Thick As Thieves, Part 1
The Importance of True Friendships.
I had originally intended to write this piece on the topic of friendship, based on my extended trip back to the UK, as a single long weekend read. Events of the past week have turned it into a longer, deeper, and perhaps darker post, and necessitated some inclusion of material rewritten from Midweek Update 38: Life’s A F***king Miracle. I will provide a break about half-way through, and post the second part in a couple of days. If you have not done so already, please subscribe so you don’t miss out. Free and paid subscriptions are available.
“It’s like EastEnders in there, isn’t it?” said Mike as he drove me to the station at Prestatyn, on the morning of Tuesday April 9th, after I had spent four idyllic nights staying in his home village, Dyserth, just up the road. He was referring to the scene at his local pub, The Red, comparing it to the vibes at the fictional Queen Victoria in the long-running BBC soap opera.
It’s many years since I’ve seen EastEnders, but I knew what he was getting at. Community. Friendship. A place where, to consciously quote Cheers for my many American readers, everyone knows your name, and if they don’t when you walk in, they will by the time you leave.
“If by EastEnders, you mean North Walers, then yes,” I said. After all, they don’t speak Cockney in the northwestern coastal Welsh area, where Mike has lived all of his life but for the brief time he went to London with his band, The Alarm, to “make it.” (Which they did.)
“You’ve carved yourself a slice of heaven here, Mike,” I continued. I was referring not just to The Red, which he and his wife of 35 years, Jules, had purchased (as The Red Lion) and re-opened, suitably renovated and refurbished, precisely one year before my visit - an Anniversary celebrated the Friday night I’d arrived in the village by Mike contentedly conducting an all-hits DJ set that seemed to attract people of all ages from miles around. I wasn’t referring to the coffee shop that forms half of The Red, either, and which conveniently began experimenting with every-day opening the same week I had been invited to come visit. Nor was I referring additionally to the converted Chapel next door, which predates Mike and Jules’ ownership of the pub by a couple of years and which is promoted online as “the Waterfall Apartments,” given that they sit directly opposite the impressive Dyserth Waterfall that remains the village’s primary attraction. These apartments are, frankly, luxurious, complete with all mod cons, plus posters from Mike’s years on the road, and each apartment furnished with an acoustic guitar from his own collection.
The Red is only open on Friday evenings and all day Sundays for now (it usually gets rented out for parties on Saturday nights). But that Sunday of my stay, while Mike had been in the studio and his young adult kids had been off at Old Trafford watching Man United do their part to deny Liverpool another Premier League title, I’d been made to feel ridiculously welcome, forming friendships everywhere I turned. As Sunday afternoon pushed into the evening, and the lads returned from the football suitably energized, the pub stayed open beyond its regular early closing, and Jules, who seems to be everywhere at once, constantly energized, always smiling, camera in hand to catch yet another snap of nirvana that she will post on social media, sat down with me for a drink and a chat. Despite her 35-year marriage to Mike, she and I had only met in person last year. Still, I knew plenty about her: Jules has lived much of her life like an open book, especially her journey with breast cancer, which involved surgery and chemo and was documented by BBC Wales. Finally given an all clear for the future, she had just posted enthusiastically about the imminent completion of her self-reconstructive “surgery” – a nipple tattoo. (Or a “tittoo,” as she was cheerfully referring to it.)
Mike, too, has had his battles with cancer, they too have been public, and they’ve been severe. In 1995, on the eve of an American tour with The Alarm, he was informed that he had Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the blood cells. Being of the indefatigable type – he’d named The Alarm’s second album Strength, after all – he had gone ahead with the tour, come home to fight the disease, and after a few rounds, seemingly knocked it out. But being cancerous, the disease resurfaced a decade later, this time diagnosed more bluntly as leukemia. Rather than bemoan his bad luck, Mike instead recognized the enormous good fortune of having quality free cancer care on the National Health Service in a world where there is so much health inequality, and in the midst of his own further bouts with the disease, in 2007 he co-founded a charitable foundation, Love Hope Strength, with the belief that "all people deserve quality care, a marrow donor if needed, and most importantly, hope.”
