Thick as Thieves, Part 2
You can't choose your family, but you can certainly choose your friends.
If you missed Part 1 of this post, you may wish to read it now…
before you get stuck in to Part 2. Please also consider reading these longer posts on a laptop or desktop, as they may be too long for a single e-mail.
We return to The Red, the pub that Mike and Jules Peters purchased in their home village of Dyserth, North Wales, and reopened as a community weekend hub exactly a year previous to the weekend of April 5-8 that I was their guest. It’s Sunday evening. I have run a long loop through Rhuddlan, Rhyl, Prestatyn and back to Dyserth in the morning, earned some brownie points and made some new friends after bringing my laptop into the pub in the afternoon with the Man United-Liverpool game on it courtesy of my VPN, and now I’m on a second of The Alarm’s “The Sound & The Fury” IPAs (bottled by local Snowdon Craft Beer Co.), sat a table near the front door with Jules; we are finally getting to know each other despite the fact that she and Mike have been happily married for 35 years already.
Jules is her usual bubbly self, taking photos she’ll inevitably post on FB the next day, clearly enjoying life to the max now that, as she had just written on one of those posts about her ‘titoo,’ “It’s like I’m letting go, not just of my breast cancer story but also of Mike’s leukemia story.”
Mike joins us around 7pm, after wrapping up some book soundtrack work for the day. Not content with an impending American tour promoting a physical-copies-only LP Music Television, dedicated to the era of MTV in the spirit of Bowie’s Pin-Ups (hence the opening single, “The Man Who Sold The World”), Mike has also just handed in the 158,234 words that comprise Volume 1 of his memoirs, LOVE, which takes us to the first break-up of The Alarm in 1991. Volume 2 is to detail his cancer journey, and Volume 3 to discuss the music he has made in the years since, which he has approached with a cottage industry mindset that involves frequently bringing the audience to him for Alarm Staycations in Dyserth.
Mike and Jules are blessed not just with the solidity of their own marriage, but with the close relationship they have with their parents – of which three are still alive and actively involved in these cottage industry and community businesses.1 The same with their two sons, who work at The Red in-between college and other commitments. It’s a pair of intertwined families in which everyone is also friends.
My back story is none so harmonious. And this might explain (in addition to the reasons I offered in Part 1) why I so appreciate the value of good friends… because while you can’t choose your family, you can choose your friends, and they will be there for you if your family is not.
This was the case in 1996, just after I had moved back to the UK for six months to research the Keith Moon book, with wife and 6-month old baby in tow. On the eve of my return, I discovered that my father, who had just turned 60 – i.e. my age as of writing - had been diagnosed with Stage 4 esophageal cancer and that, though he vowed to fight it, had been given weeks to live.
My relationship with my dad had always been difficult, to say the least, and my brother’s relationship with my mother ditto, and me and my brother likewise as a result of our parents choosing fave kids; in short, we were the model of a dysfunctional, or certainly disrupted family. Nonetheless, I’d made yet another attempt to see if I could get on with my father some years back, after he became Director of the Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, an appointment that enabled him to take an additional weekend home in a village near Caernarvon called Nantlle.
I did have an enjoyable weekend with him out on the mountains of his beloved Snowdonia during this period, but it ended with us driving back to his Cardiff apartment Sunday evening, to find out it had been burgled while we were away – a crime that my father immediately stated, with absolute conviction, was the doing of the Teachers’ Union. (According to his obit in The Guardian as referenced on a Wikipedia page that curiously makes no reference to family, “He attempted to dismiss a number of members of staff: disapproval by the governing body led to the termination of his contract.”) That incident revealed the conflict he created wherever he went, as well as a degree of paranoia that I believe left his inner body open to cancerous cells.
