The Alarm's Mike Peters opens up about album he wrote in cancer ward: "I thought, 'This is it. … I'm probably not getting out of here.'"
"I didn't want the album to be about where I've been; I wanted it to be about where I was going," says the four-time cancer survivor of 'Forwards.'
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Mike Peters, frontman for Welsh post-punk band the Alarm and the voice of triumphant anthems like “The Stand,” “68 Guns,” and “Strength,” has always been a “glass-is-half-full kind of guy.” That’s why when he was first diagnosed with lymph cancer in 1995, with doctors telling him he had “only a half-chance” of survival, he rejected treatment and went on tour anyway. He somehow went into spontaneous remission and made a miraculous recovery, but a decade later, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. That time, he underwent treatment, but that still didn’t stop him from going back on the road.
It seemed nothing could stop Peters — or his wife and Alarm bandmate Jules, a fellow cancer survivor — until September 2022. That’s when Mike found himself back at North Wales Cancer Centre, this time for “a few months,” and he began to wonder if his luck had finally run out. “I could see it in [my doctors’] eyes that they were thinking the worst,” Peters tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I thought, ‘This is it. … I'm probably not coming back, and I'm probably not getting out of here.’”
Thankfully, Peters bucked the odds yet again — for a fourth time — and the result is the Alarm’s passionate new album Forwards, written almost entirely during Peters’s latest scary hospital ordeal.
The first real sign that Peters’s leukemia had returned last year occurred during the Alarm’s 40th anniversary tour, when he developed “a cough that never stopped.” Recalls Peters, “I was very tired on the tour and I was sleeping a lot during the day, and we were playing pretty intense shows. A lot of the time I woke up with severe night sweats, which is always a big giveaway that something terrible is happening. And of course, it was.”
However, Peters says he missed the early signs of his cancer relapse as “probably a result of the pandemic, really, because I wasn't allowed to see my doctors; it was all telephone consultations and going off the stats of blood counts, so the big picture was being overlooked — not anybody's fault, just that's how it was for a lot of people in lockdown. And when I finally got to go into hospital, it became apparent that there were a lot of things out of control.”
Returning home from the tour in rough shape, Peters underwent an X-ray that revealed he had “very aggressive pneumonia, quite far advanced, in both my lungs.” But it wasn’t until he got a CT scan that doctors learned of “all the underlying causes that were going on besides pneumonia. When I got through to the end of the new first pneumonia cycle, I thought, ‘It's not getting better. The cough isn't going away.’ I kept phoning the doctors and they'd say, ‘Oh, give it time. You need to rest more. We know you — you'll be working when you should be resting!’ But it got out of hand, and I realized I couldn't even walk out the door. Jules took me for a walk one day and I got a hundred yards and had to turn back. I couldn't even cross a sports field to see my son play. And so Jules got me in the hospital the next day, and then they did the CT scans and the full range of testing. And it became clear that I was in a desperate situation. What looked like at first another case of pneumonia was actually blood that had filled my lungs. It was much more severe than a case of pneumonia. I was in a bad place. Luckily, they were able to get me straight onto the wards. I had a drain put into my back, which wasn't a nice procedure, to get inside my lungs and drain off all the blood. And that was it: I knew I was going to be in the hospital for a long time.”
Once Peters was admitted to the cancer center, doctors feared his “disease was mutating into something far more aggressive, another form of leukemia called Richter’s Syndrome.” Luckily, that turned out not to be the case, but doctors didn’t want to give Peters “false hope” as he faced what appeared to be his most difficult cancer fight yet. “I was in such a bad place. I was dependent on drugs that were killing me, really — the drugs that kept me alive started to kill me. And my glands were out here and I looked like the Elephant Man.”
Peters was only allowed one visitor a day, for one hour per day, and that visitor — his wife of 35 years, Jules — began filming Peters’s harrowing experience, “kind of documenting it for her own sanity, really.” Jules even asked Mike on camera if this was “the end of the road,” to which he answered with his typical optimism, “No, it's the beginning of a new road.” But he admits now, “It could have been [the end]; we couldn't pretend otherwise. We had to face up to the fact that it was very real.” Mike’s long cancer journey had already been the subject of several documentaries — including Mike Peters on the Road to Recovery, Mike and Jules: While We Still Have Time (which also chronicled Jules’s 2016 breast cancer battle), and The Man in the Camo Jacket — but the short film Jules made from her 2022 footage is especially “a hard watch,” says Mike. He’s still not sure if it will be screened outside of the Gathering, the Alarm’s annual weekend concert event for superfans. Says Peters of the film, “It’s quite an emotional rollercoaster, because you do see the extent of how far I'd fallen before I recovered.”
