Mike Peters on Working with Computers and Being “Garagebandish”

Tell us about your tour vehicle.

In the UK, I usually travel in a rented splitter vehicle (Room in the back for equipment etc, and upfront seats for band members and / or anyone else who dares ride across country with me). In the USA we prefer to travel via Bandwagon which are vehicles that can be driven by anyone with a clean license over 25. It makes the tour a lot more fun when we can drive ourselves and stop where we like, and don’t have to wait at truck stops for hours while the bus driver takes a break (Nothing against bus drivers by the way). We travel like a big family with kids and have a lot of fun as we all (band, crew and kids), get along great.

How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?

I find that going on a diet seems to help, also taking control of the rider is another good one. Bin the M& M’s and stick to the fruit and veg.

How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?

I used to break strings two or three times a night back on the Eighties and Nineties but that’s because I was so caught up in the singing I used to literally gouge the wood of the guitars with the heaviest picks I could find. Now I have gained some control and use l night packs and maybe break strings once or twice a tour if at all. I use a Baritone Guitar quite a lot now and have only ever broken a string on that once in its lifetime.

Where do you rehearse?

It’s a garage…. quite literally and honestly. We use an old paint spray area at the rear of the garage so it’s sound insulated and no one can hear what we get up to. We’re a garage band I think is the saying! There are no phone signals present, so everyone is focused and concentrated on getting the challenges of the day completed, it also helps that everyone gets to stay in one of the five star luxury apartments at our converted Chapel and creative hub opposite the seventy foot waterfalls of Dyserth, our North Wales village. We’re garagebandish!!!

What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?

I can’t remember as I made them up on the spot…. It was June 5th 1981 and we were about to go on stage for our first ever show as The Alarm. The problem we faced was that any potential audience members were in another bar, in another part of the venue. I said to the rest of the band “we can’t go on and waste our songs to no one” so I said…”I have this guitar motif, and so why don’t we go on, jam the riff and make some kind of unholy racket that gets the attention of the people in the other bar area and then, once they are stood in our room, we can hit them with all the proper Alarm songs”. We walked on and I started up the riff (that no-one had ever heard including the rest of The Alarm), and then the drums came in followed by the other two amplified acoustic guitars and I began wailing down the mic on a song that eventually became ’Shout To The Devil’ on our 1984 debut album Declaration. We’ve been getting away with stuff like that ever since…..

Describe your first gig.

My first ever gig was at my sister’s 21st Birthday Party in the Talardy Hotel, St. Asaph in 1975….. we had to have two drummers as they couldn’t each play all the songs. I think we played an instrumental of a Status Quo song and another original of some sorts, we were kind of like a bad version of The Shadows (all instrumentals). We had no name and my sister took a big risk having us play on her big coming of age night, towards the end of the 15 minute set, the other guitarist panicked and turned his amp up instead of down (he’d only just got one and we didn’t t really know how to use it, It was an VOX AC30 and the knobs faced the wrong way round if you stand in front of it!!), and so we finished / crashed out with a wall of feedback… The DJ was a cool dude named James Alexander Bar who dubbed us Harry Hippie after a song by Bobby Womack. We never performed again after.

What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?

From 1975 – 1981 I was a computer operator for a local supermarket chain called Kwik Save. I worked in the head office and loved the computer programming aspects but not so much the work environment. I was schooled in computers from the day they were introduced into the UK school curriculum and even went to college to do A level computers but was the only kid on the course so they scrapped it. My Mum spotted the job opportunity in the local paper and I jumped at it.

How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?

I now have control of the financial side and can afford to make and record music whenever I want to. I expect to still be able to record and make music whenever I want in 5 – 10 years time. If I’m still alive that is!

What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?

That computers were going to be BIG.

Described by U2’s Bono as “The second greatest rock and roll band in the world”, The Alarm was formed in Wales and, with the release of 1981’s debut single ‘Unsafe Building’, featured a daring mix of amped-up acoustic guitars, harmonica and passionate Mike Peters’ vocals likened by early reviewers as “Bob Dylan meets The Clash”. This is the sound of The Alarm that has been heard around the world ever since, with 17 Top 50 UK singles, a host of successful albums and over 6 million album sales worldwide.

Following an initial breakthrough in the USA with 1983’s ‘The Stand’ (that recently triggered over 3 million Spotify hits after featuring in the Netflix’ TV series ‘13 Reasons Why’), alongside the evergreen ‘Sixty Eight Guns’ that entered into the UK chart soon after, The Alarm headlined their own ‘Spirit of ’86 Concert’ before 26,000 fans in Los Angeles, that was beamed around the world via MTV’s first ever live global satellite broadcast.

In the summer of 1991, the demands of the road were at the heart of a very public swan song for the original members at London’s Brixton Academy, before the current line up re-emerged causing worldwide controversy in 2004 through The Poppy Fields ‘fake band’ subterfuge.
Released to conceal their true identity, the Alarm’s first single of the millennium – ’45 RPM’ would ultimately take their signature electro-acoustic sound back into the UK top 40 and even further into the mainstream rock culture of North America via a Headline News TV appearance with Dan Rather.

The Alarm’s return was halted almost immediately when, in late 2005, Mike Peters was diagnosed with an incurable cancer (A rare B-cell form of Leukaemia), forcing the band into playing select shows, dictated by the chemotherapy / treatment regime that has kept Mike Peters alive ever since.

In January 2006, Mike Peters was given the go ahead to resume normal duties and the group continued with the release of ‘Under Attack’ and another Top 30 single – ‘Superchannel’. A year later, Mike Peters founded the Love Hope Strength charity – which is dedicated to ‘Saving Lives One Concert At A Time’ and can lay claim to registering over 250,000 individuals to the International Bone Marrow Donor Registry in the UK / USA.

In 2022, The Alarm celebrated their 40th Anniversary with the release of the History Repeating Anthology and World Tour which was cut short when Mike Peters was stricken by Pneumonia and a life threatening Leukaemia relapse. Mike Peters continued to write new music throughout and once strong enough, lead The Alarm back into the studio to record the brand new album Forwards.

The group have just released “Next”, the first single from the forthcoming album. Connect with the band online and on the road.