Songs in the sick ward
Singer-guitarist Mike Peters of the Alarm was in a dire spot at the end of September 2022. The leukemia he'd twice beaten was back, and this time a life-threatening case of pneumonia tagged along.
“I was in a bad situation,” Peters says of his illnesses. “And then there was a gentleman hovering quite close to my bed with a mask around his face.
“I looked at him and he went, `Are you Mike Peters in there?' ” the 63-year-old Welsh rock musician continues. “I went, `Yeah. I don't feel like I look like him right now, but yeah, it's me.'
“He goes, `I'm a massive fan,' ” Peters says. “`I've just come over from the USA to see my dad, who's down on the ward.' He goes, `I was on the (Alarm) forum last night, with all the Alarm fans, telling them how ill you look.'
“I thought, oh no, it's out now,” Peters says. “Everyone knows.”
But there's one thing you need to know about Mike Peters. Since he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1995, and then a second cancer, leukemia, in 2005, Peters has welcomed the chance to talk about cancer — his, yours, anyone's.
Peters, who co-founded the Love Hope Strength Foundation after the first leukemia diagnosis, is probably the famous person least likely to be upset that news of a recurrence had been leaked by an overeager fan. So he told them even more.
“I didn't want everyone to be as worried as it sounded,” Peters says. “So I wrote a letter to all the Alarm fans that I posted on TheAlarm.com, and I signed off with a word I've never used before.
“I can't sign this off `Best' or `Many thanks, Mike.' I just signed it off with the word `Forwards.'
“And as soon as I wrote the word down, bang, there's a song comes right into my head,” Peters says. “I thought, this isn't about where I am right now. It's where I'm going to get to. I'm going to get out of this situation by hook or by crook.
“In some ways, I thought to myself, I'm going to write myself out of the situation and write a soundtrack that gets me back to real life.”
Which is exactly what Peters did. The songs he started writing while in hospital in Rhyl, Wales, eventually became the Alarm's new album, “Forwards.”
It's that which brings him to Southern California for four shows, though not entirely. Peters first decided to come attend the World Cancer Leaders' Summit in Long Beach, held this week.
Cancer and concerts
“The trigger was that I was invited to come to the Cancer Leaders' Summit and take part in that,” Peters says on a recent call from the customs line at the Atlanta airport after flying to the United States from Wales for the first time since before the pandemic. “I thought, it's a good opportunity to come to the USA on a little bit more of a challenge for a few more shows.
“Because a year ago, I was very ill and wasn't sure if I'd ever get the strength to be able to come and play in America, never mind sing,” he says.
The cancer conference is another chance for Peters to do what he's done for years now.
“I've lived with the word `cancer' hanging over me and my family since 1995,” he says. “I suppose along the way I've become
Peters, co-founder of the Love Hope Strength Foundation, is in Southern California for a series of shows as well as the World Cancer Leaders' Summit, which was held in Long Beach this week.
kind of an authority on surviving and staying the distance and hanging onto life. So I've got a lot to impart in that respect, you know, to help humanize the stories that people have to tell through cancer.”
Playing music has provided an opportunity to talk to people all around the world about cancer, often under the banner of the Love Hope Strength Foundation, often through walks like the one he's planned here, or more ambitious hikes in locales from Africa to the Himalayas.
“I perform and speak and talk about cancer,” Peters says. “I can hopefully make them aware of the second word in our charity, Love Hope Strength. Make them aware of the hope that's out there for people receiving diagnosis.”
Love Hope Strength, which took its name from a lyric in the title track of the Alarm's 1985 album, “Strength,” focuses on programs designed to have an impact in the communities where it holds events. One key program is getting people to sign up for the international stem cell registry, through which they match and donate to patients who need such cells, Peters says.
When he and the organization do work in far-flung communities, they make sure the funds raised there stay there. A project in Tanzania helped create three new hospital wards for child cancer patients, each ward named with the Swahili word for love, hope and strength. An excursion with other musicians to the base camp on Mount Everest raised funds that went to buy the first-ever mammography machines in Nepal, saving women with breast cancer from traveling to India for that service.
“Whenever we're on the ground, we like to keep the money in the shadow of the mountain,” Peters says.
When Peters realized in 2022 that he wasn't getting out of the hospital quickly, he asked his wife, Jules Peters, who herself is a breast cancer survivor, to bring his acoustic guitar to the ward.
“The COVID protocol was still in place last year, especially in hospitals in Wales,
and so it was quite a distance between me and other patients on the ward,” Peters says. “I felt like I was starting to get some ideas for songs and words, and I wanted to just make them come alive so I can record them quietly into my phone or something like that.
“Then it just became this thing that the nurses were hovering near my bed when I was playing my guitar,” he says. “They quite enjoyed it. And then the other patients went, `Play it a bit louder,' you know, `Do you know any Beatles or anything?'”
Again, he thought about how cancer is relentlessly unified when it attacks — but we in our modern world often feel so disconnected from each other.
“But music is this one force that kind of brings us all together because everyone understands harmony and singing,” Peters says. “That's what we tried to do, use the power of music to bring people together. Take some fun into the cancer world because it can be a very dark place to be involved.”
The songs that he wrote in the hospital are anthemic like Alarm classics such as “Sixty Eight Guns,” “Rain in the Summertime,” “Spirit of '76” and “The Stand.” And like those, they uplift with positive, hopeful messages.
“Songs like `Forwards,' and the one that follows it on the album, `The Returning,' that was where I wanted to get,” Peters says. “You know, I wanted my life, my relationship with my family, my kids, and to survive. I was longing to return back to real life.”