“Wow. Posthumous. I’ve not heard that word [used in interviews] before.”

Jules Peters, the widow of the Alarm’s late frontman Mike Peters and a member of the Welsh rock band for 15 years, is discussing what has sadly turned out to be the final Alarm album, Transformation. The LP was completed back in October 2024, literally the night before Mike — who’d miraculously, successfully battled blood cancer several times over the past three decades — entered the hospital to undergo CAR T cell therapy. Mike was hoping, or even assuming, that he’d beat the disease yet again, and the record was originally planned for a June 2025 release.

Instead, Transformation will now come out on May 29, 2026 — the one-year anniversary of Mike’s funeral (which was live-streamed and attended by more than 4,000 “Alarmies,” aka Alarm superfans), and exactly one year and one month after he lost his valiant fight with Richter’s Syndrome, an aggressive form of lymphoma, at age 66.

Jules was with Mike for 39 years — he was her “alpha male”; she was his “muse” — after they fatefully cute-met on the high street of Mike’s hometown village of Rhyl and got engaged just two weeks later, when she was 19 years old. She’s speaking with Lyndsanity via Zoom from the Peters’ home in Dyserth, North Wales, where Mike passed away after his CAR T treatment unfortunately failed. “We managed to get Mike home. He died in our house, which throws out a whole other set of trauma,” she says, sitting in her office with the Alarm’s gold and platinum albums on the wall behind her. “He died in this house. It was fucking hard. It’s only about now that I can really put the key in the door and walk in and not feel overwhelmed with devastation.”

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During our 90-minute conversation, Jules is surprisingly, sometimes almost uncomfortably frank. One moment, she’s chatting cheerfully about her “out of control” social life, her “life’s work” with the Alarm charity Love Hope Strength, and managing her local pub, the Red (located across the street from the churchyard where Mike’s ashes are buried). In the next breath, she’s reflecting much more somberly on her husband’s illness and the aftermath of her grief, and even going into unflinching detail about Mike’s final days and the loving way they said goodbye.

“When I start talking about him like this, this is healing me. You are my counselor today,” she quips, revealing that she has started a grief club called Red or Dead and is even considering launching a grief podcast. “As I’m talking to you today, I don’t have that weight of grief in my tummy that I have had, that physical feeling of grief. The whole year has been traumatic. … But I think we should have these very open conversations. I think it’s really important to talk about grief. I’m very open about my grief. I’m able to speak to you today without collapsing into tears. But yeah, a year — it feels like it was only yesterday. It’s very difficult for me to cope with the idea that he’s not walking in through the door.”

Mike, the strident voice of triumphant arena anthems like “The Stand,” “68 Guns,” and of course “Strength,” was first diagnosed with lymph cancer in 1995, with doctors telling him he had a very slim chance of survival. However, after rejecting Western medicine and going on tour anyway, he somehow went into spontaneous remission. A decade later, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and that time he did undergo traditional treatment, but his illness once again didn’t stop him from hitting the road. It seemed nothing could stop Mike Peters — not even when, in 2022, he found himself back at the North Wales Cancer Centre, facing what at that point was his most difficult cancer fight yet. In fact, it was during that months-long hospital stay that the famously workaholic musician wrote an entire optimistic Alarm album, Forwards.

For those unaware of Mike’s long medical history (the subject of several documentaries, including Mike Peters on the Road to Recovery, The Man in the Camo Jacket, and Mike and Jules: While We Still Have Time, which also chronicled Jules’s own 2016 breast cancer battle), it might seem like Transformation is a farewell opus, a la Blackstar by Mike’s idol David Bowie. But Julie clarifies that Mike actually created it while very much in that detemined Forwards mindset.

“Maybe he had an idea that it could have been his last album, but I don’t feel he did, because I feel like everything he’s written in this album, you could interpret it in two ways,” she muses. “Like, ‘Totally Free’ was about him being totally free of cancer. He believed that CAR T was going to give him a next chance in life. … He really, really believed he was going to get through it. He wrote Transformation not as his last album, but as the beginning of a whole new chapter for him. He was excited about coming to America [to tour in support of the record]. He’d ordered the biggest pedalboard you could ever see! Leading up to his admission into the hospital after his [2024] diagnosis, he’d performed 50 shows in the U.K. He focused on writing the album, and in between, he managed to fit in his chemotherapy. So, bizarrely, he had the most positive year.”

