Love. Hope. Strength.
Mike Peters and a life that mattered.
We lost Mike Peters of The Alarm on Tuesday, and while that is a significant loss to the music community, it is also a great loss for cancer charities. Mike survived 30 years with leukemia, and as I wrote for the show notes to Episode 27 of my One Step Beyond podcast, the interview for which was conducted almost exactly four years ago,
“Rather than bemoan his bad luck, Peters instead recognized the enormous good fortune of having quality free cancer care on the National Health Service in a world where there is so much health inequality, and in 2007 he co-founded Love Hope Strength, with the belief that ‘all people deserve quality care, a marrow donor if needed, and most importantly, hope.’
Mike went on to host concerts on top of Mt Everest Base Camp, Mt Kilimanjaro and Mt Fuji, established the 'Get On The List' drive at concerts to sign up potential bone marrow donors, and recorded the world's longest song, The Scriptures, to promote bone marrow donor initiatives between Israelis and Palestinians. Money raised has served to fund a mammography machine in Nepal, build a Children’s Cancer Unit in Tanzania, and to fund cancer projects within the UK.
Quite rightly, Mike received an MBE for his efforts in 2019, for his services to charity. Here is a clip of him from our conversation in May 2021, talking about his leukemia diagnoses and the attitude he took towards them.
The home page for the Love Hope Strength foundation is here. You can donate from the USA here and the UK here
On a personal level, I lost a really close friend in Mike. We had been tight from the early 1980s, by which I mean really tight, a personal connection that extended beyond his professional role with The Alarm and mine as Jamming! editor. Our two bands shared stages, including The Marquee. We played football together, and against each other. I joined The Alarm on video shoots and produced a couple of fan magazines for them. I first stepped foot into the United States because of The Alarm, in 1986; my life would therefore have been so different without them. And although he and I lost contact for a while as people do when they live their best lives which can also be their most challenging lives, raising families along the way, we gravitated back together in recent years, and found that our bond was tighter than ever.
Indeed, as regular readers to this site will know, a year ago this month I spent time with him and his fantastic family in Dyserth, North Wales, a trip I wrote about more in passing than significant detail – on this post which I have removed from the archive paywall.
Midweek Update 38: Life's a F***ing Miracle
I made the most of a lovely four nights away in North Wales to catch up on culture, or at least some of it. Let’s play Join The Dots…
Mike was fit as the proverbial fiddle last April, the leukemia seemingly at a distance; we went hiking together and shared personal stories and had drinks at The Red, the pub that he and his wife Jules had bought right next to the chapel they had converted into vacation apartments. Mike DJ’d his pub that weekend, and myself, him and Jules closed the place out on Sunday with some deep talk I won’t forget. The visit was so wonderful (the scenery certainly helped!) that I stayed an extra night and even looked up the price of the cottage for sale just up the road from The Red: Mike had built a life for himself and his family in his home village/town that served as a model for community in the modern musical age and I wanted to know if it could prove contagious. He and I made plans to meet again barely a month down the line when he would be touring the States and playing Daryl’s House in Pawling, NY.
On April 28 2024, he wrote to warn me that the tour was about to be canceled: only two weeks after my stay, on his way to watch his beloved Manchester United in the FA Cup Semi Final, he’d discovered a lump on his neck, and it had been quickly confirmed that he was now about to “prepare for another major life challenge,” as he modestly put it. The fact that he would take personal time to write and warn me considering what else he had to deal with said so very very much about his character.
We stayed in touch over the next year – this last year - by occasional e-mail, swapping updates on our football teams as a healthy diversion from what he was going through, and I stayed in touch with the medical developments through the regular postings of his fantastic loving wife Jules, herself a breast cancer survivor.
In December, Mike made it home from the Chrystie Hospital after a long period of chemo. It had failed to knock the Richter’s Disease into remission and he annoucned that in the New Year he would be engaging in experimental “sci-fi” treatment called CAR-T (which he describes here). Knowing that he was going into what he called “the Last Chance Saloon,” he grew a mohawk as a fresh sign of resilience and DJ’d again at The Red and even performed an acoustic set there, though from our correspondence it clearly took a lot out of him.
Still he had no plans to go anywhere but onwards. New Year 2025 saw a single by The Alarm - “Chimera,” in which he sang about the “two bloods” now flowing inside him - along with news of a summer album, Transformation. A series of Transformation weekends to be held in June 2025 at the Red, and a further iteration of The Gathering, as he called his homecoming celebrations with fans, for January 2026, were announced and sold out. Having already published LOVE, the first of his three-part autobiography, in a limited edition form, announcement of its sequel, HOPE, was made just this past week. You could not keep a good man like Mike down.
On April 28 2025, this past Monday night, a year to the day since he had written with the bad news, I was catching up on some e-mails given that I finally had my degree behind me, and my birthday, and the Palace FA Cup Semi Final win, which Mike would normally have commented on, and he was on my mind for all these reasons. I couldn’t get a sense of positivity from Jules’s public posts, so I wrote him an e-mail sending love, plain and simple. Less than ten hours later, as I prepared to start a morning run in the woods, I heard from a friend in the UK that his passing had just been announced. That love I sent is floating somewhere in the ether, as Mike’s loving soul is also.
On April 29 2025, commensurate with his passing, Mike and The Alarm released a song that feels like it was written and recorded for that purpose. It’s called “Totally Free” and the lyrics will tell you plenty about the man behind them, unafraid of death and life alike, totally free. It’s a beautiful song, an immense production, and an incredible vocal delivery for someone who clearly knew what was coming.
You will likely already have read and heard plenty beautiful tributes to Mike Peters. Most will revolve around his musical career, and that makes perfect sense: The Alarm was an important band in my life for a while there too and Mike’s bond with his fans were something to behold. But his contributions were so much greater than “mere” music: few families escape being affected by some form of cancer, mine included, and we can all learn from how he faced down his foe and held it at bay for so long, and there are those in Nepal, Tanzania and elsewhere who can thank him that they have treatment of any kind to begin with.
It’s for these reasons I am resharing that One Step Beyond podcast because I really do hope some of you can take the hour out of your day – or weave it into your day – and gain some of that inspiration for your own life. (Mike is also just a great storyteller and an easy guest.) You can access the episode along with all the show notes from its home page here, but to make it nice and easy for you, this is the audio file for the pod that I uploaded to Acast four years ago next week:
Meantime, from the Zoom video interview we conducted that May of 2021, here is Mike enthusing over our mutual love of mountains and how the obstacles they present are opportunities in disguise:
Here he is talking about how his Love Hope Strength foundation quickly found him climbing the Empire State Building, Everest Base Camp, Mount Fuji and Mount Kilimanjaro.
Finally, here he is talking about the realities of trying to sing at high altitude, and why he made sure to taje friends like Glenn Tilbrook and Slim Jim Phantom with him.
That was then.
More recently, the last words Mike wrote to me were, typically, ones of external encouragement:
“Keep rocking, running and writing.”
I will do my damndest, my friend.
With Love. Hope. And Strength.
Beautiful post, Tony. Brings back sweet memories of seeing The Alarm opening for The Pretenders at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago back in 1984...
Loss of a great human.