May 2, 2025 • 38 mins
This is a special episode from our archives with one of my favorite musicians, Mike Peters. Mike recently passed away, and this episode is more than a conversation; it’s a tribute to a beautiful soul. In our chat, we explored the idea of our lives being anthems; how defiance, hope, and inner strength were a soundtrack for his formative years, and later in life. This was an open-hearted talk about what it means to fight not just with force, but with love. We talked about instinct as a spiritual guide, about staying true to yourself when the world tries to pull you off course. Mike’s life and his music were reminders that strength can come from stillness, from surrender, and from the simple act of standing up for light when everything around you feels dark.
Key Takeaways:
- Mike’s experiences with cancer and resilience.
- The founding and mission of the Love Hope Strength Foundation.
- The significance of positivity and community support in overcoming adversity.
- The impact of music as a source of strength and healing.
- Reflections on the parable of two wolves and nurturing positive traits.
- Early musical influences and the evolution of Mike's career.
- The deeper meaning behind the song “Strength” in relation to Mike’s health journey.
- The inspiration and themes behind the song “Blaze of Glory.”
- The role of spirituality and self-trust in navigating life’s challenges.
- The communal aspect of music and its ability to foster connection and unity.
If you enjoyed this conversation with Mike Peters, check out these other episodes:
The Journey of Life Through Song with Frank Turner
For full show notes, click here!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When you take advice from someone else sometimes and you
go along with it, and you think it doesn't feel right, you.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
End up bang, they said, crash at the end of
the road.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:36):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(00:56):
how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Mike Peters was one of my earliest musical heroes. In
high school. I probably listened to his band The Alarm
more than any other. Their anthems of defiance, hope, and
inner strength were a soundtrack for those formative years and
later in life, Mike became a hero to me in
an even deeper way for how he faced thirty years
(01:22):
of blood cancer with astonishing grace, how he kept making
meaningful music, and how he gave his life to service
through his foundation, love, hope, strength. Sadly, Mike passed away yesterday,
so today's episode is more than a conversation. It's a
tribute to a beautiful soul. A few years ago I
(01:43):
had the great good fortune to sit down with him
before a show he was doing in Akron, Ohio. What
unfolded was an open hearted talk about what it means
to fight not just with force, but with love. We
talked about instinct as a spiritual guide, about staying true
to yourself when the world tries to pull you off course,
and about how music can be both a weapon and
(02:05):
a healing ball in a world that often glorifies noise
and speed. Mike's life and his music we're reminders that
strength can come from stillness, from surrender, and from the
simple act of standing up for light when everything around
you feels dark. I'm deeply grateful to have had this conversation.
I hope it brings you some of the strength that
(02:27):
Mike brought to me in my life and so many
others I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Mike,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Nice to be eh.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
I am very excited to have you on. I was
reading the other day you were talking about meeting Bruce Springsteen,
you know, and how you what it's like when you
meet somebody that you looked up to it at a
certain age. And so when I was sixteen, I was
a huge fan of The Alarm and have remained. So
it's a real honor to meet you and get to
sit down and talk with you. So our podcast is
(02:56):
called The One You Feed, and it's based on the
parable of two wolves, where they're as a grandfather who's
talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always a battle.
What is a good wolf which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
(03:17):
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your own life and
in the work that you.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Do well well, Straight off the top of my head,
it means to feed the positive side of your personality,
which is something I've always tried to do throughout my
whole musical life and my life as an adult and
human being. And you know, raise my own kids in
a good way, treat the people I meet in the
(03:50):
way I want to be treated myself. You know, even
with an audience when I go on stage, I always
try to put myself in the audience and think, well,
what do they want from the show tonight, and and
just try to have as much respect for the other
people that come into the journey that I'm on in life.
(04:10):
And there's times when we walk the path together. Sometimes
people go off on their own and then they come back,
and it's allowed people to always be it one with
you as you in step and people come in step,
that's great. If they fall out a step, that's just life.
And if once they come back into line again, then
(04:31):
we just carry on. And I've never wanted to have
enemies in life. I don't think I've got any enemies,
and I've always tried to treat people with care and understanding,
and you know, and there's times when life has forced
(04:52):
people I know apart from me, and I always tried
to see everything from both sides of the story and
so that you can heal any rifts that happen in life,
so that when life brings you back together, which it
always does, either faithfully or through a strategy, you can
(05:13):
still have a relationship with people from your history without
ill will or rancor or bitterness. And it's all part
of life's rich pageant of understanding and learning and and
and that's the wolf.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I trying to feed.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Excellent. So you you sort of emerged onto the music scene.
You know, some of your songs refer to seeing the
sex pistols, seeing the clash, being involved in that scene.
And yet everything you know, from the very earliest alarm work,
there's a there's a positivity that in your music that
that just is expressed differently than a lot of that
(05:50):
other music. There's a there's a defiance in your music,
but there's a there's a clear positivity. Where did that
come from so early in your career?
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Well, I think you know, it's sometimes talk about it
on the stage when I'm playing the spirit of seventy six,
which was, you know, seeing the sex Pists and the
Clash in early seventy six seventy seven period when punk
broke into Britain. I saw both bands up close in
the earliest days. I saw the sex Pists in seventy
six in October seventy six, and it was a.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Life changing experience.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
And hearing Johnny Rotten sing anarchy pretty vacant submission.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
They sounded amazing, but I didn't know what the language meant,
and no one taught me what anarchy was in my
high school or submission. They were brand new words. I
heard them for the first time from the mouth of
Johnny Rotten and I went up to him at the
gig and asked him what anarchy in the UK meant
and he told to.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
F off and that's surprising.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
No it's not, but he I think he was his
way of just challenging me and smashing the free conceptions
and almost like slapping you across the face to weight
you up. And so that that was a big moment.
And then and then I did see the Clash in
nineteen seventy seven on the White Riot tour in the
Electric Circus in Manchester, and I was followed the tour
(07:11):
down to Barbarellas to sit. They were doing this sort
of secret gig there and they were supposed to play
at Birmingham rag Market and it got canceled but they
turned up and I was and they were playing a
secret gig in Bob Brella's and I could see the
amps going on. I knew they were going to come on,
and I went to the bathroom and I was stood
in the doing my thing in the toilet, and I
(07:31):
ended up stood next to Joe's Strummer and the whole
of the clash, and I asked Joe's Strummer on the
way out what White Riot was all about, And because
I didn't quite fully understand it from just hearing the record,
I thought, I did, you know internally and viscerally, but
right I didn't.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Know what a White Riot was.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And he said to me it was about the future,
and he gave me something positive back, and I think
so from having the sort of polarization of the seeing
the two bands, and that was really it was like
the flint, you know, it has created the fire that
the alarm came from the positive and the negative, and
I always leaned towards the positive. I always remember thinking,
(08:15):
if I meet somebody who comes up to me in
that way looking for advice, looking for a sign, a sign,
then I'll give them something positive back. And so I
wanted to put that into my music. I wanted it
to be uplifting for people, liberating for them if they
came to see a gig, especially if they were, you know,
(08:35):
young and naive like I was when I saw the Pistols.