While Mike was hopeful about his chances, Jules, despite being a cancer survivor herself, was secretly terrified. Doctors had initially thought that Mike had Richter’s Syndrome during his 2022 heath scare, and Mike had been relieved to find out that was not the case. But that now he had received that damning diagnosis — just five days before the Alarm were supposed to begin their 2024 U.S. tour, which was included a slot at the Cruel World festival — Jules recalls, “I just had an instinct that we’d reached [the end], that cancer had finally caught up with Mike.”

Jules admits, “He didn’t fall apart. I personally, inwardly, fell apart. … I think maybe he didn’t want to acknowledge it to me as his wife, or to the family and our nearest and dearest, that it could potentially be the end. … So, for the last year of our life, it was an incredible year, but I also felt like I had to fake it a little bit with Mike, fake it to match his positivity — which I did not feel.”

Jules faked it all the way until the day Mike entered Christie Hospital in Manchester, accompanying him as he filmed the video for “Live Today” on a Northern English beach that very morning. “I’m like completely in my head, falling apart, thinking this is the last time Mike is ever going to be on the beach,” she recalls of the emotional shoot. “But Mike wasn’t thinking like that. We got him in the tour bus, and he had the most rock ‘n’ roll arrival at the hospital! He was just full of enthusiasm. It’s heartbreaking in many ways, but also incredible. The doctors and nurses around him said they’d never seen a patient so forceful and focused on getting through this.”

From that point on, Mike “turned CAR T into a plan,” printing T-shirts with different Transformation lyrics for each day of his treatment (all of which Jules still has in her possession); choosing his real-life PET scan for the album’s cover art (“I can barely look at it,” Jules now admits); and going rogue by shooting another surprisingly energetic music video, for “Outlier,” in the hospital (something he also sneakily pulled off during his Forwards era for his “Next” video).

“It was very hard for me and Andy Labrow, the Alarm’s tour manager,” Jules says of the impromptu “Outlier” shoot at Christie. “But you know what? It was getting Mike through. All the time he was doing CAR T in that hospital room, he felt like a caged animal, but he turned it into a studio. He turned it into his record company room. He did all his artwork. … This was a dying man who didn’t know it. Making this video, and for Andy and I, we were petrified, but we just went along with what he wanted to do. It was traumatic, having to go along with his focus.

“Even in the last few days when we got him home, just before he lost consciousness, Mike managed to open up his computer, lying on his back, pointing to all the different kinds of [album] formats. And I was like, ‘My husband is hours away from dying, and he is specifying to me what color vinyl?’” Jules laughs incredulously. “But I was lucky that Mike carried on behaving like that. Imagine if he’d fallen apart in front of us all! He didn’t. He just kept on believing. And I think all of us fell in love with Mike because of that great optimism and belief.”

Mike became “very, very poorly at the end” due to the effects of CAR T — an “unbelievable,” revolutionary immunotherapy treatment, “a big, big process,” that involved removing his blood, shipping it to the U.S., re-engineering that blood over the course of 28 days, and then shipping it back to the U.K. and putting it back in his body. “The day they bring in the cells to reemerge into his system, there’s all this white ice, dry ice, and it’s all very dramatic,” Jules chuckles, as she describes this somewhat rock ‘n’ roll medical spectacle. And Mike once again turned this into art, actually writing the Transformation track “Chimera” (sample lyrics: “Science fiction therapy/Two bloods, collide inside of me” and “Supercells, programmed in a laboratory/Killing me to stay alive”) about that literally transformative experience.

“While he was in the Christie Hospital, it’s hard to explain, but all the time when he had CAR T, it didn’t feel like it was Mike. It’s as if his personality and everything had been moved around. He was the Chimera, so he was a different person in those last few weeks,” Jules recalls. “It would’ve upset people to see him, but he just kept powering through and saying, ‘Oh, I’m in this physical state because of the side effects of CAR T. It’s not the cancer!’ Whereas for me, I felt like I could see him dying in front of me. I cannot explain how traumatic that has been. But, this is life.”

