With the passing of Welsh rocker Mike Peters of The Alarm this spring, Nestor Aparicio has unearthed a drove of memories, photos and audio of his Almost Famous turn as a teenage music critic at The Baltimore Sun. This is a “Raw” 1991 chat with the founder of Love Hope Strength before a sold-out concert at Hammerjacks Inner Harbor Concert hall on their “Change” tour.
Mike Peters discussed his current tour, which has been intense due to sold-out shows. He noted the growth of his fan base, including new fans from the Dylan tour. Peters reflected on the challenges faced during the recording of “The Eye of the Hurricane,” including a problematic manager and producer. He emphasized the importance of live performances and the band’s evolution, highlighting their recent album “Change” as the most honest representation of their sound. Peters also shared personal stories, such as a couple getting engaged to his song “Walk Forever by My Side,” and discussed the band’s dynamic setlists to keep fans engaged.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Tour, fan support, small venues, Dylan tour, album production, manager issues, live performances, audience engagement, songwriting, fan interactions, setlist changes, band history, album release, producer influence, concert experience.
SPEAKERS
Mike Peters, Nestor Aparicio
8
Nestor Aparicio 00:03
Is Nestor from Baltimore. Okay, you have time to talk now? Yes, yes. Okay, how’s tour going? Very good. Thanks. Yeah. Where are you today? Lake City. Lake City. The other end of the world, as far as we’re concerned here. So we all off last night, or,
Mike Peters 00:19
yeah, well, we were driving up from Southern California
Nestor Aparicio 00:27
on the road. How’s the California leg go? Very good. What kind of halls are you playing? There
Mike Peters 00:35
8been playing universities and places like the Wilton capacity, places how
Nestor Aparicio 00:42
is the reaction change? I think the last time I saw you was on a strength tour. You’re playing a little a little University Hall here, about 1500 people, and place was just rabid. It seemed like that was on the strength tour. It’s like three and a half years ago now, a long time. I tended to stay away from you on the Dillon tour. I just wanted to see you guys as a, you know, as the only act when I could see you play for three hours. I think it would have been very underwhelmed by anything else that what I saw that night you’re seeing you for 30 minutes, wouldn’t really, yeah, how’s reaction changed?
Mike Peters 01:19
It’s been really good on this stretch of more, even more intense, in a way, because all the gigs sold out really fast. You know when, when it’s like people can’t get in, and they’re phoning up to get tickets off the radio, and, you know, that sort of thing makes it really exciting.
Nestor Aparicio 01:45
Do you see the base fan support growing pretty much then? Yeah, we’ve seen with the people that I saw at the show three and a half years ago, and you guys pretty much turned me into a fan, because I was kind of skeptical, but they were, like, really hardcore. I mean, they had all the alarm shirts and pins and all that kind of paraphernalia.
8Mike Peters 02:06
It sort of get an awful lot of, you know, dedication from our audience, like that. But the new arm, seems, a bit of a lot of new fans, and also the Dylan tour brought out a lot of people that saw us playing with him. You know, it’s grown in that respect. But, you know, we still get people who are, you know, alarm fans from head to toe. So
Nestor Aparicio 02:37
are you disappointed in some ways, to still be playing small company. You’re playing these kind of clubs three years ago, yeah? And, I mean, you had a pretty successful album. Now you have a successful song. And I, you know, if you would ask me, 1986 and I was writing that, and I wrote this band, you this is you’re going to be your last chance to see them in a small place. And then here you are, three years later, you’re coming back, and you’re playing a place even smaller than the place I saw you before you played a bar. Here we playing hammer jacks. It’s a club. You never been there before. But everyone that I never talked to, I tell them, it’s an interesting experience, the biggest bar you’ll ever play in.
Mike Peters 03:16
Well, what we really doing is doing this to doing, you know, as much as we can in before we we come back next year. It’s really just been doing like a lightning sort of strike on the US at this point, and just playing places that we know is going to be, you know, really packed out, and the fans can see us in that intimate sort of atmosphere, you know. And who knows, you know that the big venues might come calling on these days. So
Nestor Aparicio 03:50
8how much time off have you had in the last, you know, three or four years? Not
Mike Peters 03:55
a lot. We’ve really continued working, especially since the Dylan tour, we went straight home to Wales for about six months to sort of write a change album and and then, you know, we’ve been we recorded it fairly quickly.