I didn't know how to become a punk. There was
no manual. I didn't know how to get skin type
black jeans. I had to find them. And I didn't
have to get certain records. You had to go on
incredible journeys across Britain to get records.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And there was no Internet. It wasn't brought to your doorstep.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And when we came on tour in America, you know,
I was from a small town. We had no spend
Arlie up bring in. Like the Pistols had had the
benefit of an older guy like Malcolm McLaren and Vivian
Westwood to dress them and Jamie Reid to do their artwork.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
We had none of that.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
The Clash had Bernie Rhodes and he'd been involved in
the Pistols camp and they were helping shape those bands
and shape the way, give them books to read, give
them clothes to wear, help them with their stance, and
the way educate them a little bit about when they
spoke to the media.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
We had none of that.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
We were just four kids from real North Wales who
wanted to be in a band and we learned our
lessons the hard way, and so we wanted our politic
if you liked, to be personal, and we wanted it
to be a message that the listener got that empowered
them a little bit or made them ask questions to
go and find their own answers. And again we grew
(09:51):
up in a very extreme political time in the eighties.
That was you know, came down from the iron Lady
at Margaret that and you know, we were brought up
in a very musically aggressive time in the music papers
in Britain that the enemy was very politicized in the eighties.
(10:11):
There was the minor strike and they were closing steel
works down and it was a tough time and every
band that walked into the enemy offices that was demanded
that they had the political rhetoric to back up what
they wanted to hear, and we weren't like that. Our
politics were different to that. It was easy to me
(10:31):
to write about the villains. They were all there on
the newspaper every day. You could knock them down easily.
But to write about somebody was struggling to make something
from nothing in the aftermath of the political turmoil. That
required a different sort of approach musically, and that was
what I was interested in. And you know, I think
(10:53):
I'm lucky that still people who come to see me
play now, who were at a gig in Omaha, Nebraska
have their life change by seeing the Alarm in a
positive way. Or someone who comes back to me and
say they were at the brink of doing something drastic
with a life and they put on the Strength album
as their last record before they were going to do
something they would regret, and it pulled them back from
(11:15):
the bring And to me, how having that those testimonies
come to me through the Internet now, through the Facebook
or the Alarm dot com. That's That's all I ever
wanted from our music was to touch people and be
meaningful to them and have some value.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
And so you are out now. We're sitting in Akron, Ohio.
You're going to play here in a little bit, and
you are a big part of what you're doing. Is
the thirtieth anniversary of the Strength record. I was curious
looking back on that record now and you've done some
re recording of it. What does the song Strength mean to
you today, thirty years after you wrote and recorded it
(11:55):
the first time?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Who are like the.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Fire than any egavi? Who a life blood passing through
not read the fo doesn't never change, honey hole.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Well, it means it's more to me than it ever did,
because the in the opening lines, it says, who will
be the lifeblood coursing through my veins?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Now?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
That was more of a metaphoric line when I was
writing it in nineteen eighty five, but it's a literal
line for me now because I've had to live with
cancer for twenty years. You know, I'm at the point
in life where I might need to have a transplant
and have somebody else's lifeblood flowing through my veins. That's
a very real step in life I might have to
(13:10):
take at some point in the future. So when I
sing that song and particular that line, it always stops
me dead every night because it's literally come true in
my own life.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Now. One of the things that you did as you
have battled cancers, you founded the Love Strength and Hope,
Love Hope, Strength and Love Hope Strength. Thank you foundation
that has done a lot of work for people with cancer.
One of the things you've done is been registering a
lot of people to be as I understand bone Mirrow donors.
Will you be doing that at the show tonight? Yeah,
(13:43):
we will be tonight.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Always hosted donor register at a lot of gigs and
through the Charities Formation in two thousand and seven, we've
been able to it with over ten thousand other recording
working artists in the world, from Robert Plant and the
Foo Fighters, Enrique Glaz Frank Turner.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Yeah we had Frank on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
You know, we've worked with all Dropped Kick Murphy's, all
kinds of bands right down to the Alarm, and thousands
of bands you know that are just up and coming
who embrace what we do, which is we try to
turn rock concerts into life saving events by holding a
donuboo that those gigs, getting people to sign up to
the International Bow Donor Registree, by giving a cheek swab,
(14:27):
giving their information personal information so we can track them
in life if they're lucky enough to be called to
save the life of someone who has blood cancer like
leukemia like I have. And we've signed over one hundred
thousand people to the registry. We've we've found close to
eighteen hundred potentially life saving matches for people, and it's become,
(14:50):
you know, as much of my life's work as the
Alarm and you know. But it's a real communal effort.
It's run by volunteers. We haven't hardly got any staff.
I've got no staff in Britain. It's a completely voluntary
charity in the UK. But with America being so big
and we're working with so many bands every night, we've
(15:11):
got staff to facilitate some of it, but we still
rely on volunteers and public donation to help fund what
we do. We work in partnership with Delete Blood Cancer.
They're an organization with a massive donor registry and we
put the people we find our gigs who all get
on the list campaign onto their registry and so someone
(15:33):
who signs up to the show tonight in akro And
Ohio could become a life saver of someone in Britain
or Germany or anywhere in the world who matches their
DNA profile. And now if you do become a life
saving donor, it's just an outpatient procedure. Ninety nine percent
of the times is just giving blood in hospital and
it's an in and out procedure in the day, and
(15:54):
then your blood will then give someone life.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
Yeah, we'll definitely put on the show. Notes to the
page and all that links to the foundation and fantastic thanks.
In the two thousands there was some new alarm work.
I love the energy and the and the aggressiveness of
some of it. One of them is a song called
Situation is under Control.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
Everything is black and wide, there's the room sins all around,
everything is upside down.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
There's a corbook box with my feet.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I'm going through hell and I can't speak.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
I'm going through hell and I can't breathe. This situation
is under good trol.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
Everything is as it should be with that sent Can
you tell me a little bit about the what went
into the writing of that song and what was going
on with you when you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, I think life was completely out of control when
I wrote that song.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
I had not long been diagnosed with leukemia, and I'd
just made an album for the longcle Under Attack, and
I didn't know really one hundred percent why my instinct
was telling me that was the album title.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
And we'd finished making the album.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
We'd recorded a video for every single song in twenty
four hours. It was an audio visual release as much
as it was just about the songs. I want people
to see the music as well as hear it. And
then all of a sudden I was diagnosed with leukemia.
For it was my second cancer diagnosis. I'd had lymphoma
(17:38):
before that, and I was off the charts ill and
I didn't know it, and I went into hospital with
some symptoms and then they wouldn't let me home. They
sent me immediately to another hospital for treatment to bring
me out of the danger zone. The doctors didn't had
even walked in the hospital. My blood was so thick
with what I thought was dead white blood at the
time that it was like oil it just and even moving.
