NOTHING IN HERE BUT ALARM CLOCKS

NOTHING IN HERE BUT ALARM CLOCKS

FEATURES

Karen Schlosberg

When last we saw the Alarm, they were indeed going out in a blaze of glory, having released a debut album that received mostly favorable critical attention (in the States, that is, but that’s another story...) and solidified and enlarged their core of tremendously devoted fans.

The Welsh quartet has been pounding the boards for four-and-a-half years, diving image-first into the brave new postpunk frontier and slowly but surely developing their own individual sound and style. The band’s 1983 EP and 1984’s Declaration LP were sweeping statements generalizing socio-politicoemotional feelings into powerful, anthemic tunes for our times. Funny thing was, the songs worked.

That description obviously didn’t—and now certainly doesn’t—do the Alarm justice, and they were—and still aren’t— everyone’s proverbial cup of tea. But the fact remains that they are paid attention to by friend and foe alike. There’s something about them that demands attention; something that demands emotion; something that demands a response from behind whatever barriers people build between themselves and the world. And the Alarm have a singular ability to touch deep down in your heart for the truth that inevitably lies there.

Pretty heavy for a rock journalist...There again, a knee-jerk cynical response to cover for a moment of intensity. That, in a nutshell, is the reaction a lot of media folks have to the Alarm. Wading through the Alarm’s press (mostly British) is like taking an acid bath. Yet the foursome (singer/songwriter/guitarist Mike Peters, bassist/songwriter/singer Eddie MacDonald, guitarist/singer/songwriter Dave Sharp and drummer Nigel Twist) have retained an optimism and faith that are almost saintly. How do they do it? Exercise, eat right?

"We're too honest, too nice and don't tell lies." — Mike Peters

“Just believe in ourselves, really, that’s it,” says Peters, with a shrug, smiling. It’s the morning after an immensely satisfying show in Boston, with the interview taking place around a road manager packing and a porter clearing out. Peters, as usual, remains unfazed. He notes recent large features in the U.K.’s two major music papers that were angry and apologetic about the bad press the Alarm had been getting.

The reporter’s answer as to why the band had been slagged, Peters says, is “because we’re too honest, too nice and don’t tell lies. He said, ‘you’re not calculating.’ A lot of clever pop stars will take journalists to places where it’ll build up their image and make the artist seem self-important and make the journalist feel intimidated. And I won’t do that. I just sit down and do my bit.

“I don’t know why people hate us so much,” he continues, then adds with a bit of quintessential Mike Peters thinking, “but I think at least that says a lot for our music as well, because there’s no halfand-half reaction, which is good. And I also think that these people who can’t stand the band will respect us eventually, because we’re not going to change from being what we are. If they then give the band a chance and maybe try and understand what we do, I think they’ll have a lot more respect for us.”

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That reasoning is, as we say, quintessential Mike Peters, because he is absolutely determined to keep believing in himself and keep the band believing in themselves; he is determined to stay away from the jaded trap most bands fall into; he is determined to continue to look at situations with a fresh and interested eye. His mental energy and sheer will are awe-inspiring. We’ve seen him take negative—shall we say constructive—criticism and either accept it gracefully if well-founded, or present a logical opposing viewpoint, thereby reducing the critic’s position to that much sand. His willingness to appear vulnerable and to remain sincere is simply not believed by a lot of the press who have, no doubt, seen too many bands they trusted turn around and in some way, shape or imagined form betray them. Therefore, as protection, they automatically assume anyone who tells a truth is lying.

Oh, well. Their loss.

The Alarm, meanwhile, have been—if you’ll pardon the expression—soldiering on with the release of their second LP, Strength, which has not only gotten them more attention at the grass-roots fans level, but at a crucial commercial level, too. At press time, the album had already gone into the Top 50 and AOR and progressive stations and MTV were playing the title single with pleasantly surprising (no, I wasn’t going to say alarming) regularity.

Strength had been 20 months in coming, which included time for a change in producers (the father of original choice Jimmy lovine died, causing a six-month delay and the search for successor Mike Howlett), intensive interband critical evaluations, intensive soul-searching, rewrites and an unusual full British tour during which they asked their fans’ advice. The result is a nearly perfect second album and follow-up to Declaration, reflecting many of the same themes and concerns, but this time with an individual perspective as opposed to a group voice.

‘‘On Declaration all the songs were from personal experience,” Peters says, ‘‘but I didn’t put them into the same language as what I was really seeing. I put them into different situations and hid behind the character in the song, and with Strength I tried to come out and say, ‘Here I am, then.’”

Nearly all of Strength's songs contain personal, almost confessional elements that were sometimes—you realize this as Peters explains their inceptions—acutely intimate journals of beliefs or emotions scraped with sandpaper. It’s clear enough on songs like ‘‘Knifedge,” ‘‘Strength,” ‘‘Only The Thunder,” ‘‘Walk Forever By My Side” and especially ‘‘Dawn Chorus.”

