Someone’s got to do it, and frankly, I don’t trust any of you lot to get the details right. You’d probably have me snuffing it in some ridiculously glamorous, rock-and-roll fashion. Choking on a champagne bottle backstage at Wembley, perhaps. but Bollocks to that. If I’m writing my own send-off, we’re going to have a bit of truth, a bit of spit, and a whole lot of polish.
In my hometown of Prestaten, I was vaguely famous for a bit. The local paper might have taken my picture. I could probably get a free pint in the correct pub, provided the landlord was in a good mood and remembered who I was.
In Tokyo, once, we were very famous for about three hours. A thousand Japanese kids sang '68 Guns' back at us with more passion than we’d ever mustered ourselves. It was breathtaking. Then we got on the bullet train to the next city and were just four gormless-looking blokes with bad haircuts trying to order noodles. That’s fame, that is. A beautiful, fleeting, and utterly confusing moment in time.
And for a little while the flags came out. The hair got bigger. We were The Alarm, the band with the pretentious name and the un-ironic love of anthems. We sang about the Spirit of ’76, about strength, about love. And people, remarkably, sang along. We got to be on Top of the Pops. I stood next to David Bowie once and was too intimidated to say anything other than a very quiet “Alright?”. He probably thought I was a roadie.
So what's the legacy of a sweaty git from North Wales who shouted into a microphone for forty years?
Is it the gold discs on the wall? I’ve used one as a coaster for a mug of Bovril, so that feels suitably punk. Is it the songs? Maybe. I still get a proper kick when I hear someone humming Rain In The Summertime in a supermarket checkout queue. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Of course, the universe has a wicked sense of humour. It gave me five goes at dying from Cancer but the cheeky sod picked the wrong bloke. Cancer thought it could have a go, but it didn’t bank on a lifetime of punk rock stubbornness or the sheer bloody-mindedness of a Welshman who hasn’t finished his tour. Bollocks to cancer, I said in 1995, 1996, 2005, 2022 and 2024 before it finally got me in 2025.
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