Mike Peters of the Alarm

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mike Peters, a Welsh musician best known as the lead singer of The Alarm. Between two thousand eleven and two thousand thirteen, Peters was the vocalist for Big Country as well as The Alarm. A two time cancer survivor, he founded the

Love Hope Strength Foundation. The foundation has found close to one thousand potentially life saving bone marrow donor matches, built the first ever children's cancer center in Tanzania, supported the Bakta Poor Cancer Center in Nepal with life saving equipment, and registered over sixty thousand donors through its Get on the List program. Eric caught up with Mike in Akron on his tour supporting the thirtieth anniversary of the classic

album Strength and now the interview with Mike Peters. Hi, Mike, Welcome to the show. I am very excited to have you on. I was reading the other day you were talking about meeting Bruce Springsteen, you know, and how you what it's like when you meet somebody that you looked up to it at a certain age. And so when I was sixteen, I was a huge fan of The Alarm and and have remained. So it's a real honor to meet you and get to sit down and talk

with you. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of Two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your own life and in the work that you do. Well, well, straight off, that's top my head. It means to feed the positive side of

your piss. And I let's say, and the which is something I've always tried to do my whole musical life and my life as an adult and human being. And you know, raise my own kids in a good way, treat the people I meet in the way I want to be treated myself. You know, even with an audience when I go on stage, I always try to put myself in the audience and think, well, what do they

want from the show tonight? And and and just try to have as much respect for the other people that come into the journey that I'm on in life, and and there's times when we walk the path together. Sometimes people go off from their own and then they come back and and it's allowed people to always be at one with you. As you instep and people come in step, that's great. They fall out of step, that's just life. And if once they come back into line again, then

we just carry on. And I've never wanted to have enemies in life. I don't think I've got any enemies. And I've always tried to treat people with care and and and understanding, and you know, and there's times when life has forced people I know apart from me um

and uh. And I always try to see everything from both sides of the story and so that you can heal any rifts that happen in in life, so that when life brings you back together, which it always does, either faithfully or or through a strategy, you can still have a relationship with people from your history without ill will or rancor or bitterness. And it's all part of life's rich pageant of understanding and learning and and and that's the wolf I trying to feed. Excellent. So you

you sort of emerged on in the music scene. You know, some of your songs refer to seeing the sex Pistols, seeing the Clash, being involved in that scene, and yet everything you know from the very earliest alarm work, there's a there's a positivity that's in your music that the just is expressed differently than a lot of that other music. There's a there's a defiance in your music, but there's a there's a clear positivity. Where did that come from

so early in your career? Well, I think you know, sometimes talk about it on the stage when I'm playing the Spirit of seventy six, that which was, you know, seeing the sex Pists and the Clash in early seventy six seventy seven period when punk broke into Britain. I saw both bands up close in the earliest days. I saw the sex Pistiness in seventy six in October seventy

six and it was a life changing experience. And hearing Johnny Rotten sing anarchy pretty vacant submission, I didn't know they sounded amazing, but I didn't know what the language meant, and no one talked about anarchy was in my high school or submission. They were brand new words. I heard them for the first time from the mouth of Johnny Roth and and I went up to him the gig and asked him what anarchy in the UK meant, and

he told him to f off, No it's not. But he I think he was his way of just challenging me, him smashing the free conceptions and and and almost like slapping you across the face to wait you up. And so that that was a big moment. And then and then I did see the clash in nine seventy seven on the White Right tour at the Electric Circus in Manchester, and I was followed the tour down to Barbarella's to say they were doing this sort of secret gig there.

And I was supposed to play at Birmingham rag Market and they got canceled, but they turned up and I was and they were playing a secret gig in Barberella's and I could see the amps going on. I knew they were going to come on and I went to the bathroom and I was stood in the doing my thing in the toilet, and I ended up stood next to Joe Strummer and the whole of the clash, and I asked Joe Strummer on the way out what White Riot was all about? And because I didn't quite fully

understand it. From just hearing the record, I thought, I did you know internally and viscerallyever, right, I didn't know what a white riot was. And he he said to me it was about the future, and and and he gave me something positive back. And I think so from having the sort of polarization that that seeing the two bands, that was really it was like the flint, you know, it was created the fire, that the alarm came from the positive and the negative. And I always lent towards

a positive. I always remember thinking, if I meet somebody who comes up to me in that way looking for advice, looking for um, a sign, a sign, then I'll give him something positive back. And and and so I wanted to put that into my music. I wanted it to be uplifting for people, liberating for them if they came to see a gig, especially if they were, you know, young and naive like I was when I saw the Pistols. I didn't know how to become a punk. There was

