Mike Peters is known primarily as front man of the internationally acclaimed Welsh band The Alarm. Mike is also an inspirational solo acoustic performer and (as a two time cancer survivor), founder of what is now regarded as the world’s leading rock and roll cancer charity ‘Love Hope Strength Foundation’.
Mike Peters has played an acoustic guitar all his musical life and the sound of the instrument has been at the core of all his work from the very beginnings of The Alarm to the present day.
Achieving over 15 Top 40 UK singles and over 5 million album sales worldwide along the way, Mike Peters’ musical journey has seen him sing with some of history’s greatest performers such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young & Bono. Mike has also taken his trusty acoustic guitar to some of the world’s highest elevations performing at ‘The Highest Ever Concert On Land’ at 18,500 feet on Mt. Everest (2007), and more recently at 19,380 feet at the summit of Kilimanjaro (2009) and Mount Fuji (2010).
Mike Peters formed The Alarm in 1981, first becoming successful soon after with classic singles such as ‘Sixty Eight Guns’ and ‘Rain In The Summertime’ and building a reputation for all out shows based on their thoughtful and challenging music.
In 1992, Mike Peters and The Alarm became one of the first bands to have a dedicated internet site www.thealarm.com and in that same year, founded The Gathering, the annual Mike Peters-hosted ‘Alarm’ event held in North Wales which now attracts fans from all over the world.
Throughout most of the 1990’s Mike Peters took a step back from The Alarm, beginning with the release of ‘Breathe’ in 1994 (which debuted at number 5 in the U.K. independent charts). A second solo album, ‘Feel Free’ (1996) documented Mike Peters’ first battle with cancer (Non Hodgkins Lymphoma). Rejecting conventional treatment, Mike Peters went to see a faith healer instead, and continued to tour extensively in the UK, Europe and USA. Upon being told that ‘green’ was a powerful color in his life, Mike Peters wore green combat fatigues every day until he eventually went into spontaneous remission.
In 2000, it was time for Mike Peters to reconvene The Alarm once more, touring in support of the groundbreaking ‘The Alarm Complete Collection’ (the band’s entire 1980’s musical output in a nine-CD box set, along with a ground-breaking bonus ‘audio dedication’ CD personally recorded by Mike Peters). Never before or since, has such a gesture been undertaken by a recording artist.
In 2004, The Alarm released the controversial ’45 R.P.M.’ single in the U.K. under the pseudonym ‘The Poppy Fields’ and entered the UK charts at number 27, immediately becoming the subject of an international news story. The furor centered around the fact that The Alarm’s identity had been kept hidden from the media and instead a stand-in group of 18-year-old musicians appeared in the video. ’45 R.P.M.’ was played throughout the UK and championed by unsuspecting DJ’s and critics as the first release by a brand-new band. It was only after the song entered the charts that The Alarm revealed the true identity of ‘The Poppy Fields’, thus causing a storm of worldwide media speculation. The band even featured on prime-time America’s CBS News with Dan Rather.
In 2006, Mike Peters’ life journey entered into its darkest phase when, just days before the release of the hit single ‘Superchannel’ (from the album ‘Under Attack’), he was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Throughout a six month spell of hardcore chemotherapy, Mike continued to play and perform, taking to the stage each time in his trademark ‘green’ combat fatigues and taking the first steps in beginning the Love Hope Strength Foundation by leading a host of Alarm fans to the summit of Snowdon to raise funding for the local cancer care center in North Wales that had helped put Mike on the road to recovery. A revealing and insightful BBC documentary, ‘Road to Recovery’ was screened in October 2007 chronicling Mike & Jules Peters’ inspiring story, chronicling their battle with cancer and infertility.
Since then, Mike has embarked on a series of remarkable journeys to raise funding for cancer care both locally and globally, In 2007, his travels took him to Nepal where he inspired a team of musicians, cancer survivors and supporters on a trek to Mt. Everest to perform an acoustic unplugged concert at 18,500 feet (The World’s Highest Concert on land), filmed by VH1 America and currently screening in the USA as ‘Everest Rocks’. The trek was instrumental in providing Nepal with its first mammography machine which is now housed at the Bhaktapur Cancer Center.
