Midweek Update 38: Life's a F***ing Miracle
James, The Alarm, Andy Rourke, Love Hope Strength, Teenage Cancer Trust, Jasmin Paris, and a God who thinks he's Bono.
I made the most of a lovely four nights away in North Wales to catch up on culture, or at least some of it. Let’s play Join The Dots…
James have a new single out. It’s called “Life’s a Fucking Miracle.” It’s also called, for radio-friendly purposes, “Life’s a Shocking Miracle” but it’s evident which title the group prefer by how it was distributed.
Tim Booth of James is my favourite lyricist, so you know. His words have not just accompanied but described (and possibly even defined) much of my adult life - to the point that I have often thought about writing a memoir/biography entitled “Dear Tim.” You are welcome to encourage me to get on with it, at which I may tell you why I have hesitated to do so.
Anyway, years back, on occasion of his second solo album Bone, I interviewed Tim for my iJamming! blog, and we dwelt on his endless lyrical obsession with the meaning of life, and the role of God, and an answer to his question “Who put brown eyes on the butterfly’s wings?” (Quick, name the James song!) To my observation that the size of the universe and the power of science demostrated the absence of a God, Tim challenged me, and I paraphrase: No, the depth and size of the universe only demonstrates the greater argument for a God.
There’s a bouyancy to the songs that James have released in the last few weeks that make me even more excited than usual for the release of a new album: Yummy drops this Friday. And so, while it hardly breaks new lyrical ground, I will quote the chorus of the new single all the same:
“Raise your glass
Life’s a fucking miracle
We’re made of light
Our form is physical”
It should have been hard for anyone who took time out on Monday to observe the solar eclipse NOT to conclude that life is indeed a miracle, that of all the planets in all the solar systems in all the galaxies in all the universe, we somehow ended up here, as living, breathing, sentient beings. I was sufficiently jealous of my older son for living in Burlington, VT, right in the path of totality, that I tuned into NY1 from my cozy accommodation in North Wales via my VPN to watch an hour of constant streaming as the eclipse moved north-east. It felt and looked so epic that I choked up - and I could certainly understand how pre-scientific humans would have considered it so frightening that they’d have gone round sacrificing each other in the hope that the sky would lighten again. And that when it did, it was proof that the sacrifices worked, which is how rituals often begin - with a total lack of correlation equalling causation.
Of all the musicians who wrote about the stars and the cosmos and made us feel connected to the worlds that lie beyond ours, probably no one nailed it better than David Bowie. As a tribute to the influence of Bowie’s Pin-Ups covers album, Mike Peters/The Alarm recently unveiled the first song from his own impending covers album, Music Television, Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World.”
My visit to North Wales this past long weekened was as guest of Mike and Jules Peters, who have carved out a slice of nirvana - or is it utopia? - in the village of Dyserth, just up the road from Prestatyn, itself one station up from Rhyl. While they have always felt closely attached to their home area, this attachment has been reinforced by their conversion of a Chapel in the village, right opposite the touristic waterfall, to house guests for their Alarm staycations, and especially, by their conversion of the pub next door, The former Red Lion, into The Red, which celebrated its first anniversary this weekend with Mike Peters on the decks Friday night. Because the pub only opens as such, i.e. pouring alcohol from behind the bar, that one night a week - plus Sunday afternoons - the whole village comes out, and the scene was a good-natured madhouse, with Mike ending the night on a home run of golden 80s hits straight out of the MTV era.
But The Red also has a coffee shop, and that has become a local hub; in fact, as of this current week, the coffee shop is now open Thursday-Monday 9:30-5:30 with everything from the bar except the draft beer available for the early drinkers out there to hang out in the pub itself as well as the coffee/bake shop. The whole place is adorable; here’s Mike, Jules, and myself on Sunday afternoon, holding up a certain book I found on the shelf there in The Red:
At the point we took this pic, Mike had just finished some recording for the soundtrack to accompany his forthcoming memoir, his sons had got back from the Man Utd-Liverpool game (the pub should really be called The Reds), and I was keen to relax and refuel after a 14-mile coastal run, so the three of us raised a glass and celebrated life’s small miracles and serendipities and karmas and coincidences. On a hike together up on Offa’s Dyke the day before, Mike had detailed some of the intricacies and intrigues that surrounded The Alarm’s break-up as a four-piece band, but over that Sunday evening drink, admitted that had they not done so, he would have been on tour at the time that destiny decided to have him meet Jules on the street instead. A week after they did so, Jules told her parents she’d be marrying Mike. Here we are all these years later, the three surviving parents are all on hand and part of the family business, and if ever a couple was sought out to embody the wedding phrase “till death do us part,” Mike & Jules really should be front of the line.