no manual. I didn't know how to get skin type black jeans. I had to find them. And I didn't have to get certain records. You had to go on incredible journeys across Britain to get records and there was no Internet. It wasn't brought to your doorstep. And when we came on tour in America, you know, we were as from a small town. We had no Sveengaria upbringing. Like the Pistols had had the benefit of an older guy like Malcolm McLaren and and Vivian Westward to dress

them and Jamie Reid to do their artwork. We had none of that. You know. The Clash had Bernie Rhodes and he'd been involved in the Pistols camp and they were helping shape those bands and shape the way, give them books to read, give them clothes to where, help them with their stance, and the way educate them a little bit about when they spoke to the media. We had none of that. Was we were just four kids from real North Wales who wanted to be in a

band and we learned our lessons the hard way. And so we wanted our politic if you like, to be personal, and we wanted it to be a message that the listener got that empowered them a little bit, or made them ask questions to go and find their their own answers and and again we we grew up in a very extreme political time in the eighties. That was you know,

came down from the iron Lady at Margaret Thatcher. And you know, we were brought up in a very musically aggressive time in the music papers in Britain that the enemy was very politicized in the eighties. There was the minor strike and and they were closing steel works down and it was a tough time. And every band that that walked into the enemy offices that was demanded that they had the political rhetoric to back up what they wanted to hear. And we we weren't like that. We

we were are politics were different to that. It was easy to me to write about the villains. They were all there and on the newspaper every day, you could knock them down easily. But to write about somebody was struggling to make something from nothing in the aftermath of the political turmoil, that that required a different sort of approach musically, and and that was what I was interested in.

And and you know, I think I'm lucky that there still people who come to see me play now who were a gig in Omaha, Nebraska, who have their life changed by seeing the Alarm in a positive way, or someone who comes back to me and say they were that the brink of doing something drafted with their life, and and they put on the Strength album as their last record before they were going to do something they would regret, and they pulled them back from the bring

And and to me that having that those testimonies come to me through the Internet now or through the Facebook or the Alarm dot com, that's um. That's all I ever wanted from our music was to touch people and and be meaningful to them and have some value. And UM, so you are out now. I'm We're sitting in acron Ohio. You're gonna play here in a little bit and you are. Um. A big part of what you're doing is the thirtieth

anniversary of the Strength record. I was curious looking back on that record now and you've done some rerecording of it. What does the song Strength mean to you today, thirty years after you wrote and recorded it the first time? Would like to fire survived Chase, Well, it means more to me than that ever did because the in the opening lines, it says, who will be the lifeblood courseing

through my veins? Now? That was more of a metaphoric line when I was writing, but it's a literal line for me now because I've had to live with cancer for twenty years. You know, I'm at the point in life where I might need to have a transplant and have somebody else's life blood flowing through my veins. That that's a very real um step in life I might

have to take at some point in the future. So when I sing that song, and particularly that line, it always stops me dead every every night because it's literally come true in my own life now. One of the things that you did as as you have battled cancer, as you founded the Love Strength and Hope, Love Hope, Strength, Love Hope Strength, Thank you foundation that has done a lot of work for people with cancer. One of the things you've done has been registering a lot of people

to be as interested in Bone Mirror donors. Will you be doing that at the show to night? Yeah, we will be tonight always hosted Donor Registrate all our gigs and through the charity's formation in two thousand seven, we've been able to work with over ten thousand other recording working artists in the world, from Robert Plant and Food Fighters and Rique Glaciers, Frank Turner, Yeah, we had Frank

on the show. Yeah, And you know, we've worked with all drop Kick Murphy's, all kinds of bands, right down to the Alarm and and thousands of bands you know that are just that I'm coming who embraced what we do, which is we try to turn rock concerts into life saving events by holding a donor booth at those gigs, getting people to sign up to the International Balmrrow Donor Registreet, by giving a cheek swab, giving their information personal information

so we can track them in life if they're lucky enough to be called to save the life of someone who has blood cancer like leukemia like I have. And we've signed over a hundred thousand people to the registry and we've we've found close to eighteen potentially life saving matches for people, and it's become, you know, as much of my life's work as the Alarm and and you know, but it's a real communal effort. It's run by volunteers. We haven't hardly got any staff. We've got no staff

in Britain. It's a completely voluntary charity in the UK. But with America being so big and we're working with so many bands every night. We've got the staff to facilitate some of it, but we still rely on volunteers and public donation to help fund what we do. We work in partnership with delete Blood Cancer. They they're an organization with a massive donor registry and we put the people we find our gigs who are get on the

list campaign onto their registry. And so someone who signs up to the show tonight in acre And, Ohio could become a life saver of someone in Britain or Germany or anywhere in world who matches their DNA profile. And how if you do become a lifesaving donor, it's a it's just an outpatient procedure. Nine of the times is just giving blood in hospital and it's an in and out procedure in the day, and then your blood will

then give someone life. Yeah, we'll definitely put on the show notes to the page and all that links to the foundation and fantastic thanks. And here's the rest of the interview with Mike Peters. In the two thousands, there was some new alarm work. Um it came out. It was a little bit I love the energy and the and the aggressiveness of some of it. One of them is a song called Situation is under Control. Everything is black and white. It's the room sends all the round me.