As well as signing up potential bone marrow transplant donors at gigs and festivals (the “Get On The List” initiative), Mike proved the power of resilience in the face of illness by leading various groups of various musicians up various mountains – by which I don’t mean the Welsh hillsides into which Dyserth is beautifully nestled, but the likes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Fuji, even up to Everest Base Camp, with member of Squeeze, The Fixx, The Stray Cats and others in tow.
Along the way, he’d also recorded the world's longest song, “The Scriptures,” to promote an existing bone marrow donor initiative between Israelis and Palestinians (yes, there are those who prefer to unite and live, not divide and kill), and money raised through Love Hope Strength had served to fund a mammography machine in Nepal, build a Children’s Cancer Unit in Tanzania, and to fund cancer projects within the UK. In 2019, Mike was awarded an MBE for his charitable work. As you probably figured, he’d kept the leukemia at bay in the process too, though not without some serious struggles along the way.
Cancer, however, always wants the last word. As recently as 2022, it had put Mike back in hospital, fighting for his life; Jules had been convinced she was going to lose him. But again, through a combination of excellent NHS medical care and a positive mindset, Mike had fought back, and he’d won that round too. An excellent new album Forwards was released in 2023, touring had resumed, and I’d had the chance to see him play again, after an absence of far too long, with Jules alongside him as part of the current version of The Alarm, in New York City last summer. He’d emphasized again then, as he had previously in writing and on Zoom calls, that I was welcome to come stay at the Chapel as his guest. All we had to do was arrange a mutually agreeable time.
That opportunity came with my decision to spend not just my mother’s 90th birthday, but my own 60th four weeks later, on an extended trip back to the UK. By the time I returned to the States (three days ago as of writing), the trip had lasted over six weeks, by far the longest period I’ve spent in my home country since a six-month period researching the Keith Moon book back in 1996. Nominally, I’d justified the lengthy stay as opportunity to rehearse and record with the Dear Boys, to take necessary meetings in London to ensure my name doesn’t fall too far by the wayside, to do some interviews perhaps, and to catch some Palace games and other football and live music. But especially, by basing myself to some extent in Beverley, the East Yorkshire town in which I was born, it gave me the opportunity to spend more “quality” time with my mother, who is languishing in a care home there with increasingly advancing dementia but who fortunately recognizes me more often than not as someone close to her that she loves.
Still, it had occurred to me before the trip was over, and before I had an unexpected e-mail from Mike on the eve of departure, that what my journey had really been about, all along, was friendship.
I live on my own, and I spend much of my working day on my own, too: writing, as you may be aware, is a solitary craft. I like walking and, especially, running on my own as well. As a kid, I was happy alone in my room, working on projects until I started a fanzine that had me working even harder alone in my room. But perhaps as a result, there is a flip side of me that is highly social. I love meeting people, and I love making - and hopefully keeping - good friends. If you can judge the quality of a person’s life by the depth of the friendships they keep, then I am one lucky dude, because some of the British-based friendships I keep run deep indeed…
…Like the one I have with Jeffries, who grew up ten yards from me, and who took on the role of surrogate big brother from the earliest age. Though life has occasionally taken us on different paths, we keep circling back to each other, bonded by our love of Crystal Palace, reggae and other Black music, fine wine, and healthy political discussions. Thirteen years ago, we celebrated J’s 50th birthday by going to a Northern Soul night in the Lancashire coastal city of Southport after Palace played at Burnley, and this year, a week after I’d spent a couple of nights at his place in West London, he joined me on the occasion of my actual 60th birthday to do what comes naturally for us together – go see Palace.
Jeffries may be my oldest longest-running lifelong friendship, but he’s far from the only one that dates way back into childhood. I was joined at my birthday gig/celebration in Clapham by Pascal, who I’ve known since he was born a few years after me in Beverley; we played a lot as kids on my family holidays there, and because he ended up in media and music in London, we’ve remained powerful adult friends too.
