An interview with Mike Peters of The Alarm: Moving 'Forwards' in 2023

courtesy Reybee PR

Imagine being in a hospital room when suddenly, you hear live music by a local world-renown musician wafting through the corridors.

That’s what happened last year after The Alarm front man Mike Peters was admitted to the North Wales Cancer Treatment Centre for a relapse of leukemia and later, pneumonia. Playing an acoustic guitar by his bedside and writing songs helped get the Welsh musician through the horrible ordeal.

“I knew I was in there for a long time, having to transition from one drug that stopped working - even though I was still dependent on it heavily,” explained Peters. “It was a very difficult time” having to “teach my body to accept this new drug. In between, I would play guitar, really just to keep my fingers going at first."

Some previous COVID-19 protocols remained in place at the facility, so there was still a big gap between occupied beds. Peters found the music welcomed by many people.

“A big guy across the way said, ‘Keep going. Play louder. I’m enjoying it.’” Doctors, nurses, patients, and others became a sounding board for new material. 

“The auxiliary staff would come in to clean the bed and return to sweep.” They would ask him to “play that again,” say it was “lovely” and “you’ve got to make that into a song.”

An Alarm enthusiast from America visiting his father nearby caught wind of Peters’ hospital serenades and spilled the beans online. The musician suddenly had to be proactive.

“I wrote a letter [on social media] to fans, let them know the status of what was happening and tried to reassure them that it wasn’t as bad as it maybe sounded,” Peters recalled. “I signed off with ‘forwards.’ As soon as I did, I thought, ‘That’s telling me something’…and it gave the songs an impetus to move forward and have a very specific direction of travel.”

Once Peters was discharged, recording the enthralling new studio album Forwards commenced.  

But “the new drugs stripped my vocal cords” while I was getting used to them and “I wasn’t sure if I was going to get my voice back.”

A dozen demos were created in “a little caravan studio I have at the top of the driveway that we brought back for lockdown,” Peters said. “We learned to do file sharing to make our last album [2021’s Omega] and released it within 50 days. That taught us a lot. It was a really powerful record, and I carried a lot of that energy” into this one.

After adding drums to the new demos with longtime producer George Williams, Peters told him frankly, “We might have to look at this as a posthumous album. Although I’m here, the Mike Peters that made all the other Alarm albums might not be. There might be a different person in the room. We were hoping the voice would come back and it did - right at the end of the sessions.

“We had some good vocals, but I had recorded them in such a rush that the levels weren’t great,” continued Peters. Deciding to give it “one more shot,” the singer went up to the microphone and “as soon as I let it rip, my voice was there.”

He redid them all in a day (!) and spent 12 days total recording. Williams mixed fast, but efficiently after Peters got a surprise call from his record distributor saying a vinyl production slot had suddenly opened up.  

“I still can’t believe we’re talking about the record so soon after I came out of hospital,” Peters said.

Forwards contains some of Peters’ most riveting, life-affirming lyrics to date. Standouts include fast and furious rocker “Next,” where he sings about “whatever’s trying to kill me”; the orchestral touches (think: Ennio Morricone) on “Love Disappearing” as Peters laments “the hatred stirred up” among society and the title track’s rallying cry of “trying to find something that looks like the new truth.”  

Societal-based themes prevalent on Omega carried over to other new album highlights like “New Standards” and “X.”

Peters felt he was “just hitting my stride” following the previous release and some lyrics likely came from that same lockdown period.

The musician sought to make Forwards “about where I was coming from. But I still wanted it to reflect the real world we are living in where the rule book has been rewritten for modern times. We have to accept there are new standards to the way we live.

“Even in ‘X,’ he continued, “a lot of people need guidance to get back into the real world. They’re still behind their doors on screens…People need to get back into the open. I wanted to write lyrics that captured and spoke to those kinds of people.”

Musically, the rousing “New Standards” recalls early Alarm and The Jam.

“Today, I was playing The Jam’s ‘The Gift’ album,” Peters admitted. “It’s always there. I find that although modern music is in the rock idiom of guitars, it’s lost some of its relevancy. Record players were at the forefront of our rooms when we were growing up. Now it’s the screen that takes their place.”

Overall, the new songs cut closer to the bone than ever before.

Peters agreed. “I can only really write from experience,” he said, adding, “I’ve always thought the imagination is my musical instrument and the guitar is really just the midwife to bring them into the world.