(18:01):
And so I was taking to hospital to get out
of the critical region I was in. And while I
was there, my wife brought my iPod in so I
could have some music to play while I was going.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Through these procedures, and and I'd forgotten i'd put this.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Under Attack old mom while I was out and about
listening to it randomly to get a sequence going for
the record.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
And I was lying in the hospital. I was having
this pretty intense procedure called Luca Faresis, and I was.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Kind of in a bit of shock at the time
as well, and going under and my iPod was on
and this track came on. I didn't know what it was,
and it had the title came to the title and
it said I'll never give up without a fight, and
I knew that was that was the alarm that was
our new record, and and and then I realized that
(18:51):
I was so ill my subconscious was driving this record.
And and and then Situation Under Control was part of
a series of music we created. It was called counter Attack,
and it was like the opposite to Under Attack, where
I'd written the record under the pressure of cancer coming
into my life taking over. I decided to write music
(19:12):
that was my counter attack, So that was me fighting
back against the cancer, and songs like Situation Under.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Control were really me.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Writing music that gave me a mental arsenal to be
able to fight cancer.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
In my mind and.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Fight it psychologically as well as physically. And I think
I've always believed that music is a great tool to
have whenever you're facing any adversity in life.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
It can release you from some of the pressure.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
It can help you fortify yourself for that big day
that's coming up, or when you've got to face that
situation that you're nervous about. You can play that favorite
piece of music and it lifts you up and you
that little bit of courage to face the day. And
so the situation and the control and the counter attacks
(20:08):
it was. The music was really my way of being
able to put myself in a position to stand up
to cancer.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
You've battled cancer twice, you know, so you're still battling it, right.
That's got to take a toll. You remain so outwardly positive,
where do you turn when you are really internally struggling,
when you just you know that that optimism isn't there.
What do you turn to to give you the strength
that you're then able to project out in the music.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I'm lucky to have a really solid life outside of
rock and roll. I've got a really strong relationship with
my wife. He's my best friend, we've been married for
twenty eight years. You know, we met, we got engaged
within a week and nothing has to We've been tested
and tested all through life in that time, but nothing
has ever tours apart from each other. And we've got
(21:00):
two beautiful boys that we've had to fight hard to get.
I had to go through my wife had to go
through IVF to get the kids. Because of all situations
we've been in. She's been to kill a Manjara with me,
help build an accounts center in Dorslom in Africa, and
suffered a DVT, nearly lost a life on the way
back from Africa, and we've both been through an incredible
(21:23):
amount together and we fall back into each other when
when we're really struggling to cope with certain situations in
life as they crop up. But I always feel grateful
for the life I've got because my music started out
life as a hobby and it still is a hobby
(21:43):
for me.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
It's still my passion.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
It's still where I would go if I had a
normal nine to five job, I'd be playing in the
garage at night, or setting up a gear at the
weekend and ripping into a gig because I love it,
and that's and I'm very lucky that I can express
myself within my passionate thing in life every day. And
I'm also grateful for the life I can come home
(22:06):
to and I've got people there who love me. You
understand me, You'll stand up for me when the stones
are getting thrown, you know, which is because that's what happens.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That's what you put your head above the parapet in
rock and.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Roll, And it's not always praise. Stones are thrown as well,
and you know, you have to have a really good
fall back to be able to cope with that, because
it is hurtful at times, you know, and you see
it from people who love you the most musically, they
can still want to tear you down and challenge everything
(22:40):
you do. And you can't please all the people all
of the time, as the famous American quote goes, But
so you need that. And when I close the door
on rock and roll, when I come home and I
see my boys and it's the best thing in the world.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
How old are they know?
Speaker 1 (22:59):
My boys are eight and a Dylan and ever. They're
into music. They play piano and drums and guitar. They
brought up to see it as a hobby like I am.
And they come to the shows with jewels and we're very,
very very close.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
Wonderful's funny how they shoot you down with your hands.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Out of mine and you want put up your hard asshole.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
But that's not enough.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Foremos I've renne.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
But this much.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Now they shoots two cards.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
They have got some of the ship. I no want
to be scanned out to scan them out of the
Going out in a blazer.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Cory Bound, don't word. You can tell anything that you
want from me. There is nothing left to hide.
Speaker 5 (23:50):
Going out in.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
A blaser Cory Man's out of mine.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
I'm learning out in it back, I'm learning out.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Tell me about the song Blaze of Glory.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Well, that was written really when we first played with
You Too. It was on the water and we played
with them in December nineteen eighty two, just before New
Year's Day came out as a single and the album
wasn't out to eighty three, and we played a momentous
night with them in London, and one of the songs
(24:29):
that were new to their audience and them as a
band was a song.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Called Surrender that was the theme of war. I think
you know.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Bonna described it as like a you know, slap in
the face against pop music was his quote.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
But really it was.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Seeing war as a different from a different perspective, seeing
war from the through the color, well without the color
with a white flag, the war where people surrender to win,
And that was what Bonner was putting across in that music.
And I saw them rip to pieces in the music
(25:07):
press in Britain, and I think it was really it
was only because I think people were envious of the
fact that they were taking their music to America and
they were starting to help other bands. I think the
British press thought it was their preserve to make or
break bands. And all of a sudden, the band like
You Two came along and opened the door for unknown
(25:29):
musicians like the Alarm to get to America for the
first time, which we did. We came with them in
nineteen eighty three. No one had heard of us in America.
We were almost unknown in Britain. We had our first
hit record in America because of the tour we did
with You Too, and you two were going on the
radio and championing the Alarms record the Stand and saying
don't play Newyear's Day, play the band that are opening
(25:51):
for us tonight.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Come and see them.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
They're amazing, and they were breaking us and they were
creating their own power base. And the music press in
Britain didn't like it one bit, and they started trying
to smash them, and they tore them down.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
I could see and I had.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
This image, saw this image Uponna with his arms held high,
surrender on the water, and the line came into my head.
It's funny how they shoot you down when your hands
are held up high, because up to that point you
two have been praised, and all of a sudden, here
they were on the verge of breaking and they were
being torn apart. And it was so obvious to the
(26:25):
world that you set them up, you knock them down.
And it was such a cliche. And here's the music
press accusing bands like you too being cliched when they
were pulling out all the cliches in the book. There
was no depth to the criticism of you two. It
was just targeted at them. They would target their Christianity
or target the fact that we're selling out playing huge gigs,
(26:49):
and it wasn't the same anymore, and there was no
real balance to it. So that prompted the line it's
funny how they shoot you down when your hands are
held up high. But the song really became more than
that when the full lyrics came down and it was
all I think. It's all about really staying strong, believe
(27:10):
in yourself. You know when out first went out as
a punk rocker and real and ripped up my jacket
and went out.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
With safety pins.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
People want to tear you down because they're scared of
the way you look, but you have and it's easy
to back down to that kind of peer pressure. It's
easy to give in and think, oh, I'll just go
along with the flow of the river and I look
like everyone else and life will be easier.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
But life isn't like that.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
You have to have courage to take those steps forward
out of the crowd, to find your own.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
In a self, find you the place where you belong
in life.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Because we're all brought up in the image of our parents,
and really we're all individual and we want to be ourselves.