It would be understandable if Jules had resented Mike for spending his final days — or many other times when he was sick — focusing so intensely on his music. (Mike once admitted in a 2018 Lyndsanity interview that he’d “lost count” of how many times his doctors had scolded him for working so much.) But Jules knew what she signed up for when she married Mike, and she says their “rock ‘n’ roll marriage survived because we were in it together.” In fact, the only time she really resented her husband’s go-getter personality when she was “in the thick of domesticity” in Dyserth with their young sons, Dylan and Evan (conceived via IVF, a harrowing medical journey that she says actually took more of a toll on their relationship than cancer ever did), while the Alarm were on tour for months. That same year, 2007, Mike embarked on a month-long trip to climb Mount Everest, while Jules was still back home dealing with a four-year-old and a nine-month-old, and she less than thrilled.

But as a workaholic herself — who eventually “ended up being in the band, much against my wishes,” and going on the road with the Alarm — Jules mostly understood and appreciated Mike’s Type A mindset. “I quite liked the idea that he was using the time efficiently,” she says of his dedication to seeing the Transformation project through to completion. “I was always very attracted to Mike for being a hard worker. There’s nothing worse than being with someone who’s lazy, and he was never lazy. So, I thought, ‘Yeah, good on ya! You turned a negative situation into a positive!’ Yes, my proactive alpha male, right to the end.”

Jules therefore says she has few regrets, “except that maybe I’d just taken Mike home [earlier], so I could have been just lying on the bed with him and said goodbye over weeks.” Whether it was denial or just his usual steadfast self-belief, Mike didn’t want to leave Christie Hospital until he had no choice, even when he was being warned that the CAR T therapy had only a 1 percent chance of succeeding. “Mike only had two days in his whole life when he was told by the doctors, ‘There’s nothing more we can do for you,’ and my God, was Mike shocked [this time]. He was so surprised. He almost collapsed with the shock,” says Jules. “He didn’t let me tell anyone, because he didn’t want anyone to not believe. He wanted you all to believe.”

Mike Peters circa 2024/2025 (courtesy of Reybee, Inc.)

Jules then begins to share — without any prompting, as if she just needs to get it all out there — her detailed memories of Mike’s final days at home. “This is just brutal. … Everyone’s got their story to tell, and this is my story,” she says. “So, I’m in Wales, and he was in Manchester, and he phoned and said, ‘Oh, darling, it’s the conversation I never thought we were going to have. They’ve just come in and told me there’s nothing more they can do for me.’ I should have been there with him. I jumped in the car, drove over, and the minute I got in there, he just looked at me and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I feel like I’ve let you all down.’ Yeah, that was Mike. And then he looked at me and went, ‘Take me home, Jules. Take me home.’ I said of course — but hospital life means that it’s 24 hours for discharge. And he said, ‘No, no. Take me home now.’ And so we literally picked him up, scooped him up, put him in the car, and drove him home,” she recalls. “He gave it everything he could. And the last two days —  surreal. One minute, he’s there fighting for his life; the next minute, I’m carrying him into the house and being told I have to phone the undertaker to plan his funeral. I’ve never known anything like it.”

Once Mike was settled comfortably at home in hospice care, he “didn’t look like Mike,” Jules says. “To me, it wasn’t Mike, if I’m allowed to say that. He was on morphine. I have to be honest about stuff like this. He had a little mohawk. For me and the children, it wasn’t Mike.” She prefers, understandably, to remember him in happier, more robust times. “I just shared the ‘Strength’ video, and I glanced and got a quick image of the man that I fell in love with. And my heart skipped a beat. My heart always skipped a beat. Whenever I saw Mike, even when I went to visit him in the Christie, it was that very big, intense love.”

Jules still seems to be struggling to grasp the reality of her great love’s death as she describes their last tender moments. “I am still very, very shocked at how cancer can destroy — and I’m a bit of a cancer veteran,” she says. “I haven’t talked about it before, but I want to tell people how it was. We held hands and he said, ‘I love you.’ And I said, ‘I love you.’ And we went backwards and forwards for what seemed like an eternity: ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you.’ … And then, he never said ‘I love you’ back. … Nothing. No more I love you’s. He died. I don’t think I ever recovered from that. … But I can see I’m healing, because I can say this and not be falling apart.”

