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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Mike and Jules Peters. (Photo: Jon Furniss/Invision/AP)

“We have to laugh about it, because you can’t write the script in our family. Me and Jules have laughed away for 20 years of living with cancer. And you have to laugh, because it’s so black.”

So says Mike Peters, frontman for Welsh post-punk band the Alarm, known for strident anthems like “The Stand,” “68 Guns,” and “Strength.” But Peters had no idea when he released that latter song, in 1985, how much meaning it would have in his life as a three-time cancer survivor and husband of a recent breast cancer survivor.

“There’s been a lot of fun times here: non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, breast cancer,” says Mike’s wife, Jules, with a wry laugh, speaking out during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “I did think I was going to dodge the bullet of cancer. I thought being married to someone for 32 years — 20 of those with Mike having leukemia — I just assumed it wouldn’t happen to me.”

Jules Peters: My Cancer Journey trail from Androo Gwynn on Vimeo.

Mike and Jules’s cancer story is definitely stranger than fiction, but it has inspired several compelling documentaries — including Mike Peters on the Road to Recovery, The Man in the Camo Jacket, Mike and Jules: While We Still Have Time, The Song That Changed My Life, and Jules Peters: My Cancer Journey. The two met in 1986 in the small town of Rhyl, Wales (where they still live with their two sons), and Mike proposed just one week later. (“Much to my mother’s absolute horror,” Jules laughs.) Then, in 1995, Mike was diagnosed with lymph cancer, with doctors telling him they had “only a half-chance of keeping [him] alive.”

Mike decided to reject treatment and go on tour anyway.

“Someone put the kettle on, because we were British, so let’s have a cup of tea at these terrible moments,” Mike, 59, chuckles as he recalls his seemingly damning diagnosis. “I saw my brother on the phone and I said, ‘Who are you calling?’ He said, ‘I’m gonna cancel the gig.’ And I said, ‘No, I can’t sit here and just think and worry about what’s coming my way tomorrow. Let’s occupy my time. Let’s go and do the gig. Let’s carry on as normal.’”

It seemed like a bad omen when, on the morning he boarded the plane to America, he saw passengers reading newspapers reporting that British singer Marti Caine had just died from the same sort of lymphatic cancer that he had. But still, he carried on. “I can vividly remember singing the strong ‘Strength’ that night,” he says, “and it took on a whole new meaning for me.”

Few people knew about Mike’s illness. (“I didn’t even tell my mum, because I thought if my mum finds out I’ve turned down the treatment she’ll kill me — and my mum is a much bigger foe in life than cancer, I can tell you that,” Mike says) But one person who knew, the Alarm’s former manager and U2′s booking agent, Ian Wilson, put the singer in touch with a faith healer named Bambi. “I was not too impressed at the time,” quips Jules.

However, Bambi’s encouragement, along with a book about self-healing that Wilson gave Mike, somehow helped put Mike on the road to recovery — and he went in spontaneous remission. His doctors were baffled.

“My blood count totally reversed and I saw it as an absolute miracle, and the doctors were obsessed with finding the science [behind it],” Mike marvels. He believes that the touring itself was the real miracle-worker. “Music, right there, is a healer,” he attests. “I turned [touring] into a psychological combat zone. I got off the plane, I went to buy combat fatigues, and I thought, ‘None of this is coming off until I’m cured.’”

Ten years later, Mike was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent treatment, but he still went on the road. “He was flying to America at this time, doing this crazy residential tour. He’s very exciting to be married to, but sometimes it’s just like, ‘You’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. Can’t you just stay home and just get on with the chemotherapy?’” says Jules. “Mike was astonishingly positive — almost annoyingly positive.”

But then, in June 2016, the couple’s roles reversed and Mike became the caregiver, when Jules, now 51, was diagnosed with breast cancer. The outdoorsy, physically active couple were mountain-climbing during Snowdon Rocks — an annual trek to the highest peak in Wales — and making a documentary about Mike’s survival story, when Jules noticed the lump.

“Jules was pretty much diagnosed on camera. We were not expecting it. We were making a documentary. It was following my life, the life of our charity [Love Hope Strength],” says Mike.

“It was all about Mike, and then I hijacked it!” Jules quips.