Additionally in attendance in Clapham were two people I’ve called friends since we started attending secondary school, aged 11. One of them, John Matthews, I’ve rarely fallen out of contact with, in part because he has the hippest music taste of anyone I know of this age (per his Latest Shit playlist), which has always enabled for easy conversation over a beer or two.
The other one, Chris Boyle, I had befriended even before we formed a band together, which happened as soon as he started playing drums at age 12. But we grew into different people, and we lost touch a decade down the line when the band split up - as in, it broke in two, with Chris on the other side. Still, he eventually found his way back after years of being AWOL; turned out he, like me, had emigrated to the States, and was living in Tampa. Occasions to get together are all too rare, but we have each visited with the other in the States, and Chris had made a special effort to join me on my birthday having just got off the plane in London for his own mother’s birthday
Also among the handful of friends who showed up at this small gathering was my closest female friend Jeni, who I met at 15 when our two schools went on a trip to France together; and Buddy Ascott, who I first saw play drums for The Chords a few weeks before I met Jeni, and after all these years of a tight, if often only online friendship, is now playing drums for my own band, The Dear Boys. Jeni joined us for our recording session this April as well, on backing vocals. Making music is more fun with friends…
Then there is my closest of all secondary school friends, Richard, who lives in Aberdeenshire with his wife from New Zealand, and who, though he often comes down to London on those astonishingly cheap EasyJet flights, was not requested to do so on my behalf given that I took him up instead on his own long-standing offer to come visit. Rich and I are, literally, “Thick as Thieves,” to quote a Jam song that we watched the group record together back in 1979, and we spent part of our time this April at his gorgeous village home playing his electric guitars, me teaching him Clash songs as if we were, to consciously quote a Buzzcocks song title now, Sixteen Again.
It's credit to the quality of these friends that every one of them gave me permission to write about them, using their real names, in my memoir Boy About Town, trusting me to do them right rather than asking to see anything in advance. Every one of them showed up for the launch party, every one of them claimed to love the book – despite or because of its honesty about our relationships – and our friendships have only grown tighter in the interim. Just as well, because they are also heavily featured in the forthcoming sequel, Teenage Blue.
So are members of the band Zeitgeist, whose records I put out on the Jamming label in 1981-82. The male lead singer of Zeitgeist, Jaf, has stayed immersed in music over the decades, and currently fronts the covers band King Biscuit; it was their gig on April 27 at the Bread and Roses that I decided to base my small 60th birthday gathering around. I also saw Jaf co-DJ a little Northern Soul party on my first night back in England, at the Sound Lounge in Sutton, which means he effectively bookended my entire journey.
Jaf, in fact, had co-DJ’d my 18th birthday party, audaciously held at Chislehurst Caves in 1982, but he wasn’t the only person at the Bread and Roses who’d been there. So had Jeni, John, Chris, Buddy (he thinks) – and Steve Gamble, who came into London for my 60th from his home in Ramsgate. Steve I had known as part of a crowd from the south London suburb of West Wickham, just down the road from Chiselhurst, a crowd that I really bonded with after he and his friends brought a newly single girl to a party in Stockwell later in 1982; our snogging fest (me and my future girlfriend, not me and Steve!) earned me a chorus of Mustang Tony after we re-emerged from the bathroom, a sobriquet that Steve honoured by presenting me with a 60th birthday card bearing the same wording. If you’ll excuse the language: how fucking blessed am I to have so many life-long friendships of this depth and quality – and humour?
Which brings us back to Mike. I’d first met him around that same crazy period, in 1981. He’d come to see me at my Jamming! office in West London, bearing a copy of his band’s self-pressed debut 45, “Unsafe Building.” I loved it immediately, was bowled away by the power of their live show – a semi-acoustic Clash, which seemed novel at a time that everyone else was turning to synthesizers - and quickly became a major advocate for the group.
