Going out in a blaze of glory

Documentary director John Geraint reflects on the life – and prophetic voice – of Welsh rock icon Mike Peters.

“Pit shaft wheels turn for the last time in the Rhondda tonight…”

It was those words – name checking my native valley for the first time ever in a song destined to become a chart hit – that drew me, in 1989, to make a BBC documentary, A Blaze of Glory, with The Alarm, the rock band from north-east Wales the death of whose lead singer, Mike Peters, we’re mourning right now.

Back in 1989, as those of us who lived through it will testify, there was a moment of crisis for our country. We’d suffered a decade of Thatcherism, and the final wave of colliery closures felt like a deathblow to beleaguered Valleys communities. In The Alarm’s anthem for doomed youth (or that’s how it seemed to us), Mike Peters sang “Great is the need for A New South Wales.”

Wogan

We filmed the band and the members of the Morriston Orpheus Choir travelling to London to perform their anthem, A New South Wales, ‘live’ on BBC network television’s Wogan show, hosted in primetime that evening by Joanna Lumley.

Then, our documentary took Mike to Oakdale in the Gwent Valleys, to see for himself the devastation of hope wreaked by the shutting of the pit there.

But, further west, Welsh-speaking communities also felt besieged. One response was the arson campaign which saw hundreds of holiday homes attacked. Tension and fear stalked the land, and the Welsh language was in danger of becoming a bitterly divisive issue, and potentially violently so.

And this is where I believe Mike Peters and his music took on a prophetic mantle. If ‘prophetic’ sounds fanciful, I don’t mean ‘clairvoyant’. I intend it in the biblical sense of someone with moral authority and influence standing up and speaking out, revealing to people what justice and fair play demand.

In a charged atmosphere, at a sold-out concert in Cardiff’s St David’s Hall, Mike sought to bridge the linguistic divide that seemed, at the time, deep enough to tear Wales apart.

He had the courage to challenge both sides of that divide by saying something that thankfully nowadays might seem uncontentious: “There are two sets of people in Wales,” he told the audience from centre stage. “There are Welsh-speaking Welsh people and there are people like myself, who are English-speaking Welsh people. And this great country of Wales belongs to us all.”

Cheers

The Hall echoed to cheers. Then, with our cameras capturing everything, it quietened as Mike went on: “But there are forces gathered out there that are trying to shatter everything that Wales stands for. There are people waging an arson campaign in this country. Should their campaign bring about the loss of life – and I feel that that loss of life could be very, very imminent – that loss would affect every single person here in Wales. Now is the time to speak up against all acts of violence.”

Finally, before the band struck up Rivers to Cross, with its evocative line ‘Under drowning valleys, our disappearing tongue’, Mike finished with this: “There’s a saying in Wales, cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon – a nation without language is a nation without heart. And I believe that we all – English speakers and Welsh speakers – must do everything we can to keep the heart of Wales beating into the future.”

Our film camera was right behind Mike on stage as he said all this. And I was standing next to the camera. I sensed the power and influence he had over that vast audience. And we’ve all seen, much more recently, how politicians and demagogues can misuse such power.

For Mike back then, it would have been so easy, with the audience hanging on his every word, to stir things up, to give those thousands of passionate young people licence to give vent to their frustrations.

But Mike’s call for restraint – expressed with a prophet’s authority and eloquence – was far from a call for passive acceptance. He himself had been taking action, and stepping well outside his comfort zone.

The Alarm’s Change album had just depicted – for the first time in English-language rock music – a rounded portrait of Wales, and a Wales in crisis at that. But it was also issued in a Welsh-language version, and Mike had arranged for us to film him singing A New South Wales in Welsh to the annual conference of the Welsh Language Society in Aberystwyth.

Fired-up

Mike had learned a few phrases of spoken Welsh, and he was always going to get a warm croeso. But in addressing the conference, he had to speak mostly in English, and he really didn’t know how that would go down with a lecture-theatre full of understandably fired-up language campaigners. It was a moment of real tension for him, and in the film.

“What I am trying to do,” he told me as I interviewed him afterwards, “is to unite the strands of people who are struggling to do good work in Wales. And to do that you have to speak to both camps. There is a divide between the Welsh speakers and the English speakers, and I’m trying to bridge that gap. And hopefully by going to Cymdeithas yr Iaith and speaking to them in the terms that they understand, I can help them look at Wales in a new light.”

No one can say whether Mike’s stand, in his words spoken at St David’s Hall, and broadcast to an even larger television audience in our film shortly afterwards, made a real difference. But Wales did avoid the loss of life Mike feared. And I think it’s fair to say that, although deep concerns for its health remain to this day, the Welsh language has become something that far, far more Welsh people feel positive about, whether they speak it or not. To steal Mike’s phrase about the whole country, we can see that the language ‘belongs to us all.’

Profound changes

But Wales – its economy and its culture – faces such profound challenges today, that it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re in another moment of crisis. A moment of choice too.

On the very day that Mike Peters passed away, Wales’s Future Generations Commissioner issued an official warning that without urgent action to protect the environment, tackle poverty and ill health, we’re set on a course towards an “unrecognisable future” in Wales – and not in a good way. To help us find a better way forward, we surely need to hear the prophetic voice of artists, and so it might seem like a bitter irony that in this moment of crisis and choice, we’re denied the voice of Mike Peters.

Except that we’re emphatically not denied that voice. The man has left us, but he’s left us his music. And that music is a clarion call for justice, equality and tolerance, a call expressed joyously, thrillingly, album after album, across a lifetime of music making, in some of the finest rock songs you’ll ever hear.

Mike’s words and his work – and, as I’ve said, it was a rare thing when he began to write English-language rock songs about Wales – pointed us towards becoming a nation confident in its identity and inclusive of everyone who wanted to be part of it. The music remains – a tower of love, hope and strength, at a time when “great is the need for a new Wales.”