Mike Peters
MIKE PETERS is known primarily as frontman 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.
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 during the 1980s to the present day.
Achieving more than 15 Top 40 UK singles and over five million album sales worldwide along the way, Peters’ musical journey has seen him sing with some of history’s greatest performers such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young & U2’s Bono.
He has also taken his acoustic guitar to some of the world’s highest elevations, performing at ‘The Highest Ever Concert On Land’ at 18,500 feet on Mount Everest (2007), at 19,380 feet at the summit of Kilimanjaro (2009) and Mount Fuji (2010).
Peters was born in Prestatyn on February 25, 1959, and grew up living in The Crescent Hotel in Edward Henry Street, Rhyl, with former The Alarm band member Eddie MacDonald. The name of the street became the inspiration for a track on the album of the same name in which Peters describes his life growing up in Wales.
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 1987, in the fitting surroundings of the citadel of Welsh rugby, Cardiff Arms Park, Peters and his by-now established band reached a career high point when they supported U2 on their Joshua Tree tour.
Music critic David Owens recalled: “A deafening roar of 50,000 voices reverberated around the Arms Park, a wave of noise rolling from those in the seats to those on the pitch, in tumultuous anticipation for what was to come.
“The stirring sound of Dylan Thomas’s haunting recital of Do Not Go Gentle and a church organ accompanying the opening strains of their anthem Strength guided the band to the stage. Fitting, as this was to be a religious experience for those that witnessed a performance of fire and brimstone.
“The home of Welsh rugby the stadium may have been, but these four Welsh musicians were greeted with the same passion and fervour that any sporting hero in red has ever received. It’s certainly the greatest ovation a support band has experienced.
“Frontman Mike Peters and his bandmates Dave Sharp, Eddie MacDonald and Twist, took to their instruments like soldiers bearing arms, before launching into battle. Bodies washed back and forth to the stage, a sea of arms held aloft, the atmosphere electric, a frenzied exultation. It was a day never to be forgotten.”
“I don’t think a Welsh band had ever played to a Welsh audience on such a scale before,” said Peters. “It was a fantastic, sunny day. Listening to the roar as we walked out, I don’t think any support band has ever received such a rapturous reception.
“We pulled out all the stops that day because it was in Cardiff. We played Bells Of Rhymney, which was the Idris Davies poem set to music by American folk legend Pete Seeger. I even managed to fit in the Welsh national anthem on my harmonica before we closed with Blaze Of Glory. It was the sort of homecoming bands dream about.”
In 1992, Peters and The Alarm became one of the first bands to have a dedicated internet site and in that same year, founded The Gathering, an annual Peters-hosted Alarm event held in north Wales which would attract fans from all over the world.
Throughout most of the 1990s Peters took a step back from The Alarm, beginning with the release of Breathe in 1994 which debuted at number five in the UK independent charts. A second solo album, Feel Free (1996), documented his first battle with cancer (non hodgkin’s lymphoma).
Rejecting conventional treatment, 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 colour in his life, he wore green combat fatigues every day until he eventually went into spontaneous remission.
In 2000, it was time for Peters to reconvene The Alarm once more, touring in support of the groundbreaking The Alarm Complete Collection (the band’s entire 1980s musical output in a nine-CD box set, along with a ground-breaking bonus ‘audio dedication’ CD personally recorded by Peters).
In 2004, The Alarm released the controversial 45 R.P.M. single in the UK under the pseudonym The Poppy Fields and entered the UK charts at number 27, immediately becoming the subject of an international news story.
The furore 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 DJs 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 and the story subsequently became the inspiration for a film entitled VINYL being shot in the UK by Shrek producer John H Williams and British film director Sara Sugarman.
In 2006, 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.
Throughout a six-month spell of hardcore chemotherapy, he 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 centre in north Wales that had helped put him 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 and their battle with cancer and infertility.
Since then, Peters 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 Mount Everest to perform an acoustic unplugged concert at 18,500 feet (the world’s highest concert on land), filmed by VH1 America and later screening in the USA as Everest Rocks. The trek was instrumental in providing Nepal with its first mammography machine, housed at the Bhaktapur Cancer Centre.
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 gatecrashed America’s airwaves once more, reaching number three 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 centre in Lima with a specialised 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.
Peters and his wife spearheaded a 25-strong team to Africa for ‘Kilimanjaro Rocks’, where, after an arduous climb, they performed at Uhuru (Freedom) Peak at 19,340ft atop the summit of Kilimanjaro and in 2011 Peters and a team of musicians and cancer survivors ascended Mount Fuji.
In 2010, Peters accepted an invitation from Scottish New Wave rockers Big Country to front the band on their 30th anniversary tour.
After writing the official Wales football anthem The Red Wall of Cymru for Euro 2020, Peters became a regular fixture on national TV and radio.
“Wales is the land of song and when the Welsh people get together and sing our voices are massive,” he said.
With the release of another Alarm album, The Sound And The Fury, Peters proved he remained as passionate as ever about his music, Wales and charity Love Hope Strength (www.lovehopestrength.co.uk).
Father-of-two Peters was awarded an MBE in the 2019 New Year’s Honours for services to cancer care, receiving the honour from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.
Following the ceremony he said: “We’ve had an incredible morning, Jules and the boys were of course with me. It was a very formal occasion and full of pomp, and the palace looked resplendent.
“I was feeling a little nervous and overwhelmed as it has been such a long journey to get here, my MBE is for all cancer survivors, fans and our supporters.”
When he was first diagnosed with cancer in 1995, quitting music wasn’t an option and he later entered his second remission from leukaemia 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”.
(sources include thealarm.com, Nationa Cymru, Daily Post, wikipedia)