Our lives are so often accompanied by the music of chance. Attentive listeners will know that strange coincidences and unexpected encounters chime loudly throughout our personal histories, echoing and shaping our world with odd connections in ways that are unforeseen, fortuitous or simply surprising. For example, take Alan White. He was born in 1949 in the coal mining village of Pelton in north-east England. Not too far from that settlement is Drum Road, now the site of the Drum Business Park. Just a few miles from his Pelton birthplace sits the town of Washington. That, in turn, isn’t too far away from Newcastle, where White’s first band, The Downbeats, played its clubs and halls in the early 60s. Fast forward a couple of decades and White became a long-term resident of Newcastle in Seattle, USA. Originally one of the very first mining towns in the region, Newcastle lies in the state of Washington. This series of apparently disparate accidents of geography and their sense of one lifetime echoing with another must have brought a smile to his face.