A dear family friend who used to work as an intensive care nurse, and who was by Jules’s side throughout this ordeal, told Jules that “Mike’s death was one of the most beautiful deaths she’d ever seen” – which is exactly how the perennially positive Mike Peters would have wanted to go out, since he’d once assured Jules that “death is as beautiful as birth.”

And Mike’s beautiful music lives on, not just through Transformation, but through his 19-year-old son, Evan. “In that moment when Mike died at home, Evan was there with his feet on the bed, strumming Mike’s guitar,” Jules recalls. “And I looked over and I’m like, ‘How do you know all these songs, Evan?’ And he says it’s in his DNA.” A month later, in what Jules calls “the most surreal scenario” at Mike’s funeral — a celebration of life that was “amazing,” “upbeat,” “joyous,” and “fantastic” — Evan made his live solo debut performing Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” which came out the year that Mike was first diagnosed with leukemia and became Mike’s cancer anthem. “He taught Evan how to play it,” Jules says with a smile.

Since then, the younger Peters son has played multiple “Evan Peters Present the Alarm” tribute gigs, including one recreating the Alarm’s historic “Spirit of ‘86” UCLA show (MTV’s first-ever live concert broadcast) to celebrate that event’s 40th anniversary, and he’s about to go on tour with Big Country playing his father’s catalog. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been in this really weird dream, and that I’ll wake up one day and I’ll go, ‘God, Mike, I dreamt that you died and that Evan took over as the singer!’” Jules chuckles.

And now as Jules enters what she calls her “second chapter” at age 59, she’s keeping busy too. She’s got her dance and yoga classes, her travels (ironically, she and her sons are planning a trip to Mount Everest to commemorate of the 20th anniversary of Mike’s above-mentioned ill-timed Everest adventure), and the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which finds bone marrow donor matches for patients in need.

Jules confesses that in the 48 hours following Mike’s death, “I just thought, ‘You know what? Fuck Love Hope Strength! Fuck doing work for charity! I’ve just seen him be destroyed by cancer.’” And recently, right before the first anniversary of Mike’s passing, she led a Love Hope Strength spiritual trek in Portugal and Spain and came home feeling “so bereft, worse than I’ve ever felt in the entire time since I lost Mike. And I thought, ‘Holy shit, is this how it’s going to go? Is it going to get worse?’ It was that idea when I walked in the house that he wasn’t here to meet me.” However, she understands that grief is not linear, and now she’s back to feeling “110 percent” committed to Love Hope Strength and other Alarm causes.

“I have got a lot to do, and that’s exciting. As long as I do that and I can keep the message of Mike Peters moving on, the spirit of it, everything is manageable. You can deal with your grief when you know that you’re moving everything forward,” Jules says. And it takes a village — literally, in her case, with Dyserth quickly turning into “the new Graceland” for Alarmies — but she also has the support of famous friends like the Cult’s Billy Duffy, longtime Alarm admirer Bono, and Ian McNabb of Icicle Works. The latter regularly sends her much-appreciated tough-love messages, like ‘Don’t be a pussy,’” she giggles. “I love Ian’s counseling services; I don’t need to go to counseling, because I’m surrounded by therapists and counselors! And I don’t think I’ve been a pussy, but I know what Ian was saying. He was saying: ‘Mike would not like you wallowing.’”

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A general resistance to wallowing was always something that kept the Peters’ “rock ‘n’ roll fairytale” marriage going strong through the toughest of times. “I understand how [cancer] can destroy a lot of marriages, but we always said that cancer enhanced our life. I know sometimes that’s difficult for people to hear… but we always compared everything to the day we got told we had cancer. Any day that wasn’t a cancer diagnosis, we’d be like, ‘Hey, life’s pretty wonderful!’ So, I think it helped our outlook,” Jules explains. And she’s trying to maintain that “no-nonsense” attitude, and heed McNabb’s advice, now that she’s going it alone.