Nestor Aparicio 04:12
Did you feel a need to have material out all the time? No,
Mike Peters 04:18
we haven’t really yet. You know, most people have been surprised that we’ve left it like, you know, two years between each album that we’ve made, we’ve toured for a long, long period of time. And you know that that’s been the backbone of the group, really, you know, probably we should, should have made more records, and you never know. I
8Nestor Aparicio 04:44
didn’t get a chance to talk to you on the last tour, but it seemed to me that the sound from strength to eye the hurricane seemed to change somehow, you know, it seemed to get a little more polished edge to it than Sure. You’ve heard that before, but how to react to that? Well,
Mike Peters 05:00
we had to make the eye of the hurricane record. Was a fairly difficult period of all our lives. We were we had a manager who was very strong, and he was very unscrupulous, and we changed from him because he was doing some, some of the black side of rock and bowl that you hear about was was happening in our backyard, and we had to take steps to deal with that. Also, we were working with a producer who we didn’t get on with, particularly the more the session went on, especially as we we put so much hard work into the hurricane record before we recorded it, we’d even toured it for three weeks before we went into the studio. And yet the producer is still using us to sort of have his own way of expressing himself in a way, rather than getting the best out of the band. Who was the producer on that one? John Fauci, okay, and the engineer we didn’t get on well with either.
Nestor Aparicio 06:08
So at this point, you don’t like them. Are you forced to keep them on? Well,
Mike Peters 06:13
8we, at the time, we were under pressure from IRS, you see to get an album on the streets. Well, yeah, you know, you know, when you sign a contract, you can’t be naive about it. You can’t just walk out of it when you want, you know. And if a record company are putting up a lot of money to make an album and they paid a producer and paid an engineer, you know, you have to do your best that you can. And at the time, we still maintained that we thought we could get the best out of the album, and we got the best that we could out the record. But looking back on it in hindsight, we you know, even though we were proud of the record and the songs that we wrote for the record, we realized that when we started playing it live, that there was more to it than we actually got out of it in the initial sessions. You know, not that we felt, you know, that we were going wrong with a record or anything like that.
Nestor Aparicio 07:08
Do you feel at all that it’s overproduced, that it, it took the raw edge away from you, that, you know, some people, some of your hardcore fans, liked.
Mike Peters 07:16
Well, I don’t know about that, but, you know, at the time, you know, from one aspect, it was a successful record. You know, it presented another side to band we’d because of a lot of things that were going on. We’d been together banders for a long time as well. And we were questioning our own relationship with each other at the time as well, and it was a difficult time because we had a manager who we didn’t realize at the time could see his own demise, and was was trying to break us up. Was this a drug thing or? No, he was, he was, you know, don’t he was stealing from the band. He was ripping us off. Oh, really, okay, right? And you know that that’s something we don’t really want to go into, okay? Yeah, that we won’t go into it now, because it’s not really that professional, as I’m sure the fans don’t hear about doing that kind of thing. What’s going on to the band. But you know, it was a very difficult sense of time, and to get out of that situation, we had to clear our management out and sort all that out, and we ended up managing ourselves for about 12 months. At the same time, we renegotiated our record deal so that we could have more autonomy in the recording process. That meant that we could take care of, you know, cutting the deals with the producers and all that so that we didn’t have to, you know, honor deals made by a third party, right? And which we’ve done and we sorted ourselves out. So
Nestor Aparicio 08:53
how does a producer affect the sounds and album personalities aside? You know, a producer
8Mike Peters 08:59
will can affect it in many ways. Because you see, if he’s hands on the desk, which most of them are, you know, and they’re affecting the actual sound that you’re making, you know, they can. They can change things quite dramatically. And when you don’t quite understand the processes that go from when you actually play your music in the studio, and then it goes, it’s mixed, and it’s cut, and every stage of that record, the sound is is treated so that by the time it comes out in the record, what comes out in the actual pro you know, to the listener is often quite different from what you start out with in the studio, and it takes a long time for band to understand those, the dynamics that that has on the heart of the sound of the band.
