Mike Peters, the frontman of ’80s Welsh rock band The Alarm, has died after a three-decade battle with most cancers, his consultant introduced Tuesday. He was 66.
Peters co-founded The Alarm within the early ’80s with Dave Sharp, Eddie McDonald and Nigel Twist, and the band signed with I.R.S. Information, whose roster included standard teams like R.E.M. and The Go-Go’s. The Alarm discovered success with singles like “The Stand,” “Energy” and “Sixty Eight Weapons,” the latter of which charted within the U.Okay. They’d open for U2 through the band’s Struggle Tour in 1983, in addition to for Bob Dylan years later. Peters additionally performed with Bruce Springsteen.
Peters was born in North Wales in 1959 and grew up in the identical neighborhood as future bandmate McDonald. He’s survived by spouse, Jules, and their sons, Dylan, 20, and Evan, 18.
Peters grew to become a outstanding activist within the combat in opposition to most cancers after he was identified with lymphoma in 1995, co-founding the Love Hope Energy Basis together with his spouse. Preventing the illness for greater than 30 years, he and his charity fundraised and sought to lift consciousness on new therapies for most cancers sufferers. In response to the charity, the Love Hope Energy Basis’s “Get on the Record” campaigns have helped add 250,000 folks to the worldwide stem cell registry.
Peters continued to tour for many years whereas he fought most cancers, going into remission and relapsing a number of occasions. However final 12 months, he was identified with Richter’s Syndrome, one other aggressive type of lymphoma, simply earlier than he was set to embark on a set of U.S. reveals. He sought remedy and the BBC reported he’d gone into remission in September, however the most cancers got here again.
Peters was open about his most cancers combat, saying in an interview in 2008 that his first prognosis “made me deal with what’s vital in my life and what I’d take with me on that subsequent journey past what all of us are on planet Earth.”
Peters left The Alarm in 1991, however he revived the band years later, releasing new albums and touring. He cited music as a key power in lifting his spirit whereas combating sickness. As he recalled in an interview with Paste in 2023, he wrote lots of the songs on the group’s most up-to-date album, Forwards, whereas he was within the hospital for remedy.
“The nursing employees would come to scrub within the morning, or it was the orderlies who would do the cleansing up, and I might see them lingering just a little bit longer by my mattress whereas I used to be figuring out a chord sequence In entrance of them,” he mentioned. “So I all the time had just a little viewers that began to turn out to be fairly receptive to me, and it was fairly good for me — and for them, too — to have a little bit of music and a little bit of life happening round the entire scenario.”