“Grief is the price you pay for love. So, hey, I’ve just got to keep marching on. I’ve just got to keep retaining that positivity. And I’m being grateful,” she says. “Mike could have gone when he was 35, when he was diagnosed, or when he was 45, when he relapsed, and so on and so on. I did really, really well to have him in my life for 39 years. I really hoped I was going to get at least 20 more years, but life’s not like that.

“But every day for Mike, he’d hit the jackpot. He never had to get a proper job. He’d always just lived life through music. We had a charmed life together,” Jules continues. “So, I’m a badass, and I’m going to turn all my grief into positivity and keep moving forwards, just the way Mike was — because it’s the only way. I practice gratitude over sorrow. I’ve got to be grateful for the fact that I had this amazing love. And I’ve got my two sons; Mike lives on in Dylan and Evan. I just don’t want to be destroyed by grief. I don’t. I don’t know how long I’ve got left. I want to have a great life. I’m going out again tonight!”

And so, as Jules suddenly realizes she’s been “talking for ages” and signs off to meet up with an old friend at the Red, she offers one last road-trip anecdote to emphasize the important point that — despite the heavy and ultimately tragic circumstances under which it was created — Transformation is not at all a depressing record. And Mike, in his typical positive manner, would want Alarm fans to enjoy it at full volume, just as he had.

Jules reveals that just two weeks before Mike died, she took him for one last joyride in her Mustang, a present he’d surprised her with for her 50th birthday after she’d completed radiotherapy for her breast cancer. “He said to me, ‘I want you to take me to the beach house,’ which was about an hour away. Bearing in mind, he could barely stand. So, I got him in the Mustang and he wanted the top down and he wanted to go for ice cream, and he was excited. He said, ‘I want to blast out Transformation,’” she recalls.

“This is the album Mike thought he was going to be leading onto his next life of being cancer-free and being alive and coming to America with his big pedalboard. He was planning what he was doing and he was air-drumming, air-guitaring,” she continues, smiling at the fond memory. “I was driving along — again, inside not quite able to match this positivity, but faking it all the way. And he had it on so loud! I could barely hear myself drive. I thought, ‘I’m going to have an accident, the music’s so loud.’ But I didn’t dare ask him to turn it down, because he was lost in this whole world.

“And that is the memory that I hold of Mike — of him being so excited for the future, blasting it out loud. And that’s what I try and say to everyone that’s going to buy Transformation: ‘Please play it loud.’”

Watch Jules Peters’s extended and in-depth video above, in which she also discusses her own battles with cancer and infertility, how she and Mike made their “fairytale” relationship work, why she didn’t want to join the Alarm at first, memories of Mike’s celebratory memorial service, the importance of accepting (and talking about) mortality, future plans she has for the Alarm Archive, and much more.

This never-seen interview with Mike Peters, who lost his 30-year battle with blood cancer on April 29, 2025, took place on March 28, 2024, less than two months before his band the Alarm were about to embark on a 50-date U.S. tour that included a set at Pasadena’s Cruel World Festival. Peters was promoting Music Television — a Pin Ups-style, limited-edition covers album celebrating the music of the early-MTV era that turned the Alarm and their fellow Cruel World performers into post-punk superstars — which would be available for sale on the tour. But as was the case with any interview involving the affable frontman, our immensely enjoyable conversation veered in many directions.

Over the course of an hour, Peters and I discussed the early days of MTV and IRS’s The Cutting Edge; the rogue way the Alarm made their “The Stand” and “Rain in the Summertime” videos; performing on the same Top of the Pops episode as Madonna, Echo and the Bunnymen, and the Smiths; doing MTV’s first global broadcast, in 1986, at UCLA, and all the things that went awry behind the scenes that historic day; and his hoax comeback band of the early 2000s, the Poppy Fields.

Heartbreakingly, Peters also excitingly discussed the Alarm’s planned tour, telling me that his health was “fantastic” at the time and that his blood count was the best it had ever been. “It’s like it’s never happened, almost,” he said, referring to the health scare of 2022 that had inspired his brilliant album Forwards, which he made while he was in the hospital. “Hooray, I’m alive again! Now I could do that kind of [tour], so it’s going to be brilliant. I can’t wait. I’m really looking forward to playing at Cruel World. It’s been on the horizon for the last three years, and then life has gotten in the way. I’m grateful that the promoters have stuck with us.”

