"When you've been in a band like the Alarm, people kind of hold that against you like a criminal record sometimes," laughs Welsh songsmith Mike Peters, guilty as charged. "It's like, 'Oh, that guy can't be creative or do anything of any relevance anymore.' And I totally refute that. I think just because you get into your thirties, you don't go to sleep."

Granted, he continues, some folks go to sleep on you. They might have grown out of their pop fetish all together, or perhaps long since traded all their old Alarm albums in for adult contemporary rubbish or whatever the next generation is listening to in a vain attempt to stay hip. But there will certainly be stragglers left to listen -- and, if you're lucky, a few new fans to be made yet. Peters takes a decidedly 'career-is-half-full' point of view. And he has good reason to. With his third solo album, Rise, he's garnered some of the best reviews of his career, and his music is finally connecting with the "people who didn't get the Alarm or couldn't see it when the hair-was-up-to-here.

"When I left the Alarm [in the early Nineties], it was like going back into the underground," says Peters. "I've been working in the vacuum for such a long time, and there's only been a few close friends sticking by me for support, so it's great to be here now doing all these interviews, having people talk about my record -- it's like, 'All right! I've made it through, I've crossed the bridge."

Rise represents a bigger triumph for Peters than critical acceptance, however. It's his personal affirmation of winding up on the winning end of a brief but worrisome battle with lymphoma cancer. Nearly every song is an anthem, espousing not so the much the shiny, happy-to-be-alive vibe the affable Peters gives off in person as the meaner intensity of a snarling, triumphant Mel Gibson standing atop a heap of butchered bodies in Braveheart. The Alarm's music was never much about subtlety, and Peters hasn't changed in that regard. Although he worked out many of the songs on Rise live as acoustic numbers, the finished product crackles with a high voltage guitar and electronica-based rock best summed up by the title track, "White Noise." Peters gives ample credit for the album's sonic assault to guests like former Cult guitarist Billy Duffy, with whom Peters plays in a side-project called ColorSound ("It is what it is," he explains, "it's the Alarm meets the Cult."), and a couple of Welsh DJs whom he invited to the studio each morning to pick and choose bits of the previous day's sessions for experimentation.

Perhaps given that the Alarm endured a decade of U2 comparisons, Peters himself invites comparison between Rise and the Irish group's own electronica excursion, Pop. With all due respect to U2, whose support during the Alarm years he readily acknowledges, Peters notes that the key difference between the two albums is that Pop didn't quite work.

"When I was importing the DJs' pieces, they weren't dictating the tempo that I was making my record at, because I wanted the band to move and sway and slow down on the verses and speed up the choruses, which you can't do with techno music," he explains. "When I heard that U2 record, it was obviously done in direct tempo computer time, and U2 got lost in all that. I didn't want to make that mistake with mine. I didn't want all the esoteric elements to infringe on the record's ability to rock."

It's a classic case of having one's cake and eating it too, which is the way Peters does things these days. He's got his solo acoustic shows to showcase his singer/songwriter side, and ColorSound to get his rocks off. He lives in a wee little village in North Wales with his wife and parents, who run the info lines for his fan club. Oh, and then there's the annual Gathering, which Peters' web page describes as "an audio visual celebration of Mike Peters and the Alarm's music, past, present and future."

"I created it when I left the Alarm, when I didn't have a record label or a setup to get me on the road anymore, and I thought 'Well, I've still got an audience ... how can I get them to come to me?'" explains Peters. "And we created this three-day event that's based around the music of Mike Peters and the Alarm. We have soccer tournaments, we have quizzes, we have parties. People fly in from America, Peru, Brazil -- we draw up to about 2,000 now. We started out in the townhall in Rhyl, but we outgrew that. Now we're in the North Wales conference center in Llandudno. On the seafront. It's great. All the hotels sell out. It's brilliant -- you should come over. It's great. Life's been good to me."

RICHARD SKANSE