And some people they give in to the peer pressure
and they suppress who they really are. So we wanted
our songs to liberate people, allow them to find the courage.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
And be who you really want to be.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
Yeah, there's a sense in a lot of your music.
I'll say this, a military sense in that there's there's
a lot of marching you you you put on the
camouflage when you were battling cancer. There's there's those sort
of analogies. And yet there's maybe the right word that
you used is is you know, fighting war by surrendering.
But I've always been sort of amazed how you've managed
to weave those two things together in a really powerful way. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
I don't know how we've done it. Really, it has
always been there, and I don't know why.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I don't know. I think we fit. The first thing
that I sort of got into where I remember seeing.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
The Who with medals on their jackets and that was
pop art, and I remember putting some medals on my jacket,
and then I and then I will I saw. I
got into this sort of seeing the sixties psychedelia thing
and people were those red guardsman's jacket and that was
sort of the start of our early look in the
(29:04):
alarm of Western psychedelia look. But the term military got
attached to us rather than pop art psychedelia, and I
think that there was that I think our image didn't
help on music in some ways because I think it
threw up some conflicts that that people would read these
lyrics and they wouldn't quite kind of lie with the
(29:25):
big hair or the over the top look that we
had on stage because we all adopted it and it
was it was very the front line of the band
was it was all attack, it was all out bang,
and we didn't have a John Entwistle like the who
did that we could be the polar opposite of We
(29:45):
had three guys flowing themselves around the stage and there
wasn't the quiet member, you know, the who amplified the
power of the individual in the band.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
We came across like for like a gang.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah, and I think and we weren't really a gang
that I think when people met as they could see
that we were all quite different. But we did have
this gang mentality that came out of the look of
the band and the way we are played on stage.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
And I don't think that helped some of the subtlety
that was in the music in.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
A way, which is you know, as you go through
life and you know that you make a record in
the eighties, it stays, it stays in the eighties. But
you write a song in the eighties, it lives beyond that.
It comes alive in the nineties, comes.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Alive again as you get older in life.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
And that's what interests me about the Alarms music, not
just what we made in the eighties, but what it
continues to be today.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how you interpret
that music this evening. What would you say is the
lesson that's taken you the longest to learn in life?
Speaker 2 (30:58):
To keep my mouth?
Speaker 1 (31:02):
You know, I always have an I always have been
brought up to be answer people politely. And if someone
answers your question and you ask answered it back, and
sometimes I should just stay quiet.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
One of the things we talk about on the show
a lot is we talk about spirituality being this very
nebulous thing. Does does the words spiritual have any meaning
to you? And if so, what what does that word
mean to you?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
I equate it with with with faith.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Really, I'm in faith that life is going to work
out the way you hope it is going to work out.
And you know, some people think in the short term
and some people I think in the long term, and
I like to think I've fall in the latter cads agree.
And so I've always trusted my instinct in life, and
I think that sometimes gets confused with spirituality. Is I
(31:52):
think instinct is a very powerful force and it's and
if you can learn to trust your instinct, then you
won't go far wrong in life. And there's so many
outside forces you makers distrust ourselves and on the way
we think as individuals that it's easy to be sidestepped
(32:14):
from your mission in life and your goals or what
your your hopes are. Again, I think spirituality I think
of as instinct really, and you know, I try to
always try to follow me instinct. And when I've really
followed my instinct is it's never very rarely let me down,
if ever. And when you take advice from someone else
(32:37):
sometimes and you go along with it and you think
it and you think it doesn't feel right, and you
end up bang, it's a crash at the end of
the road, and you think, why didn't I trust Why
didn't I trust myself?
Speaker 4 (32:51):
Yeah, And so last question, I think the song we
Are the Light, that's sort of what I took from that.
You know, we are the light of our lives, We're
our own light.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I think. So, Yeah, that was written for declaration. It
was written in in London.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
It was a little folk song I put together in
a major key, and I think that's what I was
trying to get to. I didn't understand spirituality or instinct
so much in nineteen eighty one when we moved to
London and eighty two when that song was written.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
There's a bad who was standing on the corner for
he cannot see.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
There's a blind man standing at the classrooms more you
can see that, and there's we fire the candles.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
We must make sure that he had heard.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
But it fakesure dies.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
We are that.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
You play it in concert and you see people really
get hold of it and they're all saying we are,
And you think, wow, what that's how come that's taken
hold and and you start asking a few questions yourself
and thinking what does it mean to not just to me,
but to others?
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And it was always the song that was It was
like a little communion in the gig. It was this.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
It was the moment really when the sound and the
fury would come to an end, and our instinct there's
a band, or my instinct as the singer of the band, well.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Let's not leave everyone right, up there.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Let's just let's have a moment to calm it all
down and just celebrate in a really human way this
experience we've all had where the audience have given everything
to this band. They've I've jumped up on the stage,
They've given the physically, they've lost tons of weight jumping
them down to the band. They've sung along every word.
(35:09):
And I always remember saying, let's get down to the
front of the gig. Let's leave the drums behind there,
Let's get one acoustic guitar. We'll gather around the microphone
and we'll sing this song with the audience, and we'll
just enjoy what we've all just been through. And I
think that's how it seemed to us that we were
creating a little bit of light for ourselves in the darkness.
(35:31):
You know, we were again, as I say, in the
early eighties, it was a very dark time in Britain. Politically,
it was divisive. We saw all the politicians I saw.
I always thought politics were supposed to be about bringing
us together as a community and uniting people, and here
they were doing the complete opposite and really polarizing opinion.
(35:54):
And I think it was the first time, you know,
in the war time that you know, I wasn't that
there was only a couple of decades before US politics
brought everyone together, and then all of a sudden in
the sixties we started to see that division come and
I think it really became massive in the eighties and
(36:14):
so I think we all felt like.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Unsure of who we were.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
It felt very difficult to have an opinion because everyone
was telling you what to think. The government was telling
you who to vote for, the enemy was telling you
who to get behind, and it was very hard to
think for yourselves and find that light in the of
enlightenment that you needed. So we I think thinking back
(36:40):
to it now, that they were the moments that really
made the relationship. We have the audience strong, that little
communal moment when we just all sang together.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Sometimes we'd lose the power in a gig and we
just jump in the middle of the audience and it
was always we other light and we'd play that stood
in the middle of the audience and there was no amplification. Yeah,
he's no stage lights, just complete darkness. And that I
remember doing it in Hamburg and one of the most
amazing special nights of all time. And special moments because
(37:12):
it was taking us back to the simplicity of music.