Peters was unable to make it to the festival when, just weeks after this interview, he was diagnosed with Richter’s Syndrome, an aggressive form of lymphoma. He sent 2024 Cruel World attendees a message, which played on the festival’s main-stage video screen, expressing his regrets and vowing to make it to the festival in 2025. But tragically, that never happened. It is a cruel world, indeed.

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My love, hope, and strength go out to Mike’s wife and bandmate, Jules Peters; to the entire Peters family; and to his fans and friends around the globe. I am sharing this interview to show just what a wonderful and positive person Mike Peters was. He will be dearly missed.

It’s surprising that Mike Peters, leader of seminal Welsh alt-rock band the Alarm, would release the nostalgic record Music Television, a Pin Ups-style homage to MTV’s early days featuring covers of his peers like INXS, Modern English, Gene Loves Jezebel, the Blow Monkeys, Belouis Some, and even Michael Jackson and Phil Collins. Peters usually isn’t one to look back — the Alarm’s last album was literally titled Forwards — and there have been times when he has gone to especially creative extremes to avoid being pigeonholed as an ’80s legacy act.

In fact, it was in exactly 20 years ago that Peters and the Alarm pulled off one of the greatest and funniest hoaxes in rock ‘n’ roll history, sneaking back onto MTV with the punky “45 RPM” — but only after they reinvented themselves as a shrouded-in-mystery teenage buzz band called the Poppy Fields.

Call it a false Alarm, if you will.

“We fooled the entire British industry, because they thought the record was by a bunch of 18-year-olds… when it was really the Alarm, and we were in our forties and it wasn’t the original lineup anymore,” Peters chuckles. “We were in a place where people thought older artists can’t make good music, or can’t make music that lives up to the past. But we did. We just needed to prove it — with a bit of subterfuge to get the message across.”

The subterfuge started in 2004, when Peters presented the Green Day-ish track, the Alarm’s first single since 1991 and a bit of an artistic departure for the group, to a “powerful radio plugger who was doing Oasis and big Britpop bands at the time.” But the executive didn’t even bother to listen at first. “I took the ’45 RPM’ record to him and he said he didn’t want to hear the Alarm. He said, ‘Look, mate, there’s no point. You’re not going to get on the radio. You’re too old. Everyone’s got respect for you, but you don’t fit the demographic anymore, so let’s leave it at that,’” Peters reveals.

“But then he asked about anything else new I had going on. And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a new band in Wales. They’re amazing! They’re 18!’ And he said, ‘OK, let’s hear that.’ I put it on and he said, ‘Mike, I’ll get that on the radio just like that.’”

A week later, Peter admitted to the radio plugger that “45 RPM” was actually an Alarm original. So, when the executive began pitching it to U.K. programmers anyway, Peter assumed he’d “play it for people as a white label, and then when they said, ‘Oh, that’s really good,’ he’d say, ‘It’s not what you think it is!’ … But when he phoned me back and told me, ‘Mike, I’ve been playing the song to everybody and everyone loves it,’ I asked, ‘Well, what did they do when you told them it was the Alarm?’ And he goes, ‘They went so mad for it, I didn’t have the guts to tell them!’ So, they really went for it and put it on the playlist. [BBC DJ] Steve Lamacq was making his Record of the Week, and all sorts of things.”

The Alarm decided to really go for it as well, re-pressing the “45 RPM” single with new artwork and even having a young, third-wave ska band from Chester, the Wayriders, lip-sync to the song for its music video. But as the song started to ascend the BBC charts and get some MTV play, neither the Alarm nor their radio plugger were “prepared for how big it was going to get.” Eventually MTV invited the Poppy Fields to appear on the college-rock show 120 Minutes, and the Alarm panicked.

“We were like, ‘Oh no! How are we going to do this?’ I had to come up with a story that I was managing them and that they were doing their exams in university because they were only 18, so we’d have to wait a couple of months before they could appear on MTV,” Peters laughs. “But MTV Europe did play the Poppy Fields video a few times — before the ruse got broken and everyone found out it was the Alarm in disguise.”

