in the midst of a posthumous reckoning with an artist's reputation is a collision of competing perspectives, and no one is infallible when trying to land on the neatest version of history, not least RA. I don't think many of us in music had a chance to satisfactorily navigate complicated feelings about Revill's legacy. We just suppressed them.

In hindsight, there was some uneasy foreshadowing. When I interviewed Revill for The Art of DJing in 2018, he mentioned substances, hardship, anxiety and compulsive behaviour over a dozen times, and that's just what made it to publication. That interview, which took place only months before Revill's career unravelled, reveals a self-awareness that he was dancing dangerously close to the edge:

"It's one of my real regrets, that this portrayal of me as a party boy is maybe leading impressionable young music heads to see and replicate that mentality as a benchmark of cool. Jackmaster is expected to be this guy who is the life and soul, cracking jokes, good times personified. But there is a difference between Jackmaster and Jack Revill. I can't turn it on all the time. That can be very draining because a long party really takes it out of you at the best of times. I've seen quite a lot of DJs fall by the wayside."

To say that any substantive industry conversation about Jackmaster over the past six years didn't at least partially touch on drugs and the events of 2018 is dishonest. For all its peaks, the 2010s scene was stunted when it came to talking about excess and self-care. His endurance was legion, a key part of his exhibitionist flair, and I don't think anyone fully weighed up the ramifications of the larger-than-life persona which took him to the top.

We live, work and consume culture in a radically different way to 15 years ago. The shifting standards of how to talk about accountability and atonement are doubly complex when there's a personal element at play. Questions over how Revill could have been more compassionately supported—first while he was burning the candle at both ends, and then in recent years of relative detachment—will gnaw away at a lot of people for a long time. There's no easy way to make peace with this tragic arc, but I believe there's a wrong one, and that would be to brush it under the carpet. That would do a disservice to everyone, including Revill and his loved ones. Those who look back on Revill's time fondly can feel guilty, conflicted or even devastated about his death without skirting the material details while striving to laud him.

He was a real person whose appetite for living took him to soaring highs and dark lows. The breadth of his influence goes beyond his capacity to thrill as a DJ, or the thousands indebted to him in one form or another. You can measure it by how a concrete, identifiable age in modern clubbing flows through him.

Jackmaster personified an era. Then, partially in response to his actions, progressive dance culture made strides to move past that era. Reading tributes over the past couple of days, there is a profound sense of loss that the era, to a large extent, now rests with him.

Beyond grieving a friend and scene figurehead, the sadness is magnified by the fact that, at multiple points, events might have been preventable. Life is complicated, but you have to live with yourself at the end of the day. Revill worked toward that, and in recognition, we should talk about him honestly. If you want my honesty, here it is, too: I'm gutted by all this. That his story took this path, and that any of us have to write these tributes at all, cuts at an extremely deep level.