After I found out that he was dying, I went and visited once more in March or April of 1996, and he managed to get out for another walk – no mountains this time – and told me some things that helped explain the problems behind the marriage, and indeed, perhaps the whole reason he was such a difficult and bitter, if intellectually brilliant and musically gifted person, to begin with. It was blindingly obvious, had been staring me in the face all my life, and I’d never been able to see it because of that old proverb about not being able to see the woods for the trees.
He died shortly thereafter, in May. Mistakenly, I accepted my brother’s invite to attend the funeral, staying at our dad’s house in Nantlle, our father’s body in an open casket downstairs. That Sunday night at the Red, I told Jules all the awful details of what unfolded during that stay; they’re obviously not a secret if I told her, but they’re also not necessary for this post. All that really matters for now is the following:
One, that over the 24 hours of the funeral, at some point we passed the quarry where The Alarm’s “The Chant Has Just Begun” video had been shot (see part 1), and I realized that I’d been to this spot before. It was surreal and grounding at the same time.
And two, that I cried incessantly after my dad’s body went into the fire. Just sat in a corner of the crematorium sobbing, partly out of loss for a man I didn’t know properly and who didn’t know me either, partly wondering why I had shown up given what had transpired, and partly out of complete confusion about the meaning of it all.
Seeing me inconsolable, my father’s best friend, who had just conducted what passed as a eulogy with a bluntness that my dad would have had no choice but to appreciate (“Peter was a difficult man to like,” he stated, as if the small number of people in attendance wasn’t confirmation already), came over, sat down with me and put his arm around me. “I don’t know why your father didn’t like you, there’s so much of him in you,” he said.
He meant it as a compliment. And I knew even then that he was right – not so much the first part of the sentence, which was merely a confirmation, but the second, in that I had inherited so much of him: the study of music, the writing of books, the musical direction and even the love of the mountains that was yet to reveal itself in me. What always frightened me in life was that the negative shit came with it.
Right around that same period, perhaps only the previous year, I had reconnected with Mike at an In The City convention in Manchester, and we’d had lunch together that same week. As such, I now had his phone number again. That day in May 1996, after the funeral, still distraught and emotionally spent, traveling solo and feeling utterly and completely alone, I called him from the train station. I needed to speak to someone, but not just anyone – I needed a friend, and given the connection of the local quarry, the fact that I was only over the hills from his hometown, he seemed the most obvious candidate. Mike picked up the phone. I knew nothing about his own battle with cancer, which had begun by then. And he didn’t mention it. He was just there for me when I needed him.
But that’s what friends are for. They’re there to socialize with, laugh with, walk with, holiday with, run with, drink with, eat with, chase romantic partners with when you’re young, go see live music and football matches and do all the other fun stuff in life. But they’re also there for when you need someone to lean on, when you have an urge to unburden, when you crave an opinion, or perhaps just some validation. They’re there to pump you up when you’re flat, and to deflate you when you’re full of yourself. And sometimes, they’re there just to listen.
The list of friends that I referenced in the first part of this article is incomplete, and this whole two-parter only really refers to those I made up to the point I emigrated around 1986, when I was 22. I made many more in New York City, more still in the Catskills, and I’d like to believe I’m making them to this day; in the UK on this recent trip I got together with (and even stayed overnight with) people I’d only corresponded with previously.
It’s occurred to me in writing all this down - and it’s another thing I should probably have seen many years ago - that maybe one reason I claim or perhaps need so many friends, still actively seek them out, is because of having such a small and dysfunctional family. It’s also probably the reason I was such a boy-about-town and ended up leaving London and the UK completely; I did not have a family home to root me the way that, for example, Mike and Jules do.2 Indeed, the only first-generation relative I have left in the UK that is not my mother suffering from dementia in a care home, is my sole cousin, who fortunately for the two of us is of a similar age, lives in London, plays music on the side, collects guitars, and who I consider a friend also.