In magnificent music-television fashion, the Poppy Fields revealed their true identity on Britain’s biggest music program at the time. “The record charted as the Poppy Fields and then it got picked up to go on Top of the Pops, so we announced it that way,” Peters smirks. “They broke the news on Top of the Pops and said, ‘This record that’s in the chart now at No. 21 isn’t the Poppy Fields — it’s the Welsh band, the Alarm!’ And then they played the record.”

Once the jig was up, the Alarm were getting more press than they’d had even in their ’80s heyday. “It blew up the next day in the media, like a massive story. I was on the phone [doing interviews] nonstop for a week. Even Dan Rather from CBS News sent a film crew to do a big piece, like he was covering the war in Iraq or something. It was global news,” Peters recalls, However, in retrospect Peters admits, “This has probably not been owned up to, but the reveal wasn’t handled as well as it could be.”

Peters explains, “I don’t think the journalists and DJs who were saying ‘the Poppy Fields are the best new band since the Clash and Rancid’ or ‘the best British band of modern times’ were told in advance. I think they just found out on Top of the Pops, or when they opened their newspapers the next day. And I think the BBC felt they’d had their trousers pulled down, shall we say; it became a source of embarrassment for them, because everyone was having a go at them. The BBC became a bit of a laughingstock for a while — and that didn’t bode well for us in the future! Because everyone had been fooled by it, they dropped [the song from radio rotation] like a hot potato. They just wiped it from their memory bank, as if they’d never played it — which I think said a lot more than really we were intending to say. And I thought that was a shame.”

In the end, the Alarm did get the last laugh. The stranger-than-fiction Poppy Fields saga inspired the semi-autobiographical 2012 film Vinyl, starring Quadrophenia actor Phil Daniels and featuring an original soundtrack by Peters, and “The Poppy Fields” finally got to play their first official “secret” gig (opening for Killers guitarist Dave Keuning and with the Alarm amusingly opening for them) at New York’s Mercury Lounge in 2018. And the Alarm, in various Peters-helmed configurations, have soldiered on, releasing more than a dozen original albums since the “45 RPM” scandal. Peters, a four-time cancer survivor, has been so “massively prolific in the last five years” in particular, he even managed to record Forwards from his self-described “death bed” in the North Wales Cancer Centre while dealing with his worst health scare yet.

But now that Peters has been given a clean bill of health, and the Alarm are preparing to crank out their iconic ’80s hits like “The Stand,” “Rain in the Summertime,” and “68 Guns” at L.A.’s post-punk music festival Cruel World (alongside fellow early-MTV darlings like Duran Duran, Simple Minds, and Heaven 17), Peters is in a rare backwards-looking mood, releasing the limited-edition Music Television to sell on the road. The collectible record’s “Program One” opens with Dire Straits’ ironically MTV-lambasting “Money for Nothing” (the first video to air on MTV Europe in 1987) and the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star’” (the first video played on MTV in America in ’81); “Program Two” ends with “The Man Who Sold the World” (a nod to both proto-MTV hero David Bowie and the Alarm’s 1989 performance on MTV Unplugged) mashed up with a bit of the rifftastic MTV theme song.

“I thought it was good to remind everyone about how powerful MTV once was; people have forgotten,” muses Peters. Many early fans viewers were in fact first introduced to the Alarm via MTV’s “massively important show” IRS’s The Cutting Edge (for which Penelope Spheeris memorably captured the band spray-painting graffiti poppies on an A&M studio lot backdrop for their one-take “The Stand” performance), or through their “Spirit of ’86 Live Global Broadcast” special, shot at UCLA, for which the Alarm served as the “guinea pigs” for the cable network’s new live broadcast technology.

As for why now, following the “intense” Forwards project, is the right time for the Alarm to embrace the past (maybe we’ll get another Poppy Fields “reunion” one day?), Peters says of Music Television: “If a [covers album] was good enough for David Bowie to do Pin Ups 40 years ago, then it is valid reason for us to do a collection of covers that influenced and directed the band and who we are and where we come from. There’ll be new albums on the horizon before you know it, I’m sure. But I think this is the lighter side of the Alarm. And that’s good to show that at times.”

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