We love Woody Guthrie in the simplicity of one person
with one guitar singing in the street with a message wonderful.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to
talk with me. That's a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Look forward to hearing the podcast now.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
All right, bye, thik you. Thank you so much for
listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful,
inspiring or thought provoking, I'd love for you to share
it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another
is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have
a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but
we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit
(37:53):
the share button on your podcast app or send a
quick text with the episode link to someone who might
enjoy it. Your support means world and together we can
spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for
being part of the one You Feed community.
When you take advice from someone else sometimes and you
go along with it, and you think it doesn't feel right, you.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
End up bang, they said, crash at the end of
the road.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:36):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(00:56):
how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Mike Peters was one of my earliest musical heroes. In
high school. I probably listened to his band The Alarm
more than any other. Their anthems of defiance, hope, and
inner strength were a soundtrack for those formative years and
later in life, Mike became a hero to me in
an even deeper way for how he faced thirty years
(01:22):
of blood cancer with astonishing grace, how he kept making
meaningful music, and how he gave his life to service
through his foundation, love, hope, strength. Sadly, Mike passed away yesterday,
so today's episode is more than a conversation. It's a
tribute to a beautiful soul. A few years ago I
(01:43):
had the great good fortune to sit down with him
before a show he was doing in Akron, Ohio. What
unfolded was an open hearted talk about what it means
to fight not just with force, but with love. We
talked about instinct as a spiritual guide, about staying true
to yourself when the world tries to pull you off course,
and about how music can be both a weapon and
(02:05):
a healing ball in a world that often glorifies noise
and speed. Mike's life and his music we're reminders that
strength can come from stillness, from surrender, and from the
simple act of standing up for light when everything around
you feels dark. I'm deeply grateful to have had this conversation.
I hope it brings you some of the strength that
(02:27):
Mike brought to me in my life and so many
others I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Mike,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Nice to be eh.
Speaker 4 (02:36):
I am very excited to have you on. I was
reading the other day you were talking about meeting Bruce Springsteen,
you know, and how you what it's like when you
meet somebody that you looked up to it at a
certain age. And so when I was sixteen, I was
a huge fan of The Alarm and have remained. So
it's a real honor to meet you and get to
sit down and talk with you. So our podcast is
(02:56):
called The One You Feed, and it's based on the
parable of two wolves, where they're as a grandfather who's
talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are
two wolves inside of us that are always a battle.
What is a good wolf which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second,
(03:17):
and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parable means to you in your own life and
in the work that you.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Do well well, Straight off the top of my head,
it means to feed the positive side of your personality,
which is something I've always tried to do throughout my
whole musical life and my life as an adult and
human being. And you know, raise my own kids in
a good way, treat the people I meet in the
(03:50):
way I want to be treated myself. You know, even
with an audience when I go on stage, I always
try to put myself in the audience and think, well,
what do they want from the show tonight, and and
just try to have as much respect for the other
people that come into the journey that I'm on in life.
(04:10):
And there's times when we walk the path together. Sometimes
people go off on their own and then they come back,
and it's allowed people to always be it one with
you as you in step and people come in step,
that's great. If they fall out a step, that's just life.
And if once they come back into line again, then
(04:31):
we just carry on. And I've never wanted to have
enemies in life. I don't think I've got any enemies,
and I've always tried to treat people with care and understanding,
and you know, and there's times when life has forced
(04:52):
people I know apart from me, and I always tried
to see everything from both sides of the story and
so that you can heal any rifts that happen in life,
so that when life brings you back together, which it
always does, either faithfully or through a strategy, you can
(05:13):
still have a relationship with people from your history without
ill will or rancor or bitterness. And it's all part
of life's rich pageant of understanding and learning and and
and that's the wolf.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I trying to feed.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Excellent. So you you sort of emerged onto the music scene.
You know, some of your songs refer to seeing the
sex pistols, seeing the clash, being involved in that scene.
And yet everything you know, from the very earliest alarm work,
there's a there's a positivity that in your music that
that just is expressed differently than a lot of that
(05:50):
other music. There's a there's a defiance in your music,
but there's a there's a clear positivity. Where did that
come from so early in your career?
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Well, I think you know, it's sometimes talk about it
on the stage when I'm playing the spirit of seventy six,
which was, you know, seeing the sex Pists and the
Clash in early seventy six seventy seven period when punk
broke into Britain. I saw both bands up close in
the earliest days. I saw the sex Pists in seventy
six in October seventy six, and it was a.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Life changing experience.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
And hearing Johnny Rotten sing anarchy pretty vacant submission.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
They sounded amazing, but I didn't know what the language meant,
and no one taught me what anarchy was in my
high school or submission. They were brand new words. I
heard them for the first time from the mouth of
Johnny Rotten and I went up to him at the
gig and asked him what anarchy in the UK meant
and he told to.
Speaker 4 (06:46):
F off and that's surprising.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
No it's not, but he I think he was his
way of just challenging me and smashing the free conceptions
and almost like slapping you across the face to weight
you up. And so that that was a big moment.
And then and then I did see the Clash in
nineteen seventy seven on the White Riot tour in the
Electric Circus in Manchester, and I was followed the tour
(07:11):
down to Barbarellas to sit. They were doing this sort
of secret gig there and they were supposed to play
at Birmingham rag Market and it got canceled but they
turned up and I was and they were playing a
secret gig in Bob Brella's and I could see the
amps going on. I knew they were going to come on,
and I went to the bathroom and I was stood
in the doing my thing in the toilet, and I
(07:31):
ended up stood next to Joe's Strummer and the whole
of the clash, and I asked Joe's Strummer on the
way out what White Riot was all about, And because
I didn't quite fully understand it from just hearing the record,
I thought, I did, you know internally and viscerally, but
right I didn't.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Know what a White Riot was.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And he said to me it was about the future,
and he gave me something positive back, and I think
so from having the sort of polarization of the seeing
the two bands, and that was really it was like
the flint, you know, it has created the fire that
the alarm came from the positive and the negative, and
I always leaned towards the positive. I always remember thinking,
(08:15):
if I meet somebody who comes up to me in
that way looking for advice, looking for a sign, a sign,
then I'll give them something positive back. And so I
wanted to put that into my music. I wanted it
to be uplifting for people, liberating for them if they
came to see a gig, especially if they were, you know,
(08:35):
young and naive like I was when I saw the Pistols.
