Mike Peters, frontman for the Welsh New Wave band the Alarm, best remembered for their Eighties hits “Sixty Eight Guns,” “Strength,” and “Rain in the Summertime,” died April 29 after a long battle with cancer. He was 66.
The Alarm were often compared to U2 since the two groups forged a close friendship in the early Eighties, and the Alarm opened for U2 on their 1983 War tour. But despite definite similarities between Bono and Peters’ vocal styles, the Alarm’s music was less anthemic and centered more around acoustic guitars.
“When we started out, we tried some of the songs on electric guitar, but they didn’t sound as good as they did when we wrote them on acoustic,” Peters told Rolling Stone‘s Jim Henke in 1983. “So we thought, ‘Let’s do them on the instrument they were written on.’ And we’ve slowly adapted the acoustic [guitar] from being a very personalized, big-sounding instrument when it’s played to just one person to making it sound big to however many people turn up to see the band.”
Peters grew up in the remote Welsh town of Rhyl. He met his future Alarm bandmates Nigel Twist and Dave Sharp as a young child, and they dreamt of making it big as musicians. Their lives changed forever on September 13, 1976, when they traveled to Chester, England, to see the Sex Pistols at a club called Quaintways.
“Their attitude was incredible,” Peters told Rolling Stone‘s Jimmy Guterman in 1988. “The music really hit me deep inside in a way that I didn’t understand at all. I felt ready to burst… Even though the Sex Pistols went on to become a joke, I think that most of the people who saw them saw potential.”
Peters and his childhood buddies formed a punk group called the Toilets after the show, and eventually changed their name to Seventeen after the Sex Pistols song of the same name. After a few years of slogging it out on the punk circuit with little to show for it, they changed their name once again in 1981. They called themselves the Alarm, and cut their debut single “Unsafe Building,” which built up buzz around England, eventually landing them a record deal with I.R.S.
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Bono became one of their early fans. “There are so many performers who talk about wanting to avoid cliches in their music, but who rarely avoid them in their lifestyle,” the U2 frontman told Rolling Stone in 1983. “But the Alarm aren’t like that. There’s a new mentality towards rock and roll music. It’s not important that they play acoustic guitars. It’s them that counts. When great music is made, there are usually great people behind it, and the Alarm are great people.”
Touring America on the 1983 War tour introduced the Alarm to audiences all across the country and drove sales of their 1984 debut LP Declaration. They maintained a large audience in England throughout the rest of the Eighties, landing hits on the charts like “Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke?” and “A New South Wales,” but mainstream success in the States was more elusive.
They did, however, open for Bob Dylan at a series of U.S. shows in 1988. On two occasions, Peters was called onto the stage to duet with Dylan on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
The Alarm broke up in 1991. Three years later, Peters released his solo debut, Breathe. It failed to find a mass audience. And in 1996, he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He made a complete recovery, but would battle cancer off and on for the remaining three decades of his life.
Peters began playing gigs as the Alarm with a new group of backing musicians in the early 2000s, but the original members didn’t reform until the VH1 show Bands Reunited pressed the issue in 2005. The reunion lasted only as long as it took to film the episode.
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In 2011, Peters became the lead singer of Scottish New Wave Big Country, replacing original lead singer Stuart Adamson, who died in 2001. The Peters-led incarnation of Big Country lasted a mere two years. In the years that followed, Peters became a regular part of the Light of Day benefit concert series in New Jersey, providing him with several opportunities to share the stage, and sometimes a single microphone, with Bruce Springsteen.
Three years ago, Peters announced that his leukemia had returned. “I am still alive and living, with a most amazingly close family around me,” he wrote in a letter to fans. “I also know I can count on the strength and power of the extended Alarm community who care for me personally, just as they do for the words and music and all that brings us together through this unique union…I can still sing, play guitar and write songs, and I give thanks for all the simple things in life that keep me going.”
