Love Hope Strength: Mike Peters
I had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Peters, front man of The Alarm, and two-time cancer survivor. I had met Peters before, and was a long-time fan of him as both a musician and an inspirational for life.
(This is bonus content from an interview with Mike Peters conducted last year that I recently discovered)
At a small table in the back of Orlando’s Social, we sat down for a quick chat, and I got to know the legendary front man just a little bit better.
We started out our discussion with a quick conversation about his Love Hope Strength Foundation which is his major philanthropic endeavor focused on cancer treatment, primarily on bone marrow donations. The charity has become a big part of Peters’ life, but the theme of those words has been constant in his lyrics since the beginning.
The thoughtful musician shared, “The theme of Love Hope Strength was written inside the Strength album. There were probably four, five, maybe six songs that have that combination of words somewhere in the lyric. We created a Love Hope Strength t-shirt for the Gathering once in about 2000 and then we created the charity in that name in 2007. It’s been a trilogy that has followed us around without really realizing it was there almost at the beginning.”
I then mentioned that I’ve noticed that the theme still carried through on the last two albums (Equals and Sigma).
“They’re the themes I’ve tried to build my life on, with Honesty, as well. When you make life decisions based on Love and Strength and Hope, it might take you in directions you don’t normally want to go in. But when the decisions are made with those principles, then I think everyone finds a way of understanding those life changes depending on what side you get effected by them.”
Peters went on to explain how living according to those tenets isn’t always easy.
“Sometimes loving someone means you need to be tough on them because love needs to be hard and strong at times. As long as you make the right decisions based on those principles, even though you might sever a tie or may burn a bridge, it doesn’t mean it’s burned completely. There’s still a way back, or forward, or around it. Life might take us in different ways, but it’s always circlic (sic). And if you live long enough, then you come back round to the point where if you sever something, it is often the point where it is tied together, as well.”
As we carried on, I noted that there’s truth to the expression every end is a new beginning.
“That’s it. It is. Every strength has a weakness, doesn’t it? Chrissy Hynde said it when we went out on the Pretenders Tour in 1984, “there’s a thin line between love and hate.”
We circled back to the health struggles that both Mike and his wife Jules have been beset with over the years. Those challenges had an impact on the way he wrote music, and on the way he performed as a musician.
“It meant I had to keep looking for answers, and not just me sit back and think, ‘Oh, this is my life.’ I think having the illnesses collides with the direction I was moving in life. It altered the course of my life and took me in other ways that meant I had to rethink how I approached life as a guitarist or singer.
“When I was having my first chemotherapy treatments, as big a consideration as staying alive was, I still wanted to be a singer and maintain my voice. So, the first time I tried playing a show after chemotherapy, it was a nightmare. I lost my voice in the gig and it was very traumatic.
“My doctor at the time told me that if I had the chemotherapy right on top of a show, I’d be filled with steroids and all of the treatments to keep me from feeling sick, ‘you’ll feel like you can run a mile, you’ll probably sing like a warrior on stage, so let’s try that.’ So, I got on stage and started off great. The next minute, everything shut down. It was on camera with the BBC… It was the worst thing ever.”
Through trial and error, Peters figured out it was better to perform a show and then follow the gig with a chemo treatment.
“In the end, we found a balance that made it work. But I also found because I was forced to question how I sung and how I prepared to sing, that I think it had a lot of benefits in the long run… of how I can sing and sing for longer and keep my tone better.”
The battle wasn’t a singular one. Peters had plenty of help from his loved ones.
“Luckily, I had strong family around me and strong musician friends that allowed me the time to make mistakes and learn and move forward. I’ve always believed that things happen in your life for a reason and you just have to find the purpose of that. Often it’s not just to lie down and accept it, but it’s to push back against it, or find ways around; like a river when it’s flowing through life. It doesn’t stop until it gets to the ocean and if there are trees in the way, it goes around them. If the sun comes out and dries up the river, it waits for the rain to come, and it lives again and moves forward. I think there are reflections of ourselves there in nature.”
The more you talk to Peters, the more you realize that this isn’t a recent revelation for him. He’s been a positive and optimistic sort for most of his life, and he credits his parents for their part in creating that presence.
