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"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