Mike Peters, the singer of the Welsh rock group The Alarm, has died. I was 66 years old.
Peters died of cancer, who had publicly fought as an activist and fund collector for treatments. Peters lived with lymphoma and, later, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. His death was announced for the first time in a statement from his band and his beneficial foundation.
The alarm was formed in 1981 in Rhyl, Denbighthire, emerging after the punk wave of the United Kingdom in the late 70s with a sound more driven by the hook, accessible but ardent that won the acclamation in the United Kingdom and abroad. The alarm sold millions of records and joined a small list of Welsh acts, including Tom Jones and Bonnie Tyler, to find world fame.
Singles as “The Stand”, “Sixty -eight guns”, “Blaze of Glory” and “Rain in the Summertime” embodied the exciting composition of the band. And the group became a favorite starter of the stadium-rock acts of the 80s, including Queen and U2, whose 1983 tour presented the alarm to the United States.
The band, proud of her Welsh heritage, in 1989 launched “Newid”, a version in the Welsh language of her 1989 “Change” album. Peters resigned from the group in 1991 and acted with his wife Jules, who also fought against his own cancer, in the poets of justice (he also briefly led the great country of the Scottish law). He gathered the alarm in 2000 and reached the lists of the United Kingdom in 2004 when, in a clandestine trick, he wrote and recorded a single as a fictitious teenage punk band, The Poppy Fields. The joke inspired a feature film of 2013, “Vinyl”.
Peters was diagnosed with no Hodgkin lymphoma in 1995 and spent two decades experiencing intensive treatment. In 2005, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which returned in 2015.
With his wife, he co -founded the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which helped recruit bone marrow donors in live concerts. He acted in unconventional locations to raise money for the charity, including Mount Kilimanjaro and the “Big Busk” walk concerts between cancer rooms in Wales. Acts, including Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, joined him on the stage for charity events, and in 2019 he became a member of the Order of the British Empire for their cancer activism.
Peters shot a documentary, “while we still have time,” about cancer battles and his wife. This year he got sick with a recurrence of Richter's syndrome, an especially dangerous form of lymphoma.
Peters survives his wife and children, Dylan and Evan.