“I’ve always tried to be positive. My parents always had that for me when I was a kid. They’d say ‘Look Mike, whatever you want to do in life, we’re behind you, and know that if it doesn’t work out, it’s okay. When you come home, we’ll still be behind you.’ I was sent out into the world with a feeling that I couldn’t really fail at anything, because failure didn’t really exist in the eyes of my parents. It’s just a learning curve until you find out who you want to be and then you just keep moving forward. My parents always brought me up that there was never failure. When I look back, I think that’s the greatest gift they ever gave me.”
Over the years, this positive outlook comes through in both his personality and his songs.
“Not many people get to make the number of records I have or play the amount of concerts I have. I’ve been blessed. And, it’s still moving forward and going up the hill… We’ve kept moving on a nice steady path, and our success has been longevity, and we’re grateful for that.”
As we discussed longevity, I thought it would be a good time to delve into the night when the original lineup dramatically broke up in 1991 at the end of a show. I personally was a huge fan of The Alarm, and was shocked at the time. I shared with Peters that I remembered thinking at the time “Damn, these guys were going to be the next U2, and now it’s over.”
Peters shared his thoughts on that tumultuous time: “That was a mistake everyone made. But, we were never going to be that, we were going to be The Alarm.”
So, I pressed on and asked if there were any regrets.
“No, no, no. I don’t have any regrets about that. The turning point for The Alarm happened in 1986. That’s when possibly, The Alarm could have gone in a different direction. But the musicians in the band with me, Dave and Nigel in particular, wanted The Alarm to take a different approach to making music. They didn’t want to work with my songs; they wanted to write as a collective unit. Dave didn’t want to do albums in a modern way. He wanted to go back to being a traditionalist, to never doing overdubs, to never repair anything in the studio and have everything live in the studio in one take. That wasn’t the way The Alarm was meant to be.
“The Alarm was a forward-moving contemporary band. We have influences from the past, but we weren’t going to just live in the past like that. That’s where the schism happened that really tore The Alarm in two.”
It was interesting hearing his perspective, and realizing how hard it would be to reconcile the differences when you have two groups of people with those divergent viewpoints. Peters continued.
“Yeah, but we are all in the boat then, and it was like ‘Who’s going to jump first?’ In the end, I thought the only way to set everybody free to find who they really wanted to be was to jump from the ship. When I left the band, I thought that Dave, Nigel and Eddie would have carried on. That was the intention but they couldn’t. They tried other people. They tried to write songs and make music, but they couldn’t.”
About a decade later, there was a second chance for all of the original members to come together, but at that point, it just wasn’t meant to be.
“After a decade, the opportunity came for everyone to be in The Alarm again. Eddie and I carried it forward; Nigel and Dave didn’t want to be part of it but they gave it their blessing and said ‘If you guys want to be The Alarm, you go ahead.’
“Eddie played for eight shows and then realized ‘I don’t want to be in a touring band going around the world, I’ve got things at home that I really enjoy more.’ He took up photography in the mid-eighties and that’s been his life ever since and he’s happy doing that. He dabbles a little bit in music, but he doesn’t want to be out touring six nights a week. I think once you get out of that cycle like we did, it has to be all encompassing and you can’t just dip into it and decide to go on tour this week.”
Years ago, I caught Dave Sharp live, and I shared my thoughts on how his music seemed to go in a different direction that that of the current version of The Alarm. I find that Sharp is still talented, but his sound is more raw and unrefined. The observation meshed with Peters’ earlier thoughts from the time of the breakup, but he did share that they still keep in touch.
“We did some recording. Dave is on the Sigma album. He came and played on “Equals” and he’s great. He doesn’t want to be in The Alarm. It’s the last thing on his mind, but he wants to make music and have it appreciated by Alarm fans. So, he comes out and plays our shows. We’ve done some shows together. At The Gathering, we sang together, and it’s cool. It works out great. And Nigel came on stage in San Francisco. We’re helping Eddie’s new band Small Town Glory…”
We all went to see Bob Dylan together before we left for this tour. The friendships all exist and they’re intact, but to bring the original lineup to play would be great for a Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame or to get an award and play a few songs for fun, but to take it out on the road into the real world, it wouldn’t last very long. People have grown up with different lives. We haven’t grown up together like we had in the eighties.”