In 2008, The Alarm released ‘Guerilla Tactics via an audacious acoustic concert in New York’s Times Square and along with the prophetic ‘Three Sevens Clash’ gate-crashed America’s airwaves once more, reaching number 3 on Billboard’s Rock Alternative Chart. In the autumn of that same year, Mike & Jules Peters led 62 trekkers along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu for ‘Peru Rocks’ and raised enough funds to provide the cancer center in Lima with a specialized bus that travels to remote villages in order to offer care and early detection facilities for those living outside of the reach of modern medical practices.
More recently, Mike and his wife Jules, spearheaded a 25-strong team to Africa for ‘Kilimanjaro Rocks’ , where after an arduous climb they performed at Uhuru (Freedom) Peak at 19,340’ atop the summit of Kilimanjaro and last year in 2011 Mike and a team of musicians and cancer survivors ascended Mount Fuji.
When Mike was first diagnosed with cancer in 1995, quitting music wasn’t an option and he is now in his second remission from Leukaemia and still challenging himself and his audience through music and the outreach of his charitable actions. In his own words and from the title of one of his own songs “Never give it up without a fight”.
Mike Peters and The Alarm will release a brand new album entitled STREAM [Hurricane of Change] on June 12 which takes listeners on a unique musical adventure that flows both downstream and upstream, telling a moving autobiographical story as lived and breathed by Mike Peters and The Alarm from 1986-1990.
Most recently Mike Peters released Stream: Hurricane of Change.’ The double CD Release features 39 pieces of brand new recorded music, all joined together by a Mike Peters spoken word essay, that weaves a brand new narrative into the original lyrical DNA of such classic Alarm songs as Rain In The Summertime, Rescue Me, One Step Closer To Home, Sold Me Down The River and A New South Wales. There’s also a host of brand new song recordings including the raging acoustic guitar driven ‘Irish Sea,’ and the dramatic ‘Ballad of Randolph Turpin.’
Alan Mercer: Hi Mike, your album, 'Stream: Hurricane of Change’ is out now, isn’t it?
Mike Peters: It is out now, but we had released it on our tour in the UK late last year, so it’s been circulated. I was hoping to be in America playing shows at this time, but of course the lock down has curtailed that. The album is available at the alarm.com website. It’s been getting some amazing reviews from the fans.
AM: That is awesome to let the real fans get it first.
MP: We try to put the records out first, physically for the fans that follow us and come to shows before we go to the online streaming and make it available to everybody. We want the people who are prepared to buy the records and CDs and invest in the music, the opportunity to get it a year ahead of everyone else.
AM: That really tells your fans you care about them.
MP: I think so. I have been friends with lots of music executives over the years and they always disagree. They think everyone should get it at the same time, but I think the fans who come to the gigs should get it first, but not everyone thinks like me.
AM: I love that idea.
MP: The fans like it. I don’t see buying a Spotify account as an actual investment in our music. I’m a vinyl guy myself, and CDs. When I want to play something, I like to look at the whole collection and look for something to pop out. When I am confronted with the massive choices on the online services, I don’t know what I want to play so then I don’t want to play anything. I walk away. (Laughter) I get confused.
AM: I’m just like you. I love reading the liner notes and seeing all the information. I’ve always been in love with the packaging. I know you put a lot of effort and thought into your packaging.
MP: To me, that’s the whole experience. When you invite someone over for tea, you put on the kettle and you get the cups and you enjoy the tea. If someone is coming over to listen to music, you want the whole package. You might put the music on in the background, but you still want to hold the albums and see who wrote the songs and who produced it and all the information. This is what brings people together. I don’t think you get that from the streaming services. When I discover a new artist all I can do is hear the song. I don’t know anything else. Streaming is convenient but that’s about all.
AM: I listened to both CDs of your new album, ‘Stream: Hurricane of Change’ and I fell in love with it. It was like an epic film.
MP: Thank you, there is a lot of story in there that is visual, so it does come across like that and that’s how I wanted it to come across. Once I got in the studio and realized what I had taken on, I realized there was more to it than I had originally thought. The story is visual, and it does connect people. Everyone has lived the story the album depicts. Everyone has had to leave home to go somewhere to find their true self or to find their dream. Once you’ve made that big discovery, you come home. The grass is always greener on the other side, but you don’t know that until you’ve gone to the other side and experienced it. That’s what I want to get across in the record, you have to go away and have these experiences to get to know who you truly are as an individual.