“I think the fact that Jules allowed the story to be showed in real time — most people are talking about cancer after the fact, whereas Jules’s documentary, you saw it in the moment. And they followed the whole journey.”

“I’m very good at getting my tits out!” jokes Jules.

Despite the Peters’ unflappable sense of humor, Jules confesses she was “absolutely devastated” by her diagnosis — as was Mike, who says, “I thought I was the one that was carrying that [cancer] burden for the family. And then to see Jules diagnosed as well, I look back on it now and I thought I was being really strong for my partner, really strong for my wife and the family, but then I look back on the film and I look like I’m about to collapse. I look terrified.”

Mike and Jules Peters with their children Evan and Dylan in 2017. (Photo: Desiree Navarro/WireImage)

“Having to sort of watch me and be my partner for a change, caring for me, was a big shock for [Mike],” says Jules, who underwent urgent and aggressive treatment (when it turned out she actually had three tumors and the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes) — including two operations, months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and reconstructive breast surgery. “I was stripped of my femininity and my sexuality, lost my hair,” she says. But Jules, who is now in remission, always allowed the “non-sugarcoated version” of her story to be told, even bravely showing her mastectomy scars and severe radiation burns for the camera.

“Mike is obviously a strong and positive person, and I love him for that. But I did make it very clear at the beginning of my journey, ‘I’m not going to ring Bambi up, no disrespect,’” Jules says drily. “And not be gung-ho and so positive all the time. I said, ‘I’m warning you, any of this ‘It’s going to be fine, babe, it’s going to be great, babe,’ and we’ll end up divorcing. I don’t want you to be so f***ing positive all the time!’”

However, many positive things have come out of the Peters’ grueling experience. Their Love Hope Strength Foundation (established with American leukemia survivor James Chippendale), which finds bone marrow donor matches for patients in need, has registered more than 180,000 potential donors and found 4,000 life-saving matches. Jules’s cancer story has also inspired songs on the Alarm’s new album Equals, much of written in the hospital.

“I wrote lots of lyrics. When I couldn’t see Jules when she was in the operating theater, I’d be pacing the corridors and I’d think, ‘I’ve got to write this down, what I’m feeling.’ And I wrote these long sets of words,” Mike reveals. “And then when we’d come through the worst of it and Jules would say to me, ‘What were you doing while I was in surgery for 10 hours?’ I said, ‘I wrote all this down’ — about how I felt about the kids or Jules or this life. ‘There could be an album in that lot.’”

One Equals track, “Beautiful,” addresses Jules’s difficulties coming to terms with the changes to her body, hair, and overall appearance during cancer treatment. “It says, ‘Everything is beautiful tonight on the inside.’ But it also says, ‘On the outside,’ as well,” says Mike. “We were going through these tough situations — Jules having to put a wig on. You’re going out with your friends, and deep inside you’re hurting or you’re unsure, but you put on a brave face.”

The couple’s brave saga and music have now inspired thousands of people waging their own cancer battles. “I’ve seen some incredible people stand up to the disease and make the most of it, even if they’ve got a short window of time left,” says Mike. “They’ve made the most of it and shown how precious life can be.”

“We both feel very strongly about trying to help people at that moment when they’re diagnosed,” explains Jules. “We understand, because we were just kids when we first experienced [Mike’s] cancer diagnosis. I know when Mike was diagnosed, all I wanted was to reach out and find a little positive story out there that said, ‘Hey, I was diagnosed with leukemia 20 years ago and here I am, still living my life. It’s not an easy road, but here is some hope.’ And so I always hoped there’d be somebody out there right now getting diagnosed with leukemia or breast cancer and hopefully they can read our stories. And we can be honest with them. …I wouldn’t pull any punches, because it can be really, really tough. But we can prove that you can live a great life.

“We’re a bit like a Disney movie,” Jules continues. “I think [cancer has] made life even sweeter. I’m not saying I’m glad that I’ve had cancer. It’s been a grueling journey. … But we really do live life to the full every single day. We are just grateful every single morning. Let’s try and embrace [cancer], and not see it as our enemy. It’s part of our life, so let’s try to make something good out of it.”

“Yeah, it’s been a hell of a journey, but we’re still here,” add Mike. “I’m thankful for that.”

Audio of this conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app, on Volume channel 106.

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.