“All the music I’ve made - right from the beginning when we were singing about ‘marching on’ or ‘declaring yourself unsafe’ – was because we had to uproot ourselves and try to make it in the wider world. The rock ‘n’ roll world wasn’t going to come to us. We had to go to it. With ‘Forwards,’ it’s similar. I knew when I was creating the music in hospital, I wanted a soundtrack that would get me out of there and back to real life. I wanted a record that [appealed to] people in their real life” too.

To quote an early Alarm single, it sounds like absolute reality.

Peters finds modern music making to be “quite clinical” and computers can make the process last too long. 

“We learned a lot doing the last two albums, going in and doing things fast and immediately. Having a timeline and a date to finish can improve and bring an energy to the record that can get lost.”

The Welshman sees bands like The Killers, Foo Fighters and Muse still making the music festival rounds and wonders when the next new exciting rock band will seize the moment.

“Nothing’s come along since the Arctic Monkeys, really, to challenge that,” said Peters. “A lot of bands are still big and sell a lot of tickets, but they don’t make records very often. I’m hoping some young guitar band can come and fill the void and knock some of these pop stars out of the way.”

Similarly, The Alarm came across like a breath of fresh air when it started in 1981. Peters, guitarist Dave Sharp, bassist Eddie MacDonald and drummer Nigel Twist previously played together in a few other short-lived groups.  

Two years later, they benefitted from exposure on U2’s War tour, famously represented by a stop at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

“That was brilliant,” Peters recalled. “We learned a lot from seeing how they switched from being a band playing to 8,000 people and bringing the house down and playing to 500 people the next night and putting on the same show. Different magnitudes, but they made that same connection. I thought that was incredible - seeing a band up close who cared so much and wanted to make each show as memorable as they possibly could for their fans and not have them go home citing amnesia because they forgot certain parts of the gig. Like what fans of Taylor Swift have been doing” lately.

By the late ‘80s, The Alarm was known in America for such rock radio hits as “Rain in the Summertime,” “Sold Me Down the River” and “Devolution Workin’ Man Blues.” In the U.K., The Alarm notched anthemic top 30 singles like “Spirit of ’76,” “Where Were You Hiding (When the Storm Broke)” and “Sixty-Eight Guns.”

The completed version of the latter surprised band members.

“We took a verse out at the producer’s request,” explained Peters. “When we heard the single, trumpets had been put on after we left the studio. It took some getting used to. We realized it was still a good record, but it wasn’t the kind of record we wanted to make in our imagination.

“Then, when we came back to Britain and it was a hit, we started playing it and no one knew what it was because we were playing our version. We had to begrudgingly learn the [demonstrates the sound] and play the big fanfare intro. We appreciate it now. When it comes on the radio now, it still sounds like a great record. Somewhere along the line, one of us said to the producer, ‘We want it to sound like ‘Born to Run.’’’ That’s what it sounds like. Careful what you wish for!”

By the decade’s end, the band released five studio albums before Peters left on a solo career.

He reclaimed the Alarm name in the early 2000s alongside lead guitarist/bassist James Stevenson (the original members took part in VH1’s “Bands Reunited” and remain on good terms). Peters returned to the U.K. singles chart with “45 RPM” under the guise of teen band The Poppy Fields in ’04. The saga was later made into 2013 feature film “Vinyl” starring Phil Daniels and Keith Allen.  

Since then, Peters and the current Alarm lineup - rounded out by Steve “Smiley” Barnard on drums and Peters’ wife Jules on keyboards - has put out more than a dozen additional albums.

First diagnosed with leukemia in 2006, Peters co-founded Love Hope Strength, a rock ‘n’ roll cancer foundation (named after The Alarm hit “Strength”) in ’07. It raises awareness via worldwide mountain hikes often culminating with all-star concerts and a Get on the List campaign for bone marrow donors.

With Mike Peters’ cancer in remission, he did a short U.K. spring solo tour. The Peters also recently opened The Chapel, a BNB where cancer patients can stay free as an alternative to the sterile hospital, in Wales. This past June, The Alarm held court at The Gramercy Theatre in New York City for the four-day U.S. edition of annual fan celebration The Gathering. A solo tour is tentatively planned for fall.

A version of this interview originally appeared at rockcellarmagazine.com.