AM: I like how you say that you don’t really know the end result of what the art will be until you are finished creating it.
MP: When I originally create the piece, it existed before, the original set of songs in 1987 and 1989. Often you think, well that’s it, but life doesn’t always work like that. The original albums are just a time stamp. If you ask any artist, would you record any of their songs again, even two days later, they would have done them differently. For The Alarm’s 30th anniversary I remade all our albums.
AM: What made you do that?
MP: I wanted to see how they would live in a modern climate. The Alarm, as a band was founded on a song. We weren’t a band that went into the studio and jammed until something magical happened and music appeared out of nowhere. We always came in with full songs and lyrics, played it to the band and then we’d arrange it. We all aspired to be the guy whose name was in the brackets after the title of the song. Having our name on the record is what drove us to create a band. The band was created around the songs. The heart of The Alarm exists in the songs. I want ‘Stream: Hurricane of Change’ to reflect that.
AM: How is it different now than back then?
MP: These songs were written when Europe was opening up and we had a feeling of freedom and now thirty years later it’s almost the opposite in the era of Brexit. The borders are going back up and there’s less free travel. There is a different kind of President in America challenging the way everyone thinks inside and out. It just seems like a hurricane of change is blowing again but from a different direction and how are we going to cope with it. How are these songs going to address the changes of today? You couldn’t do it by remastering the records. You have to go back into the music and see what journey it takes you on thirty years later. That’s how we got to where we are now.
AM: Isn’t The Alarm almost forty years old?
MP: Next year in 2021. Our first gig was on June 5, 1981 and we’re playing on June 5, 2021 in a big, massive show going back to the original venue we played. We’ve got all sorts of great plans.
AM: Your story and history are so unique.
MP: We’re very lucky to have been blessed with a colorful story and we’ve had some amazing musicians to continue the group through all the decades. We’ve had to adapt and change in order to survive and stay relevant.
AM: Is change something you have embraced?
MP: Yes, some of it has been forced and some has been self-driven. We are quite lucky that a lot of our history has been captured visually. As soon as video cameras with microphones came out, I started to document everything. We were one of the leading bands of that decade and instead of going on holiday when we had a break, I got the video camera and filmed everything I saw around Whales and then I wrote songs about everything that I recorded with my camera. We’re lucky to have a story to tell. It’s been quite a roller coaster that has my life written into it. It’s been fascinating to be a part of it and look back on it.
AM: Have you been doing that a lot during the lock down?
MP: It’s quite a time with the lock down, we can’t go forward because we aren’t allowed anywhere so we have to look backwards and appreciate what we’ve got and appreciate what’s special. It’s been special for The Alarm community to be able to get together on the internet and share in this deep history that we all created together by being there together.
Mike with his wife, Jules
AM: I have to ask you about the concerts you have done on the top of all these mountains.
MP: (Laughter) That is part of our story as well. That all came about because I was diagnosed with cancer twice and the second time in 2005 and the beginning of the Love Hope Strength Foundation charity I started. We had a crazy idea that if we took our guitars to some of the highest places in the world, it would attract fund raising for the people in those mountain regions who are less fortunate than those of us in the west. They don’t have the hospitals, medicines or treatments that we have here.
AM: Where are some of the places you went?
MP: We went to Mt. Everest, Kilimanjaro, our own Snowdon in Wales and Pikes Peak in America to raise funds for people didn’t have insurance and didn’t have a way to get to medicines. We stepped in to raise money for bone marrow drives and registered a quarter of a million people to the bone marrow registry and found over four and a half thousand life saving matches. It’s been quite a journey.
AM: Have you always been a thoughtful person thinking of the people of the world?
MP: In some ways I think so. I live in a small town of two and a half thousand people. That’s so small, you have to think about the bigger picture. When you want to play guitar in a band like I did, you know you aren’t going to be able to do it here. To get a drummer I had to go a few miles away and to make a record I had to go seventy miles away and if I want a gig, I’ll have to go to another country, so I do have a wide view. Where I live in North Wales, we look out to the Irish Sea with an endless horizon. I’m never enclosed in a concrete jungle.
To learn more about Mike Peters and The Alarm visit their website www.thealarm.com