Nestor Aparicio 09:57
Can you hang on for one second? I got another call. Okay? Thank you. Hi, Mike, hi. I’m sorry I was doing interviews all day long here, and I’ve got other people calling me, but I’m not going to rush you off, because I’ve been waiting too long to get a hold of you. So would you say the eye of the hurricane album? It could have been better. I mean, you’re proud of it and all that, but
Mike Peters 10:17
from a production point of view, yes, it could have been better. And you know, that’s why we put the EP out after it, to show that, you know, there’s another level of performance that we’re capable of. But you know what to make that record we wouldn’t have been able to do make the change album and the record that had come without, without making that record, I remember the time meeting Roger Dalton saying we were having a, you know, Roger, we’re having a really tough time, you know, as a band. And he said, Look, you’ve got to go through that period. That is what makes the real band. That’s what every real band that has made its fifth and sixth album has had to go through that stage. And he said, you know, if you’re worth anything, if your relationship is worth anything with your fans, you can survive that period, and it’s a very important time, and looking back at it now, I believe that I the hurricane when we look back on that record in in the light of record that we’ll be able to make it in two or three years time, will view the island hurricane as being a watershed record. Okay, how
Nestor Aparicio 11:28
8do you feel now about those earlier? I mean, this sound of the new album kind of is getting back towards that. But, I mean, what was the production like on on your first DP, with declaration and those kinds of things? I mean, it’s this sounds to me like completely different sound.
Mike Peters 11:43
Well, what we did with, we’ve just recorded a raw live record, you know, even, even when we were recording declaration, we were still struggling with producers. I mean, that’s why we’ve never worked with our own chat box into that record. You know, we’ve never worked with the same producer twice, and you know, we were always struggling, even then, against producers who wanted to impose their personality, their idea of what we should be sounding like on the band and with with the change record change is the most honest alarm record that we’ve made since then, safe building or since the stand, and it’s that is what we sound like
Nestor Aparicio 12:30
today. So, shatler was your hire.
Mike Peters 12:34
Well, the best of the producers that were available to us at the time, so, but
8Nestor Aparicio 12:41
you hired him, IRS. He was not a third man. He’s your gun. Pretty
Mike Peters 12:45
much, no Tony Visconti. Years that did change with us. Okay, when we did, when we did declaration or the stand, you know, it was, you know, we were new to the thing. Would it? You know, we thought, record, you make a record, you’ve got to have a producer. Everyone has. You don’t question those things when you’re starting, you know, it’s like you’ve got an editor. You know, you don’t question that when you start, right? And, and it’s like Alan shatlock there. We met Alan shattler. We met about three or four other guys, and we thought, oh well, we like Alan the best. And then when we did a record of him, we thought, oh well, maybe this other guy’s going to be better than him. And you start whittling them down until you realize who’s actually the right man for the job. Some people are really lucky, and they make really synthetic recipes from day one, and they stick with them. And you know, some people, it takes a little bit more time. Okay,
Nestor Aparicio 13:48
so now you know, coming from the area of the world you come from, the comparisons to you two seem to be inevitable, but has that hurt you over the period of time with their success? And it’s worked
Mike Peters 13:59
8in both ways. You know, it’s worked for us in at times, and it’s worked against us at times. And, you know, the comparisons have been, it’s been a tough one to shake off, to be quite honest. But it’s, you know, it’s something that we’ve been we’ve managed to do for the most part, with the change record. You know, I don’t think people can see, throw me down here, throw me down rivers and things like that. Sounds like you too. No, I don’t. I could agree with that, you know. And and, you know, it’s something we’ve known we’ve been able to do in the fullness of time.
Nestor Aparicio 14:40
Is it a conscious thing with you, though, that knowing your it’s always going to be there,
Mike Peters 14:47
we don’t need we don’t think about it. It seems that most a lot of other people take
Nestor Aparicio 14:53
okay on the rock. I listen to it. It sounds at the end of. A lot like rain and summertime. Is that any anything on purpose with that? Or, yeah,
8Mike Peters 15:08
making that really, yeah, we’re trying to build on what we’ve done as a band, you know, and, and we’re, you know, developed some songs that we enjoyed.