So that’s the pseudo-self-diagnosis done with. Perhaps more poignantly and positively, in thinking back on all my years of friendship with the people referenced across these two articles and the many others I don’t have space to mention, I really can’t think of a time we fell out. Occasionally, romantic partnerships have provided distractions and sometimes, if those partners harbored jealousy, they also erected obstacles to their own partner’s platonic bonding. And obviously, we have to call BS on our friends on occasions, and sometimes brutally so in regard to those romantic partnerships. But when friendships are tight, it’s respectable and acceptable to be honest with them, and the friendships usually come out stronger. And if they don’t – if the necessary counseling of an opinion is met with long-term obstinate resistance or willful ignorance – then maybe this is not a friendship for the ages after all.
In that regard, it pains me that some of the most important partnerships of my life did not last, but when I analyze such apparent failures on my part, the relationships in question were largely contractual – a partner in a band, a magazine, a club night. Friendships either led to or resulted from these relationships, but they couldn’t survive the intensity of workplace and business entanglement. It’s not an uncommon scenario – check any band of best friends who broke up acrimoniously, i.e. almost every band but R.E.M., and you’ll know what I mean - and on reflection, I shouldn’t harbor guilt.
Equally, a friendship can not always survive one person’s addiction issues; I’ve made a point of staying away from druggies in my life. Rather, I am attracted to the doers in life, the ones who get up in the morning and scream “carpe diem!” at the world, and simultaneously I am resistant to the passive-aggressive types: one of the reasons I fell in love with NYC is that people called you as they saw you, and would either choose to be your new best mate or tell you they didn’t like you from the off. (None of that LA-style constant insincere false-fronted networking BS.)
I also acknowledge that I’ve been accused of passive-aggressive tendencies myself in the past, and indeed that I did inherit a certain impatience/short temper from my father especially (though my mother was inherently resistant to criticism, which could set off similar tantrums). This makes me all the more grateful for those friends who put up with it and saw the best in me despite it. I take comfort that the years I spent on the cushion at the Zen Mountain Monastery had some effect, as did the dissolution of an increasingly unhappy marriage, to the extent that Paula, my partner of four years and counting, laughs at the very notion of anger issues given that we’ve yet to raise our voices on each other (other than when singing as Hudson Palace, that is). In turn, I’d like to believe – though it’s not for me to state as fact – that I am fiercely loyal to my friends, that I make a frequent effort to search them out and stay in touch, that I’m willing to provide an ear, and that I can be relied upon to keep their secrets.
But the best mark of truly great friendships is that they can survive long absences. That’s been the case with Jeffries more than once in our lives; with my cousin Paul; with Steve and Chris and others I mentioned in Part 1. And it was especially the case with Mike. In fact, after that phone call the day of my dad’s funeral, we didn’t speak for almost a quarter century. Our lives just continued as they had been, not in opposite directions, but on separate tracks. Only when I was putting The Best of Jamming! book together did I instigate fresh contact; Mike responded immediately, we got on a Zoom call and… it was as if we were picking up conversation from the night before. We didn’t have to make excuses about not being in touch, we just accepted it and got on with being in touch. Hearing more about his cancer battles and his charity work, I invited him on to my One Step Beyond podcast. It’s an episode I have relistened to in the process of writing this article and it’s solid. It is included below and I really do think that if you want to understand more about his passion for life and his goodness, you’ll benefit from listening to it. You can also donate to Love Hope Strength from here (for UK) or here (for US).
Following on from the Podcast, I appeared on one of Mike and Jules’ in-house YouTube “Big Night In”s, talking about the early 1980s Alarm, and we finally reunited in person at that New York City show last summer, where it was again emphasized that I’d be welcome in Dyserth. This spring of my 60th birthday, I finally spent long enough in the UK once more that I could take up this offer, along with some others.
So there I was, Sunday evening, April 7, 2024. Jules had been trying to convince me to turn the whole sorry saga surrounding my father’s life and death into a script, and I was saying I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to that dark a place. Mike then brought up his memory of a phone call from a train station, at which my synapses snapped back into attention to fill in the details as above.