But if life’s a fucking miracle, death is always knock knock knocking on heaven’s door. Mike and Jules are both cancer survivors. Mike’s battle against leukemia is ongoing: as recently as 2022 he again appeared to be one step away from knocking on that door for real, but his love, hope and strength - not so coincidentally the name of his cancer charity - pulled him through yet again. A year before that near-call, I had reunited with Mike after a long absence and invited him on to my One Step Beyond podcast, talking about his battles to survive, and the incredible work he’s done with Love Hope Strength, which has seen him awarded an MBE. You are invited to listen below; it’s one hell of a story.
For her part, Jules has survived breast cancer, a battle she has not only faced with all due bravery, but documented with a tenacity and honesty that’s beyond most people. She was the subject of a BBC Wales documentary “My Cancer Journey” and just last week, posted on her Facebook that at last, she feels comfortable getting a tattoo. Or, as she calls it, a tittoo. You can read all about it here.
In the shameless self-promotion department, I will use this opportunity to remind you that a month before Hudson Palace released “I’m A Boy” - which has gone down incredibly well, and thank you to everyone who has played it on their radio show - we unveiled our equally androgynous take on The Who’s “Tattoo.” You can listen below - and yes, that’s my bulging sleeve on the sleeve.
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Not everyone survives cancer, of course, and that sad list of the prematurely departed includes another good musician friend of mine from the general vicinity of Britain’s NorthWest, Andy Rourke of The Smiths, who lost his own battle on May 19 of last year. While I desperately would prefer that he could still have been with us, his life will at least be celebrated in style over the forthcoming first Anniversary weekend with a Manchester-based event, All About Andy. Ticket info here:
Over that Sunday drink, I talked with Mike and Jules of my father’s death from cancer at age 60, just the other side of the hills from Dyserth, in the village of Nantlle. I will be 60 myself in just two weeks, and believe you me, I ain’t ready to let anything take me out yet; I’m having too much fun. Mind you, I have had the odd brush with the unexpected myself:
…And just this week, I heard that a very close friend of mine, who got to 60 a few months back, has just had cancer caught during a different process. We are all hoping that it was caught in time, but along with other anecdotes I’ve heard during this visit from friends around the same age, it’s a reminder to all of us getting up in years to get ourselves checked out, routinely, all the time, and even if it means them emptying out your bowels and sticking a tube up your bum.
It’s important to remember that it’s not just us older-ish folk at risk of cancer, to which end the Teenage Cancer Trust is a charity I support wholeheartedly, and regularly keep top of my donations list. You have likely heard of it because of its musical connections: for the last 24 years, Roger Daltrey has led an annual fund-raising week of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. That decade concluded in March as Daltrey, 80, finally hands the baton to someone younger. (Read my review of The Who at the RAH as part of these recent concerts here.) The Sunday Times ran a diary-via-interview with Daltrey about that week, in which the singer opened with a joke - “On my 80th birthday three weeks ago, I stood up for ten whole minutes” (he managed a hell of a lot more than that in concert) but also admitted “I’m falling to bits,” and “I’m on my way out. The average life-expectancy is 83 and with a bit of luck I’ll make it.”
In a just world, his healthy lifestyle will have him live a lot longer than that, but we all know that we just don’t know. Meantime, say what you want about Roger - and a lot of people do, including my anti-Brexit cab driver on the way to Victoria Station after that Who concert - but Daltrey’s work on behalf of teenage cancer victims has been selfless. You can hopefully read his diary here, though you may have to subscribe.