I didn't know how to become a punk. There was
no manual. I didn't know how to get skin type
black jeans. I had to find them. And I didn't
have to get certain records. You had to go on
incredible journeys across Britain to get records.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And there was no Internet. It wasn't brought to your doorstep.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
And when we came on tour in America, you know,
I was from a small town. We had no spend
Arlie up bring in. Like the Pistols had had the
benefit of an older guy like Malcolm McLaren and Vivian
Westwood to dress them and Jamie Reid to do their artwork.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
We had none of that.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
The Clash had Bernie Rhodes and he'd been involved in
the Pistols camp and they were helping shape those bands
and shape the way, give them books to read, give
them clothes to wear, help them with their stance, and
the way educate them a little bit about when they
spoke to the media.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
We had none of that.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
We were just four kids from real North Wales who
wanted to be in a band and we learned our
lessons the hard way, and so we wanted our politic
if you liked, to be personal, and we wanted it
to be a message that the listener got that empowered
them a little bit or made them ask questions to
go and find their own answers. And again we grew
(09:51):
up in a very extreme political time in the eighties.
That was you know, came down from the iron Lady
at Margaret that and you know, we were brought up
in a very musically aggressive time in the music papers
in Britain that the enemy was very politicized in the eighties.
(10:11):
There was the minor strike and they were closing steel
works down and it was a tough time and every
band that walked into the enemy offices that was demanded
that they had the political rhetoric to back up what
they wanted to hear, and we weren't like that. Our
politics were different to that. It was easy to me
(10:31):
to write about the villains. They were all there on
the newspaper every day. You could knock them down easily.
But to write about somebody was struggling to make something
from nothing in the aftermath of the political turmoil. That
required a different sort of approach musically, and that was
what I was interested in. And you know, I think
(10:53):
I'm lucky that still people who come to see me
play now, who were at a gig in Omaha, Nebraska
have their life change by seeing the Alarm in a
positive way. Or someone who comes back to me and
say they were at the brink of doing something drastic
with a life and they put on the Strength album
as their last record before they were going to do
something they would regret, and it pulled them back from
(11:15):
the bring And to me, how having that those testimonies
come to me through the Internet now, through the Facebook
or the Alarm dot com. That's That's all I ever
wanted from our music was to touch people and be
meaningful to them and have some value.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
And so you are out now. We're sitting in Akron, Ohio.
You're going to play here in a little bit, and
you are a big part of what you're doing. Is
the thirtieth anniversary of the Strength record. I was curious
looking back on that record now and you've done some
re recording of it. What does the song Strength mean to
you today, thirty years after you wrote and recorded it
(11:55):
the first time?
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Who are like the.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Fire than any egavi? Who a life blood passing through
not read the fo doesn't never change, honey hole.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Well, it means it's more to me than it ever did,
because the in the opening lines, it says, who will
be the lifeblood coursing through my veins?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Now?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
That was more of a metaphoric line when I was
writing it in nineteen eighty five, but it's a literal
line for me now because I've had to live with
cancer for twenty years. You know, I'm at the point
in life where I might need to have a transplant
and have somebody else's lifeblood flowing through my veins. That's
a very real step in life I might have to
(13:10):
take at some point in the future. So when I
sing that song and particular that line, it always stops
me dead every night because it's literally come true in
my own life.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Now. One of the things that you did as you
have battled cancers, you founded the Love Strength and Hope,
Love Hope, Strength and Love Hope Strength. Thank you foundation
that has done a lot of work for people with cancer.
One of the things you've done is been registering a
lot of people to be as I understand bone Mirrow donors.
Will you be doing that at the show tonight? Yeah,
(13:43):
we will be tonight.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Always hosted donor register at a lot of gigs and
through the Charities Formation in two thousand and seven, we've
been able to it with over ten thousand other recording
working artists in the world, from Robert Plant and the
Foo Fighters, Enrique Glaz Frank Turner.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Yeah we had Frank on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
You know, we've worked with all Dropped Kick Murphy's, all
kinds of bands right down to the Alarm, and thousands
of bands you know that are just up and coming
who embrace what we do, which is we try to
turn rock concerts into life saving events by holding a
donuboo that those gigs, getting people to sign up to
the International Bow Donor Registree, by giving a cheek swab,
(14:27):
giving their information personal information so we can track them
in life if they're lucky enough to be called to
save the life of someone who has blood cancer like
leukemia like I have. And we've signed over one hundred
thousand people to the registry. We've we've found close to
eighteen hundred potentially life saving matches for people, and it's become,
(14:50):
you know, as much of my life's work as the
Alarm and you know. But it's a real communal effort.
It's run by volunteers. We haven't hardly got any staff.
I've got no staff in Britain. It's a completely voluntary
charity in the UK. But with America being so big
and we're working with so many bands every night, we've
(15:11):
got staff to facilitate some of it, but we still
rely on volunteers and public donation to help fund what
we do. We work in partnership with Delete Blood Cancer.
They're an organization with a massive donor registry and we
put the people we find our gigs who all get
on the list campaign onto their registry and so someone
(15:33):
who signs up to the show tonight in akro And
Ohio could become a life saver of someone in Britain
or Germany or anywhere in the world who matches their
DNA profile. And now if you do become a life
saving donor, it's just an outpatient procedure. Ninety nine percent
of the times is just giving blood in hospital and
it's an in and out procedure in the day, and
(15:54):
then your blood will then give someone life.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
Yeah, we'll definitely put on the show. Notes to the
page and all that links to the foundation and fantastic thanks.
In the two thousands there was some new alarm work.
I love the energy and the and the aggressiveness of
some of it. One of them is a song called
Situation is under Control.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
Everything is black and wide, there's the room sins all around,
everything is upside down.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
There's a corbook box with my feet.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I'm going through hell and I can't speak.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
I'm going through hell and I can't breathe. This situation
is under good trol.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
Everything is as it should be with that sent Can
you tell me a little bit about the what went
into the writing of that song and what was going
on with you when you wrote it.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, I think life was completely out of control when
I wrote that song.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
I had not long been diagnosed with leukemia, and I'd
just made an album for the longcle Under Attack, and
I didn't know really one hundred percent why my instinct
was telling me that was the album title.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
And we'd finished making the album.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
We'd recorded a video for every single song in twenty
four hours. It was an audio visual release as much
as it was just about the songs. I want people
to see the music as well as hear it. And
then all of a sudden I was diagnosed with leukemia.
For it was my second cancer diagnosis. I'd had lymphoma
(17:38):
before that, and I was off the charts ill and
I didn't know it, and I went into hospital with
some symptoms and then they wouldn't let me home. They
sent me immediately to another hospital for treatment to bring
me out of the danger zone. The doctors didn't had
even walked in the hospital. My blood was so thick
with what I thought was dead white blood at the
time that it was like oil it just and even moving.
(18:01):
And so I was taking to hospital to get out
of the critical region I was in. And while I
was there, my wife brought my iPod in so I
could have some music to play while I was going.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Through these procedures, and and I'd forgotten i'd put this.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Under Attack old mom while I was out and about
listening to it randomly to get a sequence going for
the record.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
And I was lying in the hospital. I was having
this pretty intense procedure called Luca Faresis, and I was.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Kind of in a bit of shock at the time
as well, and going under and my iPod was on
and this track came on. I didn't know what it was,
and it had the title came to the title and
it said I'll never give up without a fight, and
I knew that was that was the alarm that was
our new record, and and and then I realized that
(18:51):
I was so ill my subconscious was driving this record.