‘‘It’s quite from personal experience,” Peters says of ‘‘Dawn Chorus.” ‘‘I couldn’t get to sleep one night and I started to write a song; I had all these things on my mind. I’m terrible to room with because I get up and start playing the guitar and wandering around the room”—earlier he had described being inspired, again in the middle of the night, to write the chorus for “Strength,” which prompted him to run out of his Newcastle hotel room in his jammies to grab his guitar from the bus, run back upstairs and wake his roomie roadie with his musical muse—“I went through a lot of big things at the time,” he says, and pauses. “I’d come to America—I believe in God, and coming to America really confused me, because I came face to face with about 5,000 religions all professing the same belief in the same God and I saw massive hypocrisy across a whole lot of them. That was massively confusing and it really threw me for a while. And I was going through a [rough time] with personal relationships. And that’s what came out of that song.

“It was a tremendous relief to finish it,” Peters says, chuckling, “and. to go through the whole thing made me a much better person. I treat people better now than I used to; I used to be terrible with relationships when I was growing up, but now I’m a lot better.

“My aim is to strike the raw nerves. That’s where the music is at its best, I think, and that’s what I want to do,” Peters explains. “I’ve seen so many people come up to me, and in the really moving letters I’ve had, and really open themselves up, you know; they’ve really stuck the knife into their heart and spilled themselves all over the stage.

I feel I should share my experiences in the same way as the audience has shared their experiences with me. I don’t know; that’s the way I feel at the moment about music.”

The songs on Strength that aren’t emotionally personal are historically personal, for want of a more trendy phrase like political. The emotional growth can be seen from songs like “Marching On,” “68 Guns,” “Shout To The Devil” and “Blaze Of Glory” to “Knifedge,” “Dawn Chorus,” “Strength” and “Only The Thunderd”; the sociological songs in “Across The Border,” “Life Of The Land,” “For Freedom” and “Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke?” to “Deeside,” “Father To Son” and “Spirit Of 76.”

“We have written about subjects that are very political in themselves,” Peters says. “Our politics are like blood of the land politics, if you like. I’ve written about subjects that affect those people where I live. If you’ve grown up in North Wales and you’ve just come out of school, you can join the forces and either go and get ‘Third Light’-ed (a MacDonald song from Declaration) or you get sent ‘Across The Border’ed (a Sharp song from the EP)—you go and do your spell in Northern Ireland—or you end up in Shotton, that’s the Deeside steelworks, and then you become redundant (laid off) anyway, or you don’t get any of those things at all and your life becomes nothing. Or you can try to do something about that and rise above it. That’s what I’ve written about; they are highly political subjects but I’ve tried to write about them from the people’s side who are affected by the political decisions. I’m not a political person; I don’t have massive political ideologies, but I’m aware of the effects politics has on people and what it does.”

Peters grew up sports-mad (football; that is, soccer here), gradually becoming acquainted with music through his older sister’s boyfriend’s guitar lessons (“I never forgot the three chords he taught me”) and slowly learning to love it. But it was the punk movement, specifically a Sex Pistols show across the English border in Chester, that led him astray from the settled life of a computer operator to that of a spiky-haired singer in a rock ’n’ roll band.

“I knew I wanted to write about that time,” Peters says. “The music that happened in 76, 77 is probably the most important thing that’s happened to our generation, and nobody’s tackled it. There was so much hope in that time, it woke up an amazing feeling of inspiration in people, but there was a downside of it, like what it’s become now. It’s completely the opposite of what it started out as. People now see it as this disgusting nihilistic thing, which it wasn’t when it started. And I wanted to come to terms with it because it meant so much to me—I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for that period.”

“The Spirit Of 76” is Peters’ biographical account of that period, and something of a turning point on Strength. It was written about his friends and the sometimes mixed results of living through those years. It wasn’t easy being a punk in the small towns, Peters says, where changes come slowly if at all. “To look like a punk rocker in North Wales was like committing suicide,” he says, laughing.

There are a lot of electronic reasons why the song order on Strength exists as such (big sounds need more plastic), but the order listens like it would have been selected like that anyway.

After working the song order out technically for sound and timing, Peters says, “when I put the body of work together and looked at it lyrically you could almost say it’s almost a concept album as well,” he laughs, treading quietly on that word “concept.” “It hit me then that you could see it like that, not so much concept, but there’s a thread running right the way through. It starts off being on the knife edge and ends up with someone coming home. It’s almost a day-in-the-life album.”

As those who had a chance to see the Alarm during a short hop through the States in November and December know, the band has progressed not just lyrically but musically, performing shows that constantly change and reevaluate. Their look has softened and they’ve loosened up a bit with their growing and justified self-confidence.

“It’s a serious business making records,” Peters says, “because you make a bad one and it’s bye-bye.” He laughs. “So you can get too caught up in it—everything’s got to be massive big statements, you know. You just need to be able to relax in the situation. That’s what I’m learning to do now, to not take it all too seriously.”

And the band’s ultimate goal?

Peters laughs. “I’d like just to be remembered fondly.”