.jpg) |
| 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.
.jpeg)
.jpg)