Also in that Sunday Times, which it took me 9 days to get round to reading (so much for holidays!) was a brief story about “the remotest place on Earth” in which a father and son from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, took a dip “in the part of the South Pacific Ocean furthest away from land… so remote that when the International Space Station” passes overhead, the astronauts on board are the closest humans.” It’s all part of 62-year-old Chris Brown’s mission to become the first person to reach all eight of the world’s “poles of inaccessibility,” places either furthest from the sea in each direction, or furthest from land. Point Nemo in the South Pacific was number six on his list already, and it struck me that this is the kind of semi-insane adventure that seems to particularly attract the Brits.
Two more One Step Beyond podcasts might help demomstrate as much, one of them featuring a friend I have made here in Beverley, the sculptor Peter Naylor, who recently went back to Greece for a third self-supported Spartan because he wanted to achieve it in his 70s. The other is a younger man, Oliver Hunt Smart, who decided to walk the length of India and make a film about it despite never having visited India nor made a film. I think Joe Cocker had an album title about this type of person.
My long run through Rhuddlan, Rhyl, and Prestatyn on Sunday finally gave me time to catch up on some other podcasts. The latest New York Times Daily documented a scientific experiment to see whether we can “brighten the clouds” so as to mirror more of the sun’s rays back into the atmosphere. While not intended as a substitute for eliminating carbon emissions in the first place, it’s part of a necessary effort to consider all means possible given the precarious state of our planet. The cloud mirroring idea came about in 1980, when a Dr. John Latham was on a walk with his young son on the Welsh coastline, looking across the Irish sea, and learning as much at the start of the pod while myself looking across the Irish sea was one of those little coincidences that keeps life fun, even in the face of climate crisis. You can read all about it here, and the podcast is below:
I additionally listened to the Bailey and Harding Ultra Sound System podcast for the first time, in which they discussed British vetenarian and ultra runner Jasmin Paris becoming the first woman ever to finish the feared Barkley Marathons, and some of the casual media sexism that has managed to denigrate her phenomenal achievement. “Women don’t want chivalry,” the two female hosts concurred. “We want respect.” Indeed. More about the battle for the Equal Playing Field below that show.
In the same episode, Bailey and Harding discuss Pearl Jam’s new running club, and quickly dismiss it as a sham. I wouldn’t know, but I still can’t get over Eddie Vedder’s ability to raise the energy at the Royal Albert Hall when he joined The Who for “The Punk & The Godfather” all the way back on March 20.
And on the subject of totemic rock bands, there is a joke in which God thinks he’s Bono, and I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that the U2 lead singer occasionally take a breather and get down off the higher register and the pedestal that goes with it. But he opens his autobiography Surrender (40 Songs, One Story) with an account of himself on a hospital bed struggling for his life to get a single breath out. There are so many rock star memoirs out there that I’d allowed myself to skip over Surrender, yet when I brought it off the bookshelf at The Red, I was immediately captivated. Whether this was self-written or aided along by a ghost, it jumps straight in at the deep end - deep emotionally, spiritually and factually - and it’s a book I now plan to read in full. And don’t worry, there’s some self-effacement even on those harrowing opening pages.
This Friday, I go back in the studio with my transatlantic band, The Dear Boys. Hopefully, we will get four songs recorded in the one day. While none of them addresses life passing by in the blink of an I, as did our last single, they do all tackle some of the issues confronting us and at times threatening to bury us in this digitech modern world, and they do so with the kind of forceful optimism that is part of the necessary armor when you’re making music in your 60s. Well, two of us are hovering just weeks below that line, but we plan on crossing it any day now. And we plan on rocking till we drop. Here’s to your health, wherever - and however - you may be.
Just to underline your comment in the piece - Men, get yourselves checked. It’s not fun (I’ve had two prostate biopsies and a camera inserted where the Sun don’t shine - not an eclipse) but it might be a lifesaver.
I’m looking forward to reading that biography you mentioned ...
When I was 12 or so, my dad decided we should have a bonding trip, and our destination was a weekend in Prestatyn. I had entirely forgotten until you mentioned it. Nice seaside town.