However, Forwards is a much more upbeat document of the Alarm singer’s “long road to recovery.” Bored in isolation in the cancer ward, Peters “asked the nurses, ‘Do you think I could have my guitar brought in?’” And the rest was history. But the famous workaholic insists that the album “started accidentally, really. I'd asked for my guitar just purely to keep my fingers active and to keep myself amused. … You had to really dig deep to survive, and by playing a bit of music, I was creating my own soundtrack of hope to keep me going.” At first Peters thought he “could just strum quietly and it's not going to disturb [other patients’ recoveries]… but the nice thing was the nursing staff and the other patients were shouting out, ‘Hey, can you play a bit louder? Don't turn it down because of us!’” Eventually he was playing along to “all the noises of the hospital, and the heart-rate monitor going ‘beep-beep’ and the alarms going off became like a little rhythm track.” And he started “secretly using [the patients and hospital staff] as a bit of an acid test to see if [my new songs] were any good or not,” Peters chuckles. “Because you never know when you've written a song if it's any good until you play it for someone else.”
Peters says he “didn't want the album to be about where I've been; I wanted it to be about where I was going,” so the LP’s title came to him after he signed an open letter announcing his latest grim diagnosis. Peters had tried to keep his condition on the down-low, but after a hospital visitor spilled the beans on an Alarm fan site, Peters knew, “I had to go online and write a letter to the fans, just to reassure them. I was trying to be positive, but also not ducking out what was really going on. I wasn't sure, but I knew I had to say to people, ‘Look, I'm confident I'll get out of this — but, who knows?’ And then, I signed off with the word ‘forwards,’ and I had never signed off a letter with that word before. When I did, I thought, ‘There's an album title. There's a reason why I'm here,’ in a strange sort way. … I thought, ‘I've gotta make a record about this. Someone's telling me something here.’ … And so, it became real. I was glad I had the guitar there, because it was quite therapeutic.”
One of the key Forwards tracks keeping with the title’s theme is the single “Next,” although Peters confesses now, “When I wrote that song, I was not quite sure what was next. I was like, ‘Is this it? Is this gonna be it? Am I preparing myself for the next world, or for the next chapter of my life story?’ It was on a tightwire, which way it was going to fall. Luckily for me it, it fell to the right way and I was able to carry on living.” Eventually Peters was able to leave the North Wales Cancer Centre — “I was determined to walk out as in the best shape possible; I didn't want to go home with assistance, with a walking stick or a wheelchair” — only to boldly return, still on his own two feet, to shoot the rogue-style “Next” music video.
“Yeah, we shot it in the hospital,” Peters chuckles. “I said to Andy, our tour manager, ‘Come on, let's go back and sneak in!’ And we did, literally. … Andy's filming me on the camera and we walked through the corridors. We went to one end of the hospital and back, and that was it. It was shot in 20 minutes. And it's got that energy — you know, if you're strong enough, then no one wants to walk out of hospital slowly. Everyone wants to run and get home to their loved ones. As much as the hospital can be an amazing place and the staff are brilliant at keeping your spirits up, nobody wants to spend the night there voluntarily. Everyone wants to get home. And when you do get home, it's joyous. I wanted to convey that feeling.”
Peters admits that he has “lost count” of how many times his doctors have scolded him for continuing to work at such a rapid pace (since his first cancer diagnosis in 1995, he has released 15 Alarm studio albums and more than a dozen solo albums and EPs), but he laughs off their warnings. “When I say, ‘Oh, by the way, I'm playing in New York next week,’ [my doctor] goes, ‘You are crazy, Mr. Peters! You should be at home! With the drugs you are on now, that are keeping you alive, you shouldn't be running around like you're doing! But, no one's going to stop you doing that.’ But you know, I'm maintaining my blood count; it's the best it's ever been for probably 35 years. So, something's going right. I'm feeling really great. And so, I want to make the most of everything, because you could get ridden over by a bus tomorrow — never mind cancer! I might as well get out there and do what I gotta do.
“Whenever I'm in trouble and I have to go and play a show and I sing these songs, it reminds me that I'm lucky to be alive,” Peters concludes. “I'm grateful to be here, and I've got a lot to live for.”
