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March saw my return to watching live music. It had been over 2 years since my last concert, which was seeing The Alarm play at The Gathering in North Wales. It was perhaps no surprise that my first gig back would also be seeing The Alarm. This time it was at The Electric Ballroom in London.
2022 marks 39 years of me following The Alarm, which goes back to hearing The Stand single played by John Peel and then going up to see them live at The Marquee in London. I’ve never looked back and have followed the band and the individual projects ever since. I hadn’t engaged much with other fans for most of those 39 years. That is until the fundraising pulled me out of the comfortable background shadows about 5 years ago. The friendship and support ever since has been quite wonderful and I now have many many great friendships with fellow fans. This led me to going to America in 20118 and 2019 to see the band and meeting up with friends in New York. In fact, I could go to many places these days to see The Alarm and I would almost certainly know someone there.
This meant that in March 2022 as well as not seeing the band, I hadn’t seen any of my Alarm friends for two years either. As much as I enjoy listening to music it’s live music that really is the real deal for me. This concert in London had been rescheduled more than once as a result of the pandemic and its restrictions. Yet my trip into London by train and then to Camden Town on the underground felt comfortably familiar and when I walked into the pub and was met by some familiar faces and warm embraces I felt completely at home. I had missed doing this so much.
The Alarm were superb. The rescheduled tour was celebrating 40 years of the band, albeit a year late. Mike Peters had taken the bold decision to condense some of the band’s biggest songs into a medley, so as to play as many songs as possible. For me this worked brilliantly and also breathed new life and energy into some of the songs. I would end up going to another couple of dates on the tour. Things for Mike Peters, who has lived with leukaemia for 25 years would take a turn for the worse after the tour with a bout of pneumonia and a serious reoccurrence of leukaemia putting his life at risk.
March saw another fundraising project with the Kindness Vs Cancer teddy bears. On the back of the Life of Mique teddies I was contacted by Jess Woodfield who put me in touch with Grant Hendrick. Grant’s wife Laura died of bowel cancer in February and Grant has carried on with Kindness Vs Cancer fundraising campaign set up by Laura raising around an amazing £70,000 so far. The teddy bears contributed over £800 to this total, which was down to the incredible support of Laura’s family and friends in and around Thatcham.
