WAKE UP! IT'S THE ALARM

WAKE UP! IT'S THE ALARM

FEATURES

by

Harold DeMuir

Mike Peters, the Alarm’s frontman and most-interviewed member, may well possess the sunniest disposition in all of pop music. Not only is he notoriously receptive to criticism of his band, he’s even been known to greet the Alarm’s harshest critics with the sort of genuine warmth that’s normally reserved for close friends. I’ve been giving Mike a hard time about the Alarm for years, yet the singer has never been anything less than friendly— once he even phoned me after an interview to tell me that I was right about some point he’d disputed earlier.

The rock press has been ragging on the Welsh quartet consistently, ever since the youthful adrenalin buzz of the group’s early import singles wore off, Critics charged that the Alarm naively presented themselves as inheritors of a tradition of earnest political rock without possessing the musical or ideological goods to back up such bravura; that the band’s vaunted socio-political stance was vague and illdefined, making the casual military imagery of songs like “68 Guns” and “Marching On” all the more disturbing; that their live shows consisted of a series of awkward and ultimately meaningless self-aggrandizing gestures. All of this got the Alarm branded as naive anthemmongers or, worse, a cynically watereddown version of U2 (who, incidentally, were early Alarm mentors, giving the young band their first stateside exposure on U2’s 1983 summer tour).

Eye Of The Hurricane, the Alarm’s third and latest album (a self-titled 1983 EP, the following year’s Declaration and 1985’s Strength complete the catalogue) goes a long way toward addressing many of the criticisms raised by the band’s media tormentors, and finally begins to justify some of the grandiose talk bandied about in the Alarm’s early interviews. The four longtime pals from Rhyl (Peters, guitarist Dave Sharp, bassist Eddie Macdonald—who co-writes most of the songs with Peters—and drummer Nigel Twist) have eased up on the strident shouting and relaxed a bit—these days, they’d sooner bask in the quiet glory of seemingly routine events (as they do on the LP’s first single “Rain In The Summertime”) than scream about saving the world. And the tracks on which the band does slip into their anthem mode (e.g. “Shelter,” whose liberal borrowings from the Rolling Stones we won’t discuss here) ring considerably truer than their bootstomping predecessors. And, while much of the album’s sound is more tech no-flavored than its predecessors, the overall effect is closer to the Alarm’s best live moments than any of the prior discs.

So here I am interviewing Mike and Dave, both of whom are clearly thrilled with the Alarm’s current direction (though not, apparently, with their business situation—they’ll part company with longtime manager Ian Wilson a few weeks after this chat). The pair’s matching leather jeans bespeak the sort of unity that must have seemed unthinkable after the Strength tour, when the band, beset by personal tensions, took an extended break and undertook what Peters describes as “quite a lengthy period of soul-searching within the group, which left us feeling like we’ve really found a new footing for the Alarm.”

Thete was talk that the Alarm had divided into warring factions (Mike and Eddie vs. Dave and Twist) and reports of an imminent split circulated in the British music press, but Sharp denies that the situation ever got that bad. “Stories like that were just blown out of all proportion,” he says. “All that was happening was that we were reassessing the band, and people interpreted that as the band being in danger of breaking up. It angers me that people will interpret things for their own gains, but there’s not a lot we can do about it.”

Once they’d ironed out their interpersonal problems, the band did a threeweek U.K. tour that went a long way toward restoring their confidence. “We wanted to go out and play and really find the spirit of the band before we recorded the album,” explains Peters. “We hadn’t done anything in Britain for 18 months, we didn’t have any records out, and we advertised it all locally, but it ended up being the biggest and best tour we’d ever done. We were playing all stand-up venues, and we set the places alight. It was a much different Alarm—the gigs were more humble, and there was more humility,”

The Alarm finished the tour in London, and went into the recording studio the following day. Peters: “Because people had put a load of stories around that we were gonna split up, we started thinking, ‘Yeah, what if it is all over tomorrow?’ So we all sat down together and said, ‘Just supposing this was the last record we ever made. If this is gonna be our last opportunity to make a record, then let’s go and make a record that we’ll be really proud of.’ ”

Toward that end, the band engaged the services of producer John Porter, whose previous clients include Roxy Music and the Smiths. “When we met him,” Peters recalls, “he said, ‘Look, as far as I’m concerned, being a producer could mean anything from doing the whole record to just making the tea.’ That’s just the attitude we were looking for.”

