The Alarm
He’s weathered many a storm before, but for The Alarm’s Mike Peters the past few years have been truly tumultuous. With his own life in the balance, and following his wife’s recent battle with breast cancer, he’s a changed man. And he’s got a new album to
With Mike Peters’s own life in the balance, and following his wife’s recent battle with breast cancer, he’s a changed man. And he’s got a new album to prove it.
Set amid some breathtaking scenery in North Wales, the Peters family’s elegant modern home wouldn’t look out of place on Grand Designs. It’s just a few miles outside of Rhyl, the seaside town where Mike Peters grew up, played his first gigs with his formative punk band The Toilets, and in 1981 founded the band that would make his name: The Alarm.
In their 80s heyday The Alarm were regularly filed alongside post-punk arena fillers such as U2, Simple Minds and Big Country. Their breakthrough hits – rousing anthems Sixty Eight Guns and The Stand – marked them out as a band with something to say and an unerring way with a hook. Their 1984 top-five debut album Declaration and its follow-up Strength earned them a loyal following across the UK and, crucially, the US.
Peters was – and still is – a talented writer and a charismatic, compelling frontman, leading the band on tours with U2 and Bob Dylan. They didn’t quite reach the commercial heights a band of such substance deserved, but for many, The Alarm were the kind of group you could live your life by. Their music has continued to resonate with a sizeable audience of new fans and old.
We’re an hour into talking about The Alarm’s new album, Equals, when Jules, Mike’s wife of 30 years, sneaks into the room. She’s sorry to interrupt, but couldn’t wait to let him know the news: Slade have just accepted their invitation to headline Snowdonia Rocks on June 23. This annual hiking/concert event in North Wales raises funds for Love Hope Strength, the charitable foundation Peters co-founded in 2007 to help combat and raise awareness of leukaemia and other forms of cancer.
Mike Peters’s own 20-year battle with the disease is well-documented, and in 2016 the BBC commissioned a new documentary about his progress and his life-saving charity work. But the film took an unthinkably cruel turn when, mid-shoot, Jules was diagnosed with breast cancer. Broadcast last year, Mike And Jules: While We Still Have Time developed into an unflinching and inspiring account of the invasive treatment she endured, and her ongoing recovery. Today she’s bright and breezy. Unless you already knew, you’d never know.
Her husband is delighted at the Slade news. Peters grew up loving Slade, and The Sweet, Mud and The Who. Quadrophenia is still his favourite album. His first gig was Black Sabbath in Birmingham on their Sabotage tour in ’75. “I can still smell the patchouli oil,” he says with a smile.
He smiles a lot. “And every Monday I’d go to a rock club called Quaintways in Chester – I saw Robin Trower, The Groundhogs, Thin Lizzy as a three-piece with Eric Bell. But after I saw the Sex Pistols there in ’76, nothing was quite the same.”
Along with the cover versions the Pistols played that night – Substitute, The Stooges’ No Fun – they played a new tune of their own, Anarchy In
The UK. Wide-eyed with the excitement of new frontiers, Peters sought out Johnny Rotten at the bar and eagerly enquired what the song meant. Rotten told him to fuck off. A few months later, after attending his first Clash gig, Peters asked Joe Strummer what White Riot was about. “It’s about the future,” was Strummer’s enigmatic reply.
“These bands made me want to be a musician,” says Peters, 40 years on. “Before that, you were into whatever was around. Everybody dabbled with prog because that’s just what you were exposed to. I saw Yes on the Relayer tour in Stoke. Gryphon, Ace and Alex Harvey were supporting. Alex had the place in the palm of his hand, Yes seemed very boring by comparison. But the best of all that stuff, like Close To The Edge, is still great. I was always drawn more to singles than albums. For me, Queen was one of the first seventies bands that rocked hard but also had hit singles.”
The Alarm first played alongside Queen in 1984, on the bill of that odd TV/music phenomenon the Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival (A-list bands performing for beer money before a massive global TV audience). “At the post-show party, a huge bouncer came over and said: ‘Freddie [Mercury] wants to meet you.’ He got me and [Alarm drummer] Twist in a headlock and marched us over. It turned out Freddie was a big fan of ours and loved Declaration. He wanted to know all about it. We swapped anecdotes and he gave us his number, and said if we needed any help we should call him.”
Two years later, The Alarm joined INXS and Status Quo as Queen’s special guests for the two Wembley dates of their Magic tour. That would be the peak of The Alarm’s career in that decade. They’d just played their huge concert, Spirit Of ’86, for 25,000 Alarm fans at UCLA, which was broadcast on MTV around the world. “We were signed to IRS Records,” says Peters, “the maverick label that had R.E.M. Though we didn’t have the same muscle as some of the other bands from our generation, we were creatively strong then.”
But by 1991, despite more hits, internal differences had fractured the band’s first incarnation. With the grunge wave washing away the foundations of their anthemic arena rock, Peters quit in dramatic style, announcing his departure to an unsuspecting audience and band right before the final song of their
final show, at Brixton Academy. In the following years he ploughed on solo, formed Coloursound – a promising, short-lived band with The Cult’s Billy Duffy – and around 2000 began working under the Alarm banner again.