Everything is upside down. There's a cardboard box at my feet. I'm going through well then I can't speak. I'm going through hell lacking. This situation is not a good chop. Can you tell me a little bit about the what went into the writing of that song and what was going on with you when you wrote it? Yeah, I think life was completely out of control when I wrote that song, had not long been diagnosed with leukemia, and I just made an album for the long cale under Attack,

and I didn't know really why. My instinct was telling me that was the album title. And we'd finished making the album. We we'd recorded a video for every single song in twenty four hours. It was an audio visual release as as much as it was just about the songs. I want people to see the music as well as hear it. And and then all of a sudden, I was diagnosed with luke kemia for it was my second

cancer diagnosis. I had limp foma before that, and I was off the charts hill and I didn't know it and I went into hospital with some symptoms and then they wouldn't let me home. They sent me immediately to another hospital for treatment to bring me out of the danger zone. The doctors didn't know I had even walked in the hospital. My blood was so thick with I thought was dead white blood at the time that it

was like oil him. It just wasn't even moving. And so I was taking to hospital to get out of the critical region I was in, and and and while I was there, my wife brought my iPod in so I could have some music to play while I was going through these procedures. And and I'd forgotten that to put this under attack all the moment while I was out and about listening to it with randomly to get

a sequence going for the record. And I was lying in the hospital, I was having this pretty intense procedure called Luca paresis, and I was kind of in a bit of shock at the time as well, and going under. My iPod was on and this track came on. I didn't know what it was, and it had the title came to the title and it said I'll never give up without a fight, and I knew that was that

was the Alarm. That was a new record, and and and then I realized that I was so ill my subconscience was driving this record, and and and then Situation Under Control was was part of a series of music we created. It was cooled counter attack, and it was like the opposite to under Attack, where I'd written the record under the pressure of cancer coming into my life taking over. I decided to write music that was my counterattack to that was me fighting back against the cancer.

And songs like Situation Under Control were really me writing music that that gave me a mental arsenal to be able to fight cancer in my mind and fight it um psychologically as well as physically. And I think I've always believed that music is a great tool to have whenever you're facing any adversity in life. It's a It can release you from some of the pressure. It can help you fortify yourself for that big day that's coming up, or when you've got to face that situation that you're

nervous about. You can play that favorite piece of music and it lifts you up and it gives you that little bit of courage to to face the day. And and and and so the situation and the control and the Counter Attacks series of music was was really my way of being able to put myself in a position to stand up to cancer. You've battled cancer twice, um, you know, so you're still battling it, right. That's got

to take a toll. You remain so outwardly positive. Where do you turn when you are really internally struggling, when you just you know that that that optimism isn't there. What do you turn to to give you the strength that you're then able to project out of the music. I'm lucky to have a really solid life outside of rock and roll. I've got a really strong relationship with my wife. She's my best friend. We'd been married for twenty eight years. You know, we met, we got engaged

within a week and nothing has taught. We've been tested and tested all through life in that time, but nothing has ever tours apart from each other. And we've got two beautiful boys that we've had to fight hard to get. I had to go through all my wife had to go through IVF to get kids. Because of all the situations we've been in. She's been to kill a man

Jaro with me. Helped build an accounts center in Dara slam in Africa and suffered a DVT, nearly lost a life on the way back from Africa, and we've we've both been doing incredible amount together and we fall back into each other when when we really um struggling to cope with certain situations in life as they crop up. But you know, I always I feel grateful for the life I've got because my music started out life as a hobby and it still is a hobby for me.

