Band of brothers
How to cope when you lose your bestie Alastair Harper
Ahead of the 40th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, Paul Mccartney has spoken about the pure luck of meeting a friend you could so easily make music with. “How lucky was I,” he said, “to meet this strange teddy boy off the bus, who played music like I did and we get together and, boy, we complemented each other!”
I think I can share, if not the talent, at least this feeling of comradeship. I first met my friend Nick Boardman around 1993, when we were 10 years old, a short hop to the east of where John met Paul.
We went to the same secondary school and caught the same bus every morning over the course of eight long years. We survived that ordeal side by side — the pile- ons, the dead arms, the relentless farting of adolescent boys.
Nick was the sort your parents wished you were. He was Deputy Head Boy. I was always in detention. But we were best friends. We bonded over music. We listened to Idlewild and played the electric guitars we’d both got for Christmas. We made up songs about our French teacher and the girls at school who didn’t want to kiss us.
We cycled to each other’s houses, guitars strapped to our backs. We got friends who couldn’t play the drums to play the drums for us. At the school talent show, it was politely suggested that our Nirvana and T- Rex medley was not something for which the world was yet ready.
We grew up alongside each other, witnessing each other’s metamorphosis. We had bad hairstyles, bad nights and continually refined our mutual mockery.
Then we drifted apart. I went to London, he went to Leeds. We occasionally caught up on holidays and in our scruffy apartments, and still made music, but less passionately. After he graduated, I saw him off to Japan; we formed a crazy band for his leaving party, and called it Extradition Order.
I wondered if we would ever be as close again.
But when he came home, two years later, we formed a proper band, keeping the name Extradition Order and started to play shows in London. Bizarrely, we were briefly almost fashionable, although we never made any money.
We were still best friends, still making up songs in our bedrooms, but we were grown-ups, now, rather than school kids, with proper jobs and smart shoes. Nick was godfather to my daughter.
Then, in early 2017, we had just worked out the outline of our next record — a Northern Soul album about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, obviously — when Nick started being grumpy and impatient in practice. It wasn’t like him. He had some tests, and they showed a tumour. He had an operation. He got well. We played a show. And then another tumour appeared.
He stayed with me that Christmas, patiently playing game after game of Star Wars chess with his god-daughter. On New Year’s Eve he got so drunk that he refused to be put to bed. He did not behave like an ill man. But he was.
He was determined to make full use of the time he had left. He got married to his partner and took road trips with his dad. But he became steadily more gaunt. I found myself helping my best friend and band mate plan his funeral.
We talked through what he wanted. A cremation with a humanist celebrant — but his dad could read something from the Bible. A party afterward, and he would cover the bar tab. The pub was to have lots of natural light. I helped him with his will, setting myself up for a fall when he bequeathed me his beloved bike — but only if I took a cycling proficiency test.
I looked at the list of songs he had drafted for the service. An Elbow song about having cancer, Silver Mount Zion. And Radiohead.
He died early on a Tuesday morning almost exactly two years ago. I realized the person I had done most with I would never do things with again.
In the days that followed, I felt as if I was walking on thin air over a massive fall. It was OK when there were things to organize. But when there was nothing, I disintegrated. I didn’t realize how much it mattered, having an old friend you could call, who knew everything about you without explanation. I didn’t know how bad it would be to lose that friend.
Putting out our band’s record mattered. I could hear Nick’s voice and bass on every song, and the idea of finishing it gave me somewhere to land.
At first it felt strange getting the band back together. We didn’t play music the first time. We just went to the pub and toasted our lost friend again and again.
Eventually we started to practise, relearning the songs we’d written before Nick got too sick to play. We organized a comeback gig and managed to fit it in just before the lockdown.
Our friendship spanned 25 years — one bonded through music and living the adolescent dream of being in a band. Paul and John’s friendship cemented their place in musical legend. Ours led to a more mundane existence, but it too created a friendship that I, every single day, still consider myself lucky to have had.