And and and then Situation Under Control was part of
a series of music we created. It was called counter Attack,
and it was like the opposite to Under Attack, where
I'd written the record under the pressure of cancer coming
into my life taking over. I decided to write music
(19:12):
that was my counter attack, So that was me fighting
back against the cancer, and songs like Situation Under.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Control were really me.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Writing music that gave me a mental arsenal to be
able to fight cancer.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
In my mind and.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Fight it psychologically as well as physically. And I think
I've always believed that music is a great tool to
have whenever you're facing any adversity in life.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
It can release you from some of the pressure.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
It can help you fortify yourself for that big day
that's coming up, or when you've got to face that
situation that you're nervous about. You can play that favorite
piece of music and it lifts you up and you
that little bit of courage to face the day. And
so the situation and the control and the counter attacks
(20:08):
it was. The music was really my way of being
able to put myself in a position to stand up
to cancer.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
You've battled cancer twice, you know, so you're still battling it, right.
That's got to take a toll. You remain so outwardly positive,
where do you turn when you are really internally struggling,
when you just you know that that optimism isn't there.
What do you turn to to give you the strength
that you're then able to project out in the music.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I'm lucky to have a really solid life outside of
rock and roll. I've got a really strong relationship with
my wife. He's my best friend, we've been married for
twenty eight years. You know, we met, we got engaged
within a week and nothing has to We've been tested
and tested all through life in that time, but nothing
has ever tours apart from each other. And we've got
(21:00):
two beautiful boys that we've had to fight hard to get.
I had to go through my wife had to go
through IVF to get the kids. Because of all situations
we've been in. She's been to kill a Manjara with me,
help build an accounts center in Dorslom in Africa, and
suffered a DVT, nearly lost a life on the way
back from Africa, and we've both been through an incredible
(21:23):
amount together and we fall back into each other when
when we're really struggling to cope with certain situations in
life as they crop up. But I always feel grateful
for the life I've got because my music started out
life as a hobby and it still is a hobby
(21:43):
for me.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
It's still my passion.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
It's still where I would go if I had a
normal nine to five job, I'd be playing in the
garage at night, or setting up a gear at the
weekend and ripping into a gig because I love it,
and that's and I'm very lucky that I can express
myself within my passionate thing in life every day. And
I'm also grateful for the life I can come home
(22:06):
to and I've got people there who love me. You
understand me, You'll stand up for me when the stones
are getting thrown, you know, which is because that's what happens.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That's what you put your head above the parapet in
rock and.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Roll, And it's not always praise. Stones are thrown as well,
and you know, you have to have a really good
fall back to be able to cope with that, because
it is hurtful at times, you know, and you see
it from people who love you the most musically, they
can still want to tear you down and challenge everything
(22:40):
you do. And you can't please all the people all
of the time, as the famous American quote goes, But
so you need that. And when I close the door
on rock and roll, when I come home and I
see my boys and it's the best thing in the world.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
How old are they know?
Speaker 1 (22:59):
My boys are eight and a Dylan and ever. They're
into music. They play piano and drums and guitar. They
brought up to see it as a hobby like I am.
And they come to the shows with jewels and we're very,
very very close.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
Wonderful's funny how they shoot you down with your hands.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Out of mine and you want put up your hard asshole.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
But that's not enough.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Foremos I've renne.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
But this much.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Now they shoots two cards.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
They have got some of the ship. I no want
to be scanned out to scan them out of the
Going out in a blazer.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Cory Bound, don't word. You can tell anything that you
want from me. There is nothing left to hide.
Speaker 5 (23:50):
Going out in.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
A blaser Cory Man's out of mine.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
I'm learning out in it back, I'm learning out.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Tell me about the song Blaze of Glory.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Well, that was written really when we first played with
You Too. It was on the water and we played
with them in December nineteen eighty two, just before New
Year's Day came out as a single and the album
wasn't out to eighty three, and we played a momentous
night with them in London, and one of the songs
(24:29):
that were new to their audience and them as a
band was a song.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Called Surrender that was the theme of war. I think
you know.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Bonna described it as like a you know, slap in
the face against pop music was his quote.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
But really it was.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Seeing war as a different from a different perspective, seeing
war from the through the color, well without the color
with a white flag, the war where people surrender to win,
And that was what Bonner was putting across in that music.
And I saw them rip to pieces in the music
(25:07):
press in Britain, and I think it was really it
was only because I think people were envious of the
fact that they were taking their music to America and
they were starting to help other bands. I think the
British press thought it was their preserve to make or
break bands. And all of a sudden, the band like
You Two came along and opened the door for unknown
(25:29):
musicians like the Alarm to get to America for the
first time, which we did. We came with them in
nineteen eighty three. No one had heard of us in America.
We were almost unknown in Britain. We had our first
hit record in America because of the tour we did
with You Too, and you two were going on the
radio and championing the Alarms record the Stand and saying
don't play Newyear's Day, play the band that are opening
(25:51):
for us tonight.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Come and see them.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
They're amazing, and they were breaking us and they were
creating their own power base. And the music press in
Britain didn't like it one bit, and they started trying
to smash them, and they tore them down.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
I could see and I had.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
This image, saw this image Uponna with his arms held high,
surrender on the water, and the line came into my head.
It's funny how they shoot you down when your hands
are held up high, because up to that point you
two have been praised, and all of a sudden, here
they were on the verge of breaking and they were
being torn apart. And it was so obvious to the
(26:25):
world that you set them up, you knock them down.
And it was such a cliche. And here's the music
press accusing bands like you too being cliched when they
were pulling out all the cliches in the book. There
was no depth to the criticism of you two. It
was just targeted at them. They would target their Christianity
or target the fact that we're selling out playing huge gigs,
(26:49):
and it wasn't the same anymore, and there was no
real balance to it. So that prompted the line it's
funny how they shoot you down when your hands are
held up high. But the song really became more than
that when the full lyrics came down and it was
all I think. It's all about really staying strong, believe
(27:10):
in yourself. You know when out first went out as
a punk rocker and real and ripped up my jacket
and went out.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
With safety pins.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
People want to tear you down because they're scared of
the way you look, but you have and it's easy
to back down to that kind of peer pressure. It's
easy to give in and think, oh, I'll just go
along with the flow of the river and I look
like everyone else and life will be easier.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
But life isn't like that.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
You have to have courage to take those steps forward
out of the crowd, to find your own.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
In a self, find you the place where you belong
in life.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Because we're all brought up in the image of our parents,
and really we're all individual and we want to be ourselves.
And some people they give in to the peer pressure
and they suppress who they really are. So we wanted
our songs to liberate people, allow them to find the courage.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
And be who you really want to be.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
Yeah, there's a sense in a lot of your music.
