VIRTUOSO musician Roydon Titian Payne - or Big Daddy Roy Payne as he was on stage - was farewelled Thursday by 120 friends and family still reeling from his unexpected death at the age of 54.
One of his three children, son Vincent O'Malley, said the tragic sequence of events that took his father's life began just a few weeks ago with an infected cut and ended on July 6 with an aortic aneurysm.
Payne may not have been a big-name performer, but he was a "musician's musician" and a stalwart, since moving from Sydney, of the Newcastle blues and roots music scene.
He was also a guitarist in Cold Chisel songwriter Don Walker's backing band, The Suave F--ks.
Roy and his colleagues were immortalised by Walker in a 2015 Chisel workout, The Backroom, about "Dougie and Gleny Rae's tiki bar" and set "down by the Hunter where the coal trucks roll".
Walker sat at the back of the service at James Murray Funerals Thursday, one of many to come from outside of the region to pay their respects.
Payne was born in in 1968 in New Zealand, one of five children, with Fijian and Kiwi heritage, and he moved to Newcastle from Sydney more than a decade ago.
The chapel was festooned with palm fronds and a traditional Fijian mat had been flown from the Pacific island to lay under the casket.
The service was led by Maitland raconteur and wordsmith Ben Quinn, who with his wife Melissa turned the Grand Junction Hotel into a favoured venue for a host of bands including Roy's long-time outfit, The Whiteliners.
"It was never Big Daddy Roy's way to take an ostentatious bow at the falling of the final curtain," Quinn said during a eulogy after Gathering Coconuts, the first of four Roy Payne songs to be played during the hour-long service.
"Not for him the cat-and-mouse tomfoolery of endless encores . . .
"The playing was his theatre and the playing was his reward.
"He was the sideman the big bosses swoon over. The suave f--k with the peasant's touch. Chops to burn. The rarest class."
Roy's "long-distance guitarist girlfriend" Toni Swain, told the Newcastle Herald how the above-mentioned Dougie Bull and mates fashioned a coffin out of old pump organ parts in the best "steam-punk" fashion.
"It's a beautiful thing, and Roy would have loved it," Swain said of Its repurposed antique panels, ivory knobs and carved corbels.
Quinn read tributes from friends Ian Hayden, Su Morley, Gleny Rae and Dave Philpots, as well as a poem from one of Payne's brothers, David, who wrote about the "fireball" that was Roy.
"Roy was almost mythical," Morley had written.
"Every guitar player I knew was in awe. Everything he did felt authentic, whatever genre or instrument he was playing. Always the explorer yet never the dilettante."
Roy's ability to master any instrument he picked up was a repeated refrain.
He also made instruments, including twin-necked guitars he loved playing on stage, and in recent years had fallen hard for the piano accordion, telling the Herald in 2017 it was his "latest love".
"It's basic and rural, but when I listen to it it's like there is hidden rhythms in it, the way they play it."
There was plenty of rhythm - and little of it hidden - after the funeral when everyone shifted to Mayfield Bowling Club, where a stage was set up to sing and play Big Daddy Roy "into eternity" with one more "dynamite gig".