It's still my passion. It's still where I would go if I had a normal nine to five job, I'd be playing in the garage at night or setting up a gear at the weekend and ripping into a gig because I love it. And that's and I'm very lucky that I can express myself within my passionate thing in life every day. And I'm also grateful for the life I can come home to and and I've got people there who love me. You understand me, or stand up for me when the stones are getting thrown, you know which,

because that's what happens. That's what you put your head up up the power of pitting rock and roll, and it's not always praise. Stones are thrown as well. And you know, you have to have a really good um fall back to be able to cope with that, because it is hurtful at times, you know, and you see it from people who love you the most musically, they can still want to tear you down and and challenge

everything you do. And you can't please all the people all of the time, you know, as the famous American quote goes, But so you need that. And when I close the door on rock and roll, when I come home and I see my boys and it's the best thing in the world. How old are they know that my boys are eight and eleven, Dylan and even then into music. They play piano and drums and guitar that they brought up to see it as a hobby like I am. And they come to the shows with jewels,

and we're very, very very close. Wonderful Blaze of Glory.

There's nothing they tell me about the song Blaze of Glory, well that that was written really And when we first played with you two was on the water and we played with them in December, just before New Year's Day came out as a single and the album wasn't out to eighty three, and we played a momentous night with them in London, and one of the songs that were new to their audience and them as a band was a song called Surrender, and that was the the theme

of war. I think, you know Bonner described as like a you know, slap in the face against pop music was his quote, But really it was it was seeing war is a different from a different perspective, seeing war from the through the color, well without the color, with the white flag, the war where people surrender to win, and and that that was what Bonner was putting across

in that music. And I saw them ripped to pieces in the music press in Britain, and I think it was really it was only because I think people would envious to the fact that they were taking their music to America and they were starting to help other bands. I think the British press thought it was their preserved to make or break bands, and all of a sudden, your band like you two came along and opened the door for unknown musicians like the Alarm to get to

America for the first time, which we did. We came with them in no one had heard of us in America. We were almost unknown in Britain and when we had our first hit record in America because of the tour we did with You Too, and you two were going on the radio and Champion in the Alarms record the Stand and saying, don't play New Year's Day. Play the band that are opening for us tonight. Come and see them. They're amazing and and they were breaking us and they

were creating their own power base. And the music press in Britain didn't like it one bit, and they started trying to smash them, and they tore them down. I could see and I had this image, saw this image upon with his arms held high surrender on the wa tour,

and I the line came into my head. It's funny how they shoot you down when your hands are held up high, because up to that point you two have been praised, And all of a sudden, here they were on the verge of breaking and they were being torn apart. And it was so obvious to the world that you set them up and you knocked them down, and it was it was such a cliche. And here's the music press accusing bands like you two being Lee Shade when they were putting out all the clayches in the book.

There was no depth to the criticism of you two. It was just targeted at them. They would target their Christianity or target the fact that were selling out playing huge gigs, and it wasn't the same anymore, and there was no real balance to it. So that prompted the line It's funny how they shoot you down when your hands are held up high. But the song really became more than that when when the full lyrics came down and it was all I think. It's all about really

staying strong, believe in yourself. You know when at first went out as a punk rocker and rill and ripped up my jacket and went out with safety pins. People want to tear you down because they're scared of the way you look. But you have and it's easy to back down to that kind of peer pressure. It's easy to give in and think, I'll just go along with the flow of the river and I look like everyone else and life will be easier. But life isn't like that.

You have to have courage to take those steps forward out of the crowd, to to find your own in a self, find you the place where you belong in life. Because we're all brought up in the image of our parents, and really we're all individual and we want to be ourselves, and some people they give in to the peer pressure and then and they suppress who they really are. So we wanted our songs to liberate people, allow them to find the courage and be who you really want to be. Yeah,

there's a sense in a lot of your music. I'll say this, a military sense in that there's there's a lot of marching you you you put on the camouflage when you were battling cancer. Um, there's there's those sort of analogies, and yet there's maybe the right word that you used is is you know, fighting war by surrendering. But I've always been sort of amazed how you've managed to weave those two things together in a really powerful way. Yeah. I don't know how we've done it, really, Uh, it

has always been there, and I don't know why. I don't know. I think we fit. The first thing that I sort of got into where I remember seeing the Who with medals on their jackets and that was pop art, and I remember putting some medals on my jacket, and then I and then I will I saw I got into the sort of seeing the sixties psychedelia thing and people were those red guardsman's jacket and that was sort of the start of our early look in the alarm

of western psychedelia look. But the term military got attached to us rather than pop art psychedelia, and I think that there was that I think our image didn't help on music in some ways, and I think it threw up some conflicts that that people would read these lyrics and they wouldn't quite kind of lie with the big hair or the over the top look that we had on stage because we all adopted it and it was it was very the front line of the band was

it was all attack. It was all out bang, and we didn't have a John ent Will still like the who did that we could be the polar opposite of We had three guys flowing themselves around the stage and that there wasn't the quiet member, you know, the who amplified the power of the individual in the band. We we came across like four like a gang, and I think and we weren't really a gang that I think when people met as they could see that we were

