Mike Peters, Alarm frontman and voice in cancer fight, dies at 66

Boston Globe

05-05-2025

Starting in the 2000s, Mr. Peters took on a second career as a prominent spokesperson in the fight against cancer. He helped found the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which has staged concerts in dramatic locations including Mount Everest and Mount Fuji to raise funds for cancer research and treatment.
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Emerging from Britain's punk underground of the late 1970s, the Alarm, known for righteous fury and electric-shock hairstyles, fused the high-octane energy of punk with a distinctive twin-acoustic-guitar attack while firing off musical fusillades like 'Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke?,' 'Spirit of '76,' and 'The Stand.'
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The band got a big boost when, before even releasing an album, it was chosen as an opening act on U2's breakout 1983 American tour in support of the landmark album 'War.' (The Alarm released its debut EP on IRS Records midway through the tour.)
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'Without any introduction, music should be able to stand on its own,' U2's frontman, Bono, said in an interview that year with Rolling Stone magazine. 'And with the Alarm, it did.'
The band released its first full album, 'Declaration,' the next year. It earned airplay on MTV with 'Sixty Eight Guns,' a song inspired by a book about Glasgow, Scotland, street gangs set in 1968; it showcased Mr. Peters's raspy, breathless vocal style and bristled with youthful rebellion.
Despite its rebel-rocker fury and lyrics that touched on topics like war and unemployment, Mr. Peters did not see the Alarm as an overtly political band, like the Clash.
'Some of them sound like that,' he said in a 1983 interview with Creem magazine, referring to the Alarm's songs, 'but they're still songs about people, about the way people feel, trying to bring people together rather than keep them apart by taking sides.'
The Alarm became big in Britain, charting 16 Top 50 singles over the years. While they failed to follow U2 to stardom on the American side of the Atlantic, their sophomore album, 'Strength,' hit No. 39 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and their fourth studio album, 'Change' yielded their only Top 50 hit in the United States, the snarling rocker 'Sold Me Down the River.'
Along the way, Mr. Peters experienced his share of career highlights, including twice joining Bob Dylan onstage for a duet of Dylan's 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' when the band opened for him on his 1988 American tour.
But Mr. Peters showed no interest in industry hype or shooting-star fame. 'Some groups want to make it right away,' he said in a 1983 interview with The Albuquerque Tribune. 'Well, fair enough to them, but we want to stand for something 10 years from now.'
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Michael Leslie Peters was born Feb. 25, 1959, in Prestatyn, a seaside town in Wales, and grew up in nearby Rhyl. His parents, Robert and Marjorie Peters, owned a women's clothing shop.
Like a lot of young Britons of his era, he was inspired by the do-it-yourself ethos of the Sex Pistols, whom he saw perform in Chester in 1976 with his future bandmates Nigel Buckle (who later changed his last name to Twist) and Dave Kitchingman (later Sharp).
'I was like all the other kids who got turned on to rock 'n' roll by Johnny Rotten and his boys,' Mr. Peters told the Tribune, referring to the Pistols' sneering lead singer. 'I saw him and said to meself, 'Well, I want to do that.''
He did, briefly, forming a punk band called the Toilets.
After cycling through various bands involving his friends, he settled in with the Alarm, with Sharp on guitar, Twist on drums, and Eddie Macdonald on bass.
The band rode high until breaking up in 1991. Four years later, Mr. Peters began his long ordeal with cancer. But relying on chemotherapy and other treatments, he continually returned to recording and touring, as a solo act and with bands, including one with his wife, a former keyboardist with the Alarm, called the Poets of Justice.
He eventually joined forces with James Chippendale, a Dallas business executive who was fighting leukemia, to form Love Hope Strength. With Jules Peters's help, it has raised millions in its charity concerts staged in famously elevated locales, including the top of the Empire State Building.
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In the fall of 2007, Mr. Peters, along with other cancer survivors, supporters, and musicians, embarked on a 14-day trek to the base camp at Mount Everest, where he joined Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats, and others to perform a concert at nearly 18,000 feet -- an adventure captured in a 2008 television documentary, 'Everest Rocks.'
Mr. Peters (left) performed at a concert along with a team of six international rock band at Hanumandhoka Durbar square in Katmandu, Nepal in 2007. The team of musicians had returned from a Mount Everest base camp after performing what they claimed was the world's highest concert on land and raising money for a local cancer hospital.
Binod Joshi/Associated Press
In 2017, Mr. Peters and his wife embarked on another TV documentary, 'Mike and Jules: While We Still Have Time.' But what started out as a look at a year in the life of a Welsh rock star took a dramatic turn when Jules Peters was diagnosed with breast cancer during the shoot. The project then became a kind of cancer odyssey for both of them.
Mike Peters soldiered on. In 2021, during the pandemic, he joined with a different Alarm lineup remotely to write and record an album titled 'War,' a response to the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. The next year, he announced that his chronic lymphocytic leukemia had returned, requiring more chemotherapy.
In addition to his wife, he leaves their sons, Dylan and Evan.
Throughout Mr. Peters's health struggles, music remained its own form of therapy.
In a 2022 message posted on the Love Hope Strength site, he detailed his hospital stay during his leukemia relapse, noting that his lungs had been drained of 5 liters of fluid. But, he added, 'I've even got my guitar with me on the ward, just in case inspiration strikes!'
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