As well as writing about them in Jamming!, I played football with, and occasionally against, them, and their manager Ian Wilson joined our Jamming! team permanently. Although I couldn’t secure The Alarm for the Jamming! label (they went to IRS), my championing of the group did help get them opening slot(s) on the Jam’s national tour in early 1982. At the end of that year, the Alarm and my group Apocalypse (featuring Chris of course, as well as my true best friend Tony Page, with whom I now have a band again, the aforementioned The Dear Boys) shared our first appearances at The Marquee together as a nominal double bill and sold the place out. In the time honoured tradition of conflict-of-interest British music journalism, I also produced The Alarm’s in-house fanzine/magazine, in which guise I joined them on a video shoot to a quarry in Caernarfon, North Wales for the single “The Chant Has Just Begun” (their lone concession to the 1980s penchant for gated drums and extended mixes, as Mike reminded me this past month). That location will come back into the story.1
After Jamming! folded, I started writing freelance, primarily for the NME.2 In that guise, I was invited on a press trip all the way from London to Los Angeles for The Alarm’s Spirit of 86 concert on the grounds of UCLA, a show that was broadcast live on MTV, a major coup which helped the album Strength become a Top 40 record there.
It was my first trip to the States. You can tell as much by my anemic skin color as we hung out poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt the day after the concert in the photo up top, quaffing quality champagne in the Sunday sunshine and talking football results as always. Understandably, MCA decided to max out the press trip – we were there for a full week - by arranging additional interviews with the Three O’Clock, Stan Ridgway and, at the 11th hour and after a lot of frantic phone calls by the publicist, with Tom Petty. Late on our final evening, we drove up to his co-writer Mike Campbell’s house in the Hollywood Hills, where there was open smoking of marijuana, and a film with topless women on the TV in the corner. It was Los Angeles rock clichés writ large, and I was in awe.3
I loved the all-expenses paid trip. Who wouldn’t? But I didn’t love Los Angeles. However, I managed to convince MCA to route my return trip via Boston, so I could meet another group, Three Colors (with whom I am also still friends.) I took a daytrip to New York City from Boston and despite long-term fears that Gotham city would surely eat me alive, my reaction was visceral, instant and quite to the contrary of expectations: I have to move here, I decided, and within two years I had done so. I never regretted that decision. In fact, what followed were the best years of my life – and among the best aspect of them was that I knew as much at the time.
Which leaves one of those eternal questions: without my friendship with Mike and The Alarm, without that junket to the States, who knows what different direction my life would have taken?
…To be continued.
During the period of writing this, I learned that I took my first ever baby steps at Caernafon Castle.
I’d been invited on to the NME by its editor, Ian Pye, only to quickly learn that there was a rebellion going on within the ranks, and that Danny Kelly was really the one in charge. He did not like my writing, which admittedly still came from a fanzine editor’s perspective, and killed my feature on The Alarm because it wasn’t critical enough. So much for the press junket!
I was also woefully unprepared for this particular interview. Despite having bought “I Need To Know” on release, I really did need to know the most basic facts about their career. Offering my own perception that Petty and the Heartbreakers had a lower profile in the UK than the USA, Tom responded with casual disdain. “I don’t know, what’s the name of that place we filled last time round?” he asked Mike. “Wembley Arena?” came the response from across. “Yeah, that’s the one.” Wembley Arena holds 8000 people. Touché.)
A thoughtful account of true friendship indeed and an interesting life lived. Goes to show the worth of grasping any opportunities that come our way. I often think back to the 70s and my time as a spotty-faced oik, I could never have foreseen what life had in store and I remain ever grateful for the chances given me - even more grateful for having the balls to act on them !
Another great read! I never intended to do anything like this with my substack, but you give me pause for thought. Funny thing about your Alarm piece for the NME. I left Melody Maker when Ian Pye took over at the NME, as I felt like a change. I did some big articles for him/them but had never really looked at the paper before. It was so boring I returned to the Maker after a month or so, which surprised everyone. Before I did I left the NME a nice farewell present, a hugely complimentary article about The Alarm. I gather that wasn't well received at the paper.