Peter 'Roadcrew' Brockbank

[Pudders]

A few on here will remember Peter from the old TNMS days. Sad to report that he passed away over the weekend after a short illness. Ironically he was no great fan of the band but he worked for them, as Neil's personal driver, during the European legs of two tours (Hold Your Fire and Roll The Bones) having first met Neil in London, before he joined the band. To say he was a character is somewhat of an understatement but he was great company and I'll certainly miss the occasional chats we would have on the phone. We rarely talked about Rush, it was Football, Horse Racing, Rioja and family stuff in the main and we would ramble on for ages.

Rest easy Pete...

[Thenop]

Sad to hear, never met him but from his posts he seemed like a character.

[The Picnic Wasp]

Met him very briefly before a Glasgow Rush concert. He wrote amazing stuff on TNMS many years ago, I'm trying to piece together my memory of his tale of NP's hire car which he lost. Neil seemed to have a fascination for him, which if I remember correctly, sadly fizzled out.

RIP Peter.

[dom]

That's sad news, like Thenop only knew him from his posts on here (in fact that goes for almost all of you) sad face

[Fishy]

Sorry to hear this .. met him once for a night in Ayr...top stories great bloke... smiles.....

[Nickslikk2112]

Aye, sad news. Not a good way to start the day hearing that.

[Matt2112]

I was in quite regular contact with him, the last few years being mostly about horse racing and football and associated betting; though he always made a point of asking how I and the family was doing and he kept a keen eye on Halifax Town's fortunes.

I was a bit stunned when I heard he'd gone; I'll miss those text/WhatsApp/FB exchanges and the occasional phone call.

A proper character with a good heart.

[pdw1]

Bit late on this but sad news. I met him once and he was a great character and a top bloke. RIP

[Slim]

Sorry to come to this so late but I was sad to receive this news via Facebook on my phone while on holiday in Scotland. He'd been contributing to TNMS for a while when he sent me a private message, to tell me about his history with Neil Peart. We used to exchange messages quite often and we spoke on the phone two or three times.

The thing about a telephone call with Peter was that it could last, literally, for hours. He was a sweet man and he used to say that our telephone calls gave him a nice feeling, which was touching. I'm sorry to say though that I hadn't spoken to him for many years when he died.

I only met him once, at a TNMS get-together in Wembley in 2005.

One memorable late Sunday afternoon at around that time I was exchanging emails with him and he mentioned that he'd just received one from Neil. He even forwarded to me a Word document that was a draft of one of the chapters Neil was writing for one of his books. Clearly Neil would have been irate if he'd known that Peter had shared an early draft of his work with a Rush fan but of course I was sworn to strict secrecy and I never told anyone about this.

But I asked Peter to ask Neil something for me; I wanted to know why Neil preferred to use American English spelling rather than his native Canadian (British English really). Neil's reply was that he saw the American English spellings as more modern. Which I thought was daft, but we needn't discuss that here.

Peter's status as an ex-convict was well known. Neil even writes about this in one of his books. But what may not be quite so well known is that his nefarious activities continued well into later life. He even tried to enlist me in one of them, hoping that my IT experience might assist with whatever criminal enterprise he and his dubious associates were planning. And when I declined to respond to his emails about it, he told me that I reminded him of Neil.

It's also well-known I think that our favourite drummer cut Peter off after he found that Peter had been helping himself to a bit of reflected glory in Rush fandom, even having Peter's backstage pass removed from him on one of the tours by security. I've always thought that the song Wish Them Well is about Peter.

[Thenop]

I guess you never know someone until you really know them. Great story Slim, thanks for that.