It was a lovely evening, a fantastic conclusion to a wonderful weekend, and I didn’t want my trip to end. So when Jules asked me, “What time do you have to leave in the morning?” as the bartender – one of her sons – gathered up the glasses, I seized my opportunity.
“Actually, to be honest, just this one day I don’t really… Do you have anyone staying in my room tomorrow?”
“It’s yours,” Jules and Mike chorused. “You’re always welcome. Stay another day. And come back next year. Bring Paula.”
I stayed another day. It was, truly, the only complete rest day of my trip. I took a Yoga class conveniently located within the Waterfall Apartments (Jules inevitably posted pictures of me at full downward dog!), flitted between the apartment and The Red, reading and writing and planning the rest of my trip; I played on the jerry-rigged acoustic guitar in my room in preparation for my own recording session at the end of the week, and for the second time in Dyserth, I got a takeaway from the Indian place up the hill, because just as there are undiscovered villages in Africa with an Irish pub, so there is an Indian takeaway in every remote corner of the British Isles. I also took a picture of a cottage with a For Sale sign, and just this minute I got around to looking it up. It’s priced well under £200,000, with 3 bedrooms, a large back garden, and the mountains out front. It’s also just 20 yards from The Red.
It’s tempting, and I can see why my father lived out the end of his life the other side of these hills. It does, after all, seem like an idyllic existence, and Mike and Jules certainly weren’t going to disagree. “We always loved it here,” said Mike as he drove me back to the station on Tuesday. “I only moved to London with The Alarm to get a job done. We got it done, and I moved back.”
He was about to leave it behind him again, however, for a lengthy US tour starting in early May. But that’s who he is. A doer. “See you in New York,” he said as we hugged on departure, referring to the date at Daryl’s House in Pawling on May 23.
Just 19 days later, the evening after my 60th birthday, I received an e-mail from Mike marked “personal”. Contained within was advance news of something that was set to go public the next day. Only two weeks after our long hike, not a week after Mike had played that two hour set at the Red, and on the very morning he was setting off to see Manchester United at Wembley in the FA Cup Semi-Final, he had discovered a large swollen gland on his neck. Though he went to the match, he was at the North Wales Cancer Treatment Center the following morning, after which a hastily ordered emergency biopsy and CT scan determined that, as Mike stated in his public announcement, “my Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia (CLL) has undergone a transformation into a High Grade Lymphoma.” You don’t need to know much about the specifics of these diseases to sense that’s some seriously heavy news.
Back in 1995, the younger Mike had determined to go ahead with an impending US tour upon hearing he had blood cancer. But that was then. This is now. Mike is 64. His cancer has decided to come back for one more battle of the heavyweights, presenting him with no choice but to cancel the tour, postpone his charity’s El Camino hike in June, and knuckle down to the absolute reality that he is now facing “what I know will be the most challenging time of my life.” He’s going to require 18 weeks of chemo at a minimum, he’s going to lose that luxuriant head of hair that’s been one of his calling cards these last few years, and he’s going to lose his energy for a while there too.
But Mike is a fighter. He has gone ten rounds already with this cancerous beast and if anyone is able to go one more, it’s him. He’s not my father. He’s not bitter or vindictive. He’s an open, loving, creative, fit, generous, happy person whose unbridled passion for life sends out positive energy to all who encounter him. As a result, his public announcement generated thousands and thousands of positive messages of love hope and strength back at him. To me, it’s just one more mark of his beautiful nature that he felt compelled to write to me ahead of the news going public, not just because it would come as such a shock after I saw him fighting fit only three weeks earlier, but because “we were so looking forward to seeing you and Paula in Pawling next month.”
I guess it’s also a mark of a deep friendship, established four decades ago, when we were all young and had the world at our feet, and we bonded over his band and we played football together, I was loyal to his band when most music journalists ran a mile from them but was rewarded with that first trip to the USA that inadvertently changed the course of my life. I did not get to choose my family, but I made some damn good choices in my friends.