Nestor Aparicio 15:21
Okay, now doing the Dylan tour, did you hit a new audience with that? Are you seeing people that age group coming to the shows? Yeah,
Mike Peters 15:28
having people go through my trash cans these days.
Nestor Aparicio 15:34
8Okay, on the tour, you’re doing a song in Welsh. Is that correct?
Mike Peters 15:37
Yeah, we have been, yeah. What songs that well, it’s been varying from time to time. It’s really question about the, you know, the do we pick up Dylan audience? Now we’ve definitely picked up a certain element of our audience that really go, you know, like I was saying, you like the old Dylan band used to go through his garbage cans. We definitely got an element of bands like that, you know. And we’re the sort of band because we don’t play the same set every night, and we throw in things, you know, random sometimes, you know, people are always we have a lot of people that are following us. You know, just been through California being people following us, you know, for like seven shows on the trot, they started in San Francisco, and followers all the way down. And that’s
Nestor Aparicio 16:33
like a Grateful Dead
Mike Peters 16:36
and, you know, we, that’s why we sort of change the set around a bit so that people, you know, can see something different, and we can make sure that people who come in night after night get something a bit different without, you know, altering the set so drastically that it, you know, it takes away from the main thrust of it. And so we’ve been singing certain parts in, well, some sometimes half a song, sometimes a whole song. And you know, changing that around from night tonight.
8Nestor Aparicio 17:07
So how much of a change do you get from night tonight? We do 20 songs, and how much
Mike Peters 17:14
we you know, it depends. Sometimes, you know, we change four or five, sometimes six, sometimes more, sometimes less,
Nestor Aparicio 17:22
so you still have the capability to play almost anything you’ve ever done. Oh yeah, right on the spot, yeah, okay, a question, I mean, and ask you, I know, if I ever got a hold of you walk forever by my side on strength album. How did that song come about? Just one of those off the wall kind of questions. One of the songs I like the most, yeah, I
Mike Peters 17:44
8wanted to write a song that expressed the way, you know, a depth of feeling, you know, that you can have for somebody, togetherness. You know, it is a love song, but it’s more than just a love song. It’s when it goes, you know, I’ve seen the word love sort of drag through the top chart so much that it’s almost become meaningless. And I wanted to try and write something that goes, that expresses it much more than just four four letters.
Nestor Aparicio 18:18
How long did it take you write.
Mike Peters 18:22
It didn’t take it took a long time in the build up, but it didn’t take that long to actually write. I wrote it one Sunday morning, and it’s a song that a lot of people who’ve been following the tour. I can’t say how many people I’ve met who’s come along, who’s had that song played at the wedding, or going to have, I mean, I’ve had it played at my wedding by the band.
Nestor Aparicio 18:53
That’s, you know, that’s pretty much what I was getting at with the wedding thing. I wondered if you had any strange stories that went along with that. But, well,
8Mike Peters 19:01
you know, I mean, you know, like the other night, I had a couple come up to me, and after the gig outside asking me if I had one guy come up, he said, I’ve got my girlfriend around the corner. She doesn’t know this. I’m gonna ask you to get engaged, but I want you to sing forever by my side while I ask her if she’ll marry me. So you did it like I just wound down at the time. So what I did was I wrote the lyrics out for him on the set list that we played, and, you know, wrote on a topic, Congratulations on your engagement. And gave her this piece of paper, and she read it while he was stood next to him, and they got engaged. Where was this at? In Riverside, UC, Riverside. This was a couple weeks ago, two nights ago, two nights ago.
Nestor Aparicio 19:53
It’s funny. I’d bring that song up. You still play that one sometimes. Yeah, you don’t play it every night. Then not every night. No, I. Play when you come here. All right, well, I shall see you in a few weeks, and I appreciate you talking to me today. Okay, thank you, and I appreciate your
20:10
honesty. Sure thing, thank you, bye, bye. You.
