When Mike Peters, the frontman of The Alarm, was confronted with the conundrum of honoring the long-running band’s booked concerts as he was dealing with his latest cancer setback, he surprised his wife and bandmate, Jules, with a solution: “Evan can sing.”
Their youngest son Evan grew up with The Alarm, and even recorded drums on an album and filled in behind the kit on a few shows at the family’s pub in Wales. But fronting the band with more than 40 years of history, more than 5 million records sold and a legion of fans spanning the globe?
The task became nearly impossible when Mike Peters passed on April 29, 2025. The first performance would find Evan, then 18, singing at his father’s funeral, with Jules playing piano. He sang “Wonderwall” by Oasis, a song Mike often sang in difficult moments.
“Rock and roll prepared me for this,” Jules remembers Mike saying during one of his tougher moments with cancer, a 30-year period that started in 1995 with a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer.
Distraught but fortified, Evan fronted what is now billed as Evan Peters presents The Alarm for the first time at The Gathering, the annual concert and fan festival Mike hosted in Wales and elsewhere that has continued. The band fulfilled its touring commitments with the Scottish band Big Country (which Mike had fronted for a time after the death of its lead singer).
On May 29, a year to the day of Peters’ funeral, “Transformation,” his final album with The Alarm, was released. Hearing the songs now, with lyrical content that explores death and transition to another plane, with the knowledge that Peters anointed his youngest son to carry the band forward, it’s reasonable to assume that the elder Peters knew his days were numbered. But after three decades of ups and downs with his illness, he was planning on sticking around for the release of the album and expected Evan’s fronting of the band to be temporary.
While his death landed an emotional sucker punch on his loved ones, Peters’ attitude about his illness and his philosophy about life helped inspire some positivity. In fact, Jules calls his passing “a beautiful death” and goes as far as saying “cancer was a weird blessing.”
Indeed, Mike Peters sounds defiant, not despondent, on the new album. The song “Chimera” was inspired by his Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy (CAR-T), which was deployed for his battle against Richter’s syndrome, a rare but aggressive complication of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
The BBC reported last year that Peters’ tour bus dropped him off at The Christie hospital in Manchester, where he told the network Richter’s, if left untreated, would kill him in two weeks.
“My white lymphocytes were harvested in December,” he told the TV network before he began the personalized immunotherapy. “Those were then sent to a laboratory where each blood cell was re-engineered by scientists and then targeted to seek and destroy the Richter’s syndrome.”
On “Chimera,” he sings of “sleeper cells programmed in a laboratory/ targeted to hunt down my disease.”
“Soul Town” is special in a different way, a tribute to Northern Soul, a music and dance phenomenon that emerged in the workingman’s clubs of northern England and the Midlands in the 1960s. With a Motown beat and vocals that might remind some listeners of U2’s Bono, Peters sings of “fighting for survival” on “broken streets” in a “Northern Soul town.”
It’s a “dusty old religion,” as he sings, that he experienced first-hand working in the cloakroom of the 100 Club, the home to the world longest running Northern Soul all-nighters. He shared duties with Shane MacGowan before he went on to front The Pogues.
On Christmas Day last year, Mike, who wasn’t feeling well and sitting on a stool, put the then-unreleased “Soul Town,” on the turntable and winked at Jules, she recalls, her voice cracking.
Jules’ life path was not heading toward a life in rock ‘n’ roll: she earned an English degree and planned to become a lawyer. But she had trained as a classical pianist and studied ballet — she credits her working-class parents for finding the money to pay for expensive lessons. When she met Peters in 1986, they became engaged within a week, and their romantic partnership became musical, with her playing in his group Poets of Justice while The Alarm was split up in the ’90s.
When Peters got The Alarm back together, he needed a keyboardist and he wanted Jules to do the job. She adamantly refused before he won her over.
“I was a very reluctant member of The Alarm because of all the connotations of being married to the lead singer,” she says.
The family business was set in motion, with Evan — whose first concert was his dad’s Empire State Building rooftop set in 2007 when he was three months old — now taking the spotlight. Evan Peters’ The Alarm hosted a Gathering at Cardiff University in Wales in January, with guest performers including Billy Duffy of The Cult and Jamie Watson of Big Country. More dates with Big Country in the UK will kick off in November, including shows at the various 02 venues across Britain.
Love Hope Strength, the foundation the couple founded in 2007, continues its mission to “help save and change lives one concert, one step, one helping hand at a time through partnering with cancer care specialists across the globe, and offering support when families affected by cancer need it most.” The organization takes its name from the 2007 Alarm song “Love, Hope, and Strength.”
In 2024, LHS campaigned to double the number of people signed up through the charity on international stem cell registers. To that point, LHS had already encouraged 250,000 people to register in partnership with the blood cancer charity DKMS.
LHS’s fundraising events include hikes, most notably “Everest Rocks” in 2007, a 14-day trek with 38 musicians, including Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze and Slim Jim Phantom of Stray Cats. A few months ago, “El Camino Rocks” took a group from Portugal to Spain, and Everest Rocks II in December will bring a hearty crew back to the highest mountain on earth above sea level. It will be Jules’ first time hiking Everest.
Leave a Reply