Sadly, Mike is not the only one of those friends fighting cancer or something similar right now. Indeed, this trip home was sobering for the number of people my age or thereabouts who are battling the various ailments and diseases that come at us as we grow older and this mysterious thing called “life” simultaneously tries to kill us. My friends will all be or have already been blessed by the vast strides in science and medicine in recent decades that were not available to our parents’ generation, and it’s additionally thanks to people like Mike and his Love Hope Strength charity that such advances are available at all in poor, medically challenged countries like Nepal and Tanzania as well. Illnesses we used to die from we can now live with: if leukaemia was a death sentence for 85% of people who contracted it in the 1980s, that same percentage can now learn to live with it. Mike has been at the head of that increasing statistic for three of these last four decades. No wonder he is still planning on performing some British shows and home village DJ gigs this summer.
Nonetheless, as Richard said to me when I went to visit him in Scotland, “We’re in Sniper’s Alley now, mate!” That comment, and Mike’s overnight transition from survivor back to carrier, confirmed why I am so glad I took these six weeks out from work, and therefore from income, to sleep in a dozen different beds in three different countries. Or as Jeffries said when I pointed out that I was racking up a fair amount of expenses in Air BnBs and meals, “Yeah, but what’s life for eh?”
He’s right. Because while your close friendships are forever, the opportunities to engage in them are not. And so, if someone you care for offers you the invitation to visit, act on it. Cancel other plans. Find the time. Indulge in that friendship. Get drunk on it. It’s worth it. It’s what, when we’re not fighting wars and killing each other, we humans are so good at. We are social animals. Be social. Love your friends. And always find time for them, as they do for you.
And for those like Mike, battling cancer or something similarly devastating, take heed, and hopefully comfort, from Mike’s final words of our One Step Beyond podcast:
“Life is precious. Just having ten more minutes is a gift, and sometimes in the passing through cancer, life can reveal itself to be incredibly beautiful. And they are the moments to strive for. If you can find love hope strength in yourself to stay alive for one more day, to tell your wife “I Love you” one more time, or hold your child’s hand, that’s worth a million pounds. So I always say to everybody, if you have the right mindset with cancer, you can always beat it. You might not outrun it fully, but you may be able to get one more yard out of it.”
Mike, I will see you in Dyserth next year, at the Red, watching you play “You Spin Me Round” on the decks on a Friday night as a multi-generational community village audience goes mental on the dance floor. I then look forward to taking a hike together on Saturday, talking music and football as always, and to another Sunday night pint while Jules takes cheerful snapshots for the following day’s post. To everyone else, remember that it’s friends that really make the world spin round, like a record, baby, right round, round round…
Music, self-evidently, is Mike’s lifeblood, but as he explained to me on our long Saturday hike, it is something he has to do, regardless of money. And money is hard to come by as a working musician these days, especially when you plough what little income it generates into extensive tours, with hired musicians and crew, and you take time out for your charitable work. Fortunately for the Peters – i.e. they worked at it - he and Jules have a thriving company that provides pre-match entertainment at major football/soccer matches, including for the Welsh national team. Mike’s passion for his home country (as well as for Man U) is such that he wrote the official UEFA Euro 2020 song for the Welsh team, “The Red Wall of Cymru,” and can regularly be seen at the national games.
This topic came up in a Fanzine Podcast interview with James Brown, whose mother had mental health issues that led to her suicide, and who flitted around and moved to London and traveled abroad frequently. He shared that episode with fellow Yorkshireman Mark Hodkinson, who came from a stable family and has never left Rochdale.
Tony, some wonderful memories here. And friendships that run deep as deep as yours cannot be overstated or underestimated. I have a close aquaintance who knows Mike and Jules and related the news to me. I’m hoping to speak with Mike when he’s ready and well. Thank you. 💜
Beautiful piece, my friend. xx