I'll say this, a military sense in that there's there's
a lot of marching you you you put on the
camouflage when you were battling cancer. There's there's those sort
of analogies. And yet there's maybe the right word that
you used is is you know, fighting war by surrendering.
But I've always been sort of amazed how you've managed
to weave those two things together in a really powerful way. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
I don't know how we've done it. Really, it has
always been there, and I don't know why.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I don't know. I think we fit. The first thing
that I sort of got into where I remember seeing.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
The Who with medals on their jackets and that was
pop art, and I remember putting some medals on my jacket,
and then I and then I will I saw. I
got into this sort of seeing the sixties psychedelia thing
and people were those red guardsman's jacket and that was
sort of the start of our early look in the
(29:04):
alarm of Western psychedelia look. But the term military got
attached to us rather than pop art psychedelia, and I
think that there was that I think our image didn't
help on music in some ways because I think it
threw up some conflicts that that people would read these
lyrics and they wouldn't quite kind of lie with the
(29:25):
big hair or the over the top look that we
had on stage because we all adopted it and it
was it was very the front line of the band
was it was all attack, it was all out bang,
and we didn't have a John Entwistle like the who
did that we could be the polar opposite of We
(29:45):
had three guys flowing themselves around the stage and there
wasn't the quiet member, you know, the who amplified the
power of the individual in the band.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
We came across like for like a gang.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah, and I think and we weren't really a gang
that I think when people met as they could see
that we were all quite different. But we did have
this gang mentality that came out of the look of
the band and the way we are played on stage.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
And I don't think that helped some of the subtlety
that was in the music in.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
A way, which is you know, as you go through
life and you know that you make a record in
the eighties, it stays, it stays in the eighties. But
you write a song in the eighties, it lives beyond that.
It comes alive in the nineties, comes.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
Alive again as you get older in life.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
And that's what interests me about the Alarms music, not
just what we made in the eighties, but what it
continues to be today.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how you interpret
that music this evening. What would you say is the
lesson that's taken you the longest to learn in life?
Speaker 2 (30:58):
To keep my mouth?
Speaker 1 (31:02):
You know, I always have an I always have been
brought up to be answer people politely. And if someone
answers your question and you ask answered it back, and
sometimes I should just stay quiet.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
One of the things we talk about on the show
a lot is we talk about spirituality being this very
nebulous thing. Does does the words spiritual have any meaning
to you? And if so, what what does that word
mean to you?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
I equate it with with with faith.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Really, I'm in faith that life is going to work
out the way you hope it is going to work out.
And you know, some people think in the short term
and some people I think in the long term, and
I like to think I've fall in the latter cads agree.
And so I've always trusted my instinct in life, and
I think that sometimes gets confused with spirituality. Is I
(31:52):
think instinct is a very powerful force and it's and
if you can learn to trust your instinct, then you
won't go far wrong in life. And there's so many
outside forces you makers distrust ourselves and on the way
we think as individuals that it's easy to be sidestepped
(32:14):
from your mission in life and your goals or what
your your hopes are. Again, I think spirituality I think
of as instinct really, and you know, I try to
always try to follow me instinct. And when I've really
followed my instinct is it's never very rarely let me down,
if ever. And when you take advice from someone else
(32:37):
sometimes and you go along with it and you think
it and you think it doesn't feel right, and you
end up bang, it's a crash at the end of
the road, and you think, why didn't I trust Why
didn't I trust myself?
Speaker 4 (32:51):
Yeah, And so last question, I think the song we
Are the Light, that's sort of what I took from that.
You know, we are the light of our lives, We're
our own light.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
I think. So, Yeah, that was written for declaration. It
was written in in London.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
It was a little folk song I put together in
a major key, and I think that's what I was
trying to get to. I didn't understand spirituality or instinct
so much in nineteen eighty one when we moved to
London and eighty two when that song was written.
Speaker 5 (33:23):
There's a bad who was standing on the corner for
he cannot see.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
There's a blind man standing at the classrooms more you
can see that, and there's we fire the candles.
Speaker 4 (33:44):
We must make sure that he had heard.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
But it fakesure dies.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
We are that.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
You play it in concert and you see people really
get hold of it and they're all saying we are,
And you think, wow, what that's how come that's taken
hold and and you start asking a few questions yourself
and thinking what does it mean to not just to me,
but to others?
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And it was always the song that was It was
like a little communion in the gig. It was this.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
It was the moment really when the sound and the
fury would come to an end, and our instinct there's
a band, or my instinct as the singer of the band, well.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Let's not leave everyone right, up there.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Let's just let's have a moment to calm it all
down and just celebrate in a really human way this
experience we've all had where the audience have given everything
to this band. They've I've jumped up on the stage,
They've given the physically, they've lost tons of weight jumping
them down to the band. They've sung along every word.
(35:09):
And I always remember saying, let's get down to the
front of the gig. Let's leave the drums behind there,
Let's get one acoustic guitar. We'll gather around the microphone
and we'll sing this song with the audience, and we'll
just enjoy what we've all just been through. And I
think that's how it seemed to us that we were
creating a little bit of light for ourselves in the darkness.
(35:31):
You know, we were again, as I say, in the
early eighties, it was a very dark time in Britain. Politically,
it was divisive. We saw all the politicians I saw.
I always thought politics were supposed to be about bringing
us together as a community and uniting people, and here
they were doing the complete opposite and really polarizing opinion.
(35:54):
And I think it was the first time, you know,
in the war time that you know, I wasn't that
there was only a couple of decades before US politics
brought everyone together, and then all of a sudden in
the sixties we started to see that division come and
I think it really became massive in the eighties and
(36:14):
so I think we all felt like.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Unsure of who we were.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
It felt very difficult to have an opinion because everyone
was telling you what to think. The government was telling
you who to vote for, the enemy was telling you
who to get behind, and it was very hard to
think for yourselves and find that light in the of
enlightenment that you needed. So we I think thinking back
(36:40):
to it now, that they were the moments that really
made the relationship. We have the audience strong, that little
communal moment when we just all sang together.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Sometimes we'd lose the power in a gig and we
just jump in the middle of the audience and it
was always we other light and we'd play that stood
in the middle of the audience and there was no amplification. Yeah,
he's no stage lights, just complete darkness. And that I
remember doing it in Hamburg and one of the most
amazing special nights of all time. And special moments because
(37:12):
it was taking us back to the simplicity of music.
We love Woody Guthrie in the simplicity of one person
with one guitar singing in the street with a message wonderful.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to
talk with me. That's a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Look forward to hearing the podcast now.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
All right, bye, thik you. Thank you so much for
listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful,
inspiring or thought provoking, I'd love for you to share
it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another
is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have
a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but
we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit
(37:53):
the share button on your podcast app or send a
quick text with the episode link to someone who might
enjoy it. Your support means world and together we can
spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for
being part of the one You Feed community.
Host
Eric Zimmer
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