Peters calls Eye Of The Hurricane “the hardest record we’ve ever had to make, but also the most rewarding. I know that when people hear it, they’re gonna say, ‘Oh, it sounds really different.’ It does sound different, but I think that if you put it up against everything we’ve ever done, it ties up the whole circle.

“The son<3 that sums up this whole record for me is ‘One Step Closer To Home’ (a Sharp tune that’s long been a staple of live shows but which makes its vinyl debut in a live version on Hurricane). We had that song when we did Declaration, but we knew we couldn’t record it until we got home. And this album is that song—it’s almost as if that song was waiting for this record to fit in.”

The Alarm’s over-the-top gung-ho stage attack, long a source of problems with critics, is largely a thing of the past, says Sharp. “Before, we’d all get onstage and go ‘Charrrge!!!’ We don’t have to do that anymore, because we know our strengths and our weaknesses, both as artists and as people. We’re letting each other breathe morte, and we’re letting the band breathe. Thdre’s no point in trying to make things happen, because they’ll either happen or they won’t.”

“We’ve played 10, 11 years together, and now we know that we can just be the Alarm and something will happen,” agrees Peters. “In the past, we tended to try and force things, and we tried to beat people into submission. Now we know that we’re good enough to get people’s attention, and we’ve come to appreciate that what we do is good enough in itself, without us polishing it up for public consumption.”

Peters maintains that the group’s attitude toward commercial 'success ha^ changed as well. “When we made Strength, we all said, ‘Yeah, it’s gonna go gold In America and it’s gonna be a big hit in Britain.’ And when those things didn’t happen, we got very disillusioned, and eventually we realized that we had no right to have those preconceptions in the first place. On this record, we made it a point not to think about having a hit— we didn’t set our sites any higher than making a record we feel good about.

“In the past,” the vocalist continues, “we always wanted to be #1, we always wanted to be the most-added record. But we don’t give a monkey’s about that kind of thing anymore. We just want to enjoy being in the Alarm. And that’s gonna be reflected when people see the group live now. We’re not gonna be trying to say the right things just to get a rise out of the crowd—we’re just gonna walk out on stage and be ourselves and see what happens.”

“In the past, we always wanted to be #1.. .but we don’t give a monkey’s about that kind of thing anymore. ”

—Mike Peters

“We certainly found out who our friends were during that period,” says

That ought to be good enough for the foursome’s fans, who are a decidedly fanatical lot. “When we went out and did the British tour before the record,” says Sharp, “I felt like crying when I saw how strong the support was. We really needed our audience at that point, and they really came through for us. We’d always known that there was a really strong relationship, but to actually see how strong it was was pretty touching.” Peters. “The fans knew that the stories about us splitting up were untrue, they knew it would never happen. I think it made us realize that we’ve got something rare, and that we can’t take it for granted. We went to our audience and said ‘Look, we need you,’ and they responded.”

The always-optimistic Peters seems even more positive than usual when assessing the Alarm’s future. “We’ve gone through our apprenticeship, and now this record marks the beginning of the new Alarm,” he beams. “We feel like a real band now, which we probably never did before. We all probably felt, ‘How long will we be together? What’s gonna happen in the future?’ Whereas now we know that it’s the four of us, and that it’s only ever gonna be the four of us. We’ve been through ups and downs and we’ve been through a big crisis, and it’s made us a better group.

“I think it’s important that we’re not taking the Alarm for granted anymore. We did take it for granted for a little while, and that’s something we don’t intend to let happen again. It probably will, but at least we’re prepared, and we can recognize the signs when they come along. It’s a very exciting time for the Alarm at the moment, and we’re probably getting on better than we ever have before. I don’t know what kinds of records we’re gonna make in the future, and we don’t really know what we’re capable of yet, but I think we’ve got an idea with this record, and I feel confident that we’re gonna be making some great music together.”