For many of the thousands of loyal fans who still turn up at the shows, including The Gathering, the annual fan weekend in Llandudno, Peters is
The Alarm. In October 2015 he was joined by an orchestra and two choirs at Cardiff’s Millennium Centre for a sold-out show marking the 30th anniversary of the landmark album Strength. The concert was preceded by a screening of The Man In The Camo Jacket, a thorough, moving account of The Alarm’s career, Peters’s two cancer diagnoses (lymphoma in 1995, leukaemia 10 years later) and his work with Love Hope Strength.
His health relapsed for a third time before that landmark Cardiff event, and he’s now on a new drug. “It’s an oral chemotherapy, which means I don’t have to go back to hospital every three weeks for treatment. So my leash is longer now, and I have more freedom as a musician. It’s worked out well for me.”
You’d never tell that Peters was ill. Today, as ever, he’s warm, friendly and very chatty. It’s hard to believe he’ll be 60 next year. He runs 30 miles a week, revels in taking care of his two young sons (both fans of The Who and Green Day), and he’s never more animated than when talking about music.
Last year The Alarm played the Vans Warped Tour across the States, sharing stages with young metal bands including Attila and Barb Wire Dolls. Peters was told more than once that some of the next generation were led to The Alarm by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, who claimed he first picked up an acoustic guitar after hearing their track The Stand. It was used recently on hit teen-suicide drama 13 Reasons Why, resulting in a million fresh hits on the band’s Spotify page.
Understandably, Peters is strongly pro-streaming. “Our audience is expanding all the time through things like Spotify. Some fans have been with us a long time and have a real bond with us, but when a young person’s taken by The Alarm, they do follow up, they do come to the gigs – our old music is new for them now.”
Of course, this hasn’t all been easy. While Jules is now cancer-free, she and the family are still dealing with the aftermath of her ordeal. Mike didn’t realise the toll it had taken on him until the cameras stopped rolling. “At the time, I thought: ‘I’ve been strong for Jules when she needed me.’ But when I look back on the film, I look in pieces. It really knocked me down, and I didn’t know what voice I’d have at the end of the process, or if I’d even want to play rock music again when I felt so betrayed by life. I’ve always been optimistic, but I didn’t know if I’d be able to accept the me coming out of this, me with a darker countenance.”
While sitting in hospital waiting rooms, and later at home, page after page of lyrics poured out of him. When the time came, he printed the words out and spread them across the floor of his studio, a converted chapel near the house. He festooned its walls with art – red, raw paintings, oblique symbols. Only then did he pick up the guitar.
Through playing the resulting songs live and working with trusted producer George Williams, he came up with two limited-release albums: the introspective Blood Red and more outwardlooking Viral Black.
“A bigger picture emerged, and it all started to feel like an Alarm record, so I decided to make one cohesive album. Those two LPs added up to Equals.”
These mature, crafted pieces were re-recorded for this new album by The Alarm’s 2018 line-up: Peters, drummer Steve ‘Smiley’ Barnard, guitarist/ bassist James Stevenson, and Peters’s wife Jules
– a classically trained musician – on keyboards.
Amid all the human drama, it’s easy to forget that Peters made his name as an old-school frontman and masterful songwriter. His personal anguish and worldly concerns are subtly and artfully couched within these songs’ traditional contours.
Opener Two Rivers, an electro-infused rock anthem about reconciliation and acceptance, has fast become a concert favourite among Alarm fans. “As soon as we played it live, there was no song in the set that could go after it. It’s about where the past meets the future, where differences can be resolved.”
The catchy, upbeat Beautiful draws on the couple’s situation, the pressure to stay positive while in the public eye, despite the emotions surging underneath. Billy Duffy adds guitar to the driving Coming Backwards. Reassuringly traditional yet fresh songs abound, about insurrection (Crowd Trouble), war (Cenotaph) and peace (Peace Now).
The dour, startling 13 Dead Reindeer was inspired by a bloody and self-defeating protest against Christmas, while bluesy riff-rocker Hell Fire is its ballsy antidote. Neutral is a nuanced call for openmindedness, for replacing old loyalties – to party, country, team – with enlightened self-interest.
With album closer Tomorrow, Peters and the band turn their face towards the future. It’s about time, precious time, an empowering anthem in this enduring band’s best traditions. Strong material, then, but it has come at a price.
“I’m not the same,” says Peters, a hesitation in the voice, the flame flickering slightly. “My life changed with cancer. It made me say yes to everything and live for the moment. But then Jules got struck with it and went through so much, and I’m not sure what that’s done to me. I know how important it is to have a woman by your side as a man, and how much that person brings to your life. The thought that that might not be there any more scares me.”
He fights through it with his art, urged on by the sense that there’s yet more to be discovered.
“Part of me wonders what’s next. It’s exciting, but there’s trepidation too. I’m at the beginning of a new era in my life, and I’m just going to have to learn how to live again.”
“I’m at the beginning of a new era in my life, and I’m just going to have to learn how to live again.”