all quite different. But we did have this gang mentality that came out of the look of the band and the way we had played on stage, and I don't think that helped some of the subtlety that was in the music in a way, which is you know, as as you go through life, and you know that that you make a record in the eighties, it stays, it stays in the eighties. But write a song in the eighties, it lives beyond that. It comes alive in the nineties,

comes alive again as you get older in life. And that's what interests me about the Alarms music, not just what we made in the eighties, but what it continues to be today. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how you interpret that music this evening. What would you say is the lesson that's taking you the longest to

learn in life? To keep my mouth, you know, I always have an I always have been brought up to be answer people for likely if someone answers your question and you asked answered it back, and sometimes I should just stay quiet. Yeah. One of the things we talked about on the show a lot is um. We talked about spirituality being this very nebulous thing. Does does the word spiritual have any meaning to you? And if so, what what does that word mean? Do you? I equate

it with with with faith. Really, I'm in faith that life is going to work out the way you hope it is going to work out. And you know, some people think in the short term and some people I think in the long term, and I like to think I've fall in the latter category. And so I have always trusted my instinct in life. And I think that's sometimes gets confused with spirituality, is I think instinct is a very powerful force, and it's and if you can learn to trust your instinct, then you won't go far

wrong in life. And there's so many outside forces you make as distrust ourselves and are on the way we think as individuals that it's easy to be sidestepped from your mission in life and your goals or what your your hopes are. Again, I think spirituality I think of as as instinct really, and you know, I try to always try to follow me instinct. And when I've really followed me instincts, it's never very rarely let me down,

if ever. Um And when you take advice from someone else sometimes and you go along with it and you think it and you think it doesn't feel right, and you you end up bang, there's a crash at the end of the road, and you think, why didn't I trust? Why didn't I trust myself? Yeah? And so last question, um, I think the song we Are the Light, that's sort of what I took from that. You know, we are the light of our lives? Were our own light? I think so. Yeah, that was written for declaration that it

was written in in London. It was a little folks song I put together in a major key, and I think that's what I was trying to get to. I didn't understand spirituality or instinct so much in one when we moved to London. And two when that song was written, there's a bad who was standing on the corner. There's

my class and it's read by the candles. We must make sure but if they should do were You play it in concert and you see people really get hold of it and they're all saying we are and you think, wow, what how come that's taken out holder? And you start asking a few questions yourself and thinking what does it mean not just to me, but to others? And it was always the song that was it was like a

little community and in the gig it was. It was the moment really when the sound and the fury would come to an end, and our instinct there's a band or minstincts as the singer the band, Let's not leave everyone right up there. Let's just let's have a moment to calm it all down and and just celebrate in a really human way this experience we've all had, where

the audience have given everything to this band. They've jumped up on the stage, they've given the physically, they've lost tons of way in jumping them down to the band. They've sung along every word. And I always remember saying about let's get down to the front of the gig. Let's leave the drums behind there, Let's get one acoustic guitar. We'll gather around the microphone and we'll sing this song with the audience, and we'll just enjoy what we've all

just been through. And and I think that's how it seemed to us, that we were creating a little bit alight for ourselves in the darkness. You know, we will again, as I say, in the early eighties, it was a very dark time in Britain. Politically, it was divisive. We saw all the politicians I saw. I always thought politics was supposed to be about bringing us together as a community and uniting people, and here they were doing the

complete opposite and really polarizing opinion. And I think it was the first time, you know, in in the war time that not it wasn't that only it was only a couple of decades before US politics brought everyone together. And then all of a sudden in the in the sixties we started to see that division come and I think it really became massive in the eighties, and so I think we all felt like unsure of who we were. He felt very difficult to have an opinion because everyone

was telling you what to think. The government was telling you who to vote for, the enemy was telling you who to get behind, and it was very hard to think for yourselves and and find that light in the of enlightenment that you need, you know. So we I think thinking back to it now, that they were the moments that really made the relationship. We have the audience strong, that little communal moment when we just all sang together.

You know, sometimes we'd lose the power in a gig and we just jump in the middle of the audience and it was always weird the light and we play that stood in the middle of the audience and there was no amplification, no p as, no stage lights, just complete darkness and that remember doing it in Hamburg and one of the most amazing special nights of all time and special moments because it was taking us back to

the simplicity of music. We love Woody Guthrie in the simplicity of one person with one guitar singing in the street with a message wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. Pleasure. Look forward to hearing the podcast now. All right, thank you. You can learn more about Mike Peters and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Peters