I shifted the focus to the current line-up, which seems to have a ton of camaraderie to which he offered. “It’s brilliant. It’s amazing.”
I pulled the thread a bit and offered up an example the last time I caught them live in Orlando when they adeptly handled some technical issues and left me with a live concert memory that I’d never forget, when the band quickly shifted on the fly into a wonderful, unplanned version of “Unsafe Building,” followed by “Shout to the Devil.”
Peters remembered that night with a smile. “Yeah, the guitars wouldn’t play. When things go wrong, and you have technical issues, you have another opportunity. Times like that, the abiding principle of The Alarm comes into play. The band is built on songs; songs that could be sung without PA, without technology and as long as there is a guitar with six strings and a voice, it doesn’t need to be amplified and that song can be played.”
He then shared a story about a recent show where they experienced technical issues after I had commented how many bands would have just walked off or refused to play until everything was fixed. The Alarm figured out how to play through it.
“So, what do you do? You carry on. I played an acoustic set for ten minutes while it was all sorted out. We’ve done shows without PA, without lights, during thunderstorms. We learned that from U2 when we were at Red Rocks with them on our third date in America for their Under a Blood Red Sky show.
“The rain was like a hurricane and they had to call the gig off and arranged a free show the next day. They had already brought in a film crew from Britain and Steve Lillywhite to record it. Brought a mobile studio with Jimmy Iovine. They made a huge investment to play at an iconic venue and then the weather conspired against them.”
But despite the weather, the U2 crew still wanted to give it a go.
“They said ‘We’re going to go out and do one song to get a bit of outdoor footage to cut in tomorrow night, and the second song we’re going to do is Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain is Gonna Fall,” and we want you to come sing it in the rain.’ They could’ve easily said ‘Let’s not do anything, let’s just wait for tomorrow.’ But they took a chance, walked out on stage and a miracle happened with the weather. Their Manager, Paul McGuinness said ‘Keep going,’ and they played the whole set and history was created that night.
“When you look at the video, it’s not great. It’s magical but it’s not technically great. Okay with the pictures but not so with the audio. When they came to the encore, if you look at it now, The Edge plays my guitar, because all the crew still thought I was coming on. And so did I for the end, but Paul McGuinness said ‘Not tonight Mike, a bit of history being made,’ but we did it the next night at the free show in Boulder.
“If you back out of things because something goes wrong, you might lose the moment of your life.”
It’s a great story about capitalizing on opportunities and making the best out of an imperfect situation. One of many fleeting moments in life that could change a lifetime. With that, he shared a story about love that almost never happened.
“We were in New York, and James’ brother who lived in Australia was there. The first hotel we stayed at was the Iroquois and it had the slowest lift in the world. One day, James, Pete (from Gene Loves Jezebel) and James’ brother got on the lift in the Iroquois to go up to their rooms, and just as the doors were closing, they saw three girls walking in and they held the lift so the girls could get in. One of them married James’ brother. They held the lift and there’s two kids because of that. That family wouldn’t exist, all because James decided to press the hold button.”
As our time together wound down, and we approached time for sound check, I came back to the earlier brief mention of the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. I asked that in the unlikely event that it ever happened, what three songs would he decide to play for the induction ceremony set?
After stumbling a bit, he offered: “I wouldn’t be able to give you a definitive answer on that. Three brand new songs I’d like to play, but it’s not always up to me. Obviously in a show like that, you play the three songs you’re known for. One would be “Strength” I think, but then it gets hard. Is it “The Stand,” is it “Rain In the Summertime”?
“You know, some of our songs live on more now than they have before. “The Stand” and “Strength” are our biggest plays in the digital world, probably because they’re featured in Thirteen Reasons Why. I think we’d play “Strength” and the other two would be down to what’s happening on that night. You’ve got to allow for chance.”
I closed out our conversation offering a chance for this affable rock legend to be reflective on his career, and asked what he would like his legacy to be. For the first time during the interview he hesitated for a moment, before offering the perfect answer.
“Love, hope and strength. That’s sort of what I’ve stood for, and created and left behind in the world.”
