The One You Feed - Mike Peters of the Alarm

Episode Date: October 20, 2015

This week we talk to Mike PetersMike Peters is a Welsh musician, best known as the lead singer of The Alarm. Between 2011 and 2013, Peters was the vocalist for Big Country as well as The Alarm.A two time cancer survivor he founded the Love Hope Strength Foundation. The Foundation has found close to 1000 potentially life saving bone marrow donor matches; built the first ever children’s cancer center in Tanzania; supported the Bhaktapur Cancer Center in Nepal with life saving equipment and registered over 60,000 donors through it’s ‘Get On the List’ program.Eric caught up with Mike in Akron on his tour supporting the 30th anniversary of the classic Strength album.     Our Sponsor this Week is Athletic GreensClick here to get 50% off your first order!!  In This Interview Mike and I Discuss...The One You Feed parableFeeding the positive side of our personalityTreating people the way we want to be treatedSeeing both sides of the storySeeing The Clash and The Sex Pistols in 1977Meeting Johnny Rotten and Joe StrummerJoe Strummer teaching Mike to be positiveCreating an empowering message for the audienceWhat the song Strength means to him 30 years laterHis 20 year battle with cancerThe Love Hope Strength FoundationHis approach to handling cancerThe power of musicWhere he turns when he is struggling internallyThe meaning of the song Blaze of Glory For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you take advice from someone else sometimes and you go along with it and you think it doesn't feel right, you end up, bang, there's a crash at the end of the road. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mike Peters, a Welsh musician best known as the lead singer of The Alarm. Between 2011 and 2013, Peters was the vocalist for Big Country as well as The Alarm.

A two-time cancer survivor, he founded the Love Hope Strength Foundation. The foundation has found close to 1,000 potentially life-saving bone marrow donor matches, built the first-ever Children's Cancer Center in Tanzania, supported the Bhaktapur Cancer Center in Nepal with life-saving equipment, and registered over 60,000 donors through its Get on the List program. Eric caught up with Mike in Akron on his tour supporting the 30th anniversary of the classic album, Strength. And now the interview with Mike Peters. Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show. Nice to be here. I am very excited to have you on. I was reading the other day, you were talking about meeting

Bruce Springsteen, you know, and how you, what it's like when you meet somebody that you looked up to at a certain age. And so when I was 16, I was a huge fan of The Alarm and have remained. So it's a real honor to meet you and get to sit down and talk with you. Nice to meet you too. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your own life and in the work that you do. Well, straight off the top of my head, it means to feed the positive side of your personality, which is something I've always tried to do throughout my whole musical life. And my life as an adult, a human being, and raise my own kids in a good way,

treat the people I meet in the way I want to be treated myself. Even with an audience, when I go on stage, I always try to put myself in the audience and think, well, what do they want from the show tonight? And, and, and, and just try to have as much respect for the other people that,

that, uh, come into the journey that I'm on in life. And, uh, and there's times when we walk the path together. Sometimes people go off on their own and then they come back and and it's allowed people to um always be at one with you as you in step if people come in step that's great they fall out of step that's just life and if once they

come back into line again then we just carry on. And I've never wanted to have enemies in life. I don't think I've got any enemies. And I've always tried to treat people with care and understanding. And there's times when life has forced people I know apart from me. And I always try to see everything from both sides of the story so that you can heal any rifts that happen in life so that when life brings you back together, which it always does, either faithfully or through strategy,

you can still have a relationship with people from your history without ill will or rancor or bitterness. And it's all part of life's rich pageant of understanding and learning. And that's the wolf I try to feed. Excellent. So you sort of emerged onto the music scene. You know, some of your songs refer to seeing the Sex Pistols, seeing The Clash, being involved in that scene. And yet everything, you know, from the very earliest alarm work, there's a positivity that's in your music that just is expressed differently than a lot of that other music.

There's a defiance in your music, but there's a clear positivity. Where did that come from so early in your career? Well, I think I sometimes talk about it on the stage when I play in the Spirit of 76, which was seeing the Sex Pistols and The Clash in that early 76, 77 period when punk broke into Britain. I saw both bands up close in the earliest days i saw the sex pistas in 76 in in october 76 and it was a life-changing experience and hearing johnny

rotten sing anarchy pretty vacant submission i didn't know they sounded amazing right but i didn't know what the language meant and no one told me what anarchy was in my high school or submission they were brand new words I heard them for the first time from the mouth of Johnny Rotten and I went up to the gig and asked him what anarchy in the UK meant and he told me to F off. That's not surprising. No it's not but he I think he was his way of just challenging me and smashing the preconceptions and almost like slapping you across the face to wake you up.

And so that was a big moment. And then I did see The Clash in 1977 on the White Riot tour in the Electric Circus in Manchester. And I followed the tour down to Barbarella's. They were doing this sort of secret gig there, and they were supposed to play at Birmingham Rag Market, and it got cancelled, but they turned up, and they were playing a secret gig in Barbarella's,

and I could see the amps going on. I knew they were going to come on, and I went to the bathroom, and I was doing my thing in the toilet, and I ended up stood next to Joee strummer and the whole of the clash and uh i asked joe strummer on the way out what white riot was all about and um because i didn't quite fully understand it from just hearing the record i thought i did in you know internally and viscerally but right i didn't know what a white riot was and he said to me it was about the future and uh and and he gave me something positive back and i think so from having the the sort of polarization of the seeing the two

bands uh and that was really it it was like the flint you know it was created the fire that the alarm came from the positive and the negative and i always lent towards the positive i always remember thinking if i meet somebody who comes up to me in that way looking for advice looking for um a sign a sign then i'll give them something positive back and and and uh so i wanted to put that into my music i wanted it to be uplifting for people liberating for them if they came to see a gig especially if they were you know young and naive like i was when i saw the pistols i didn't know how to become a punk right there was no manual i didn't know how to get skin tight black jeans i had to find them and i didn't know how to get certain records you had to go on incredible journeys across britain to get records and there was no internet it wasn't brought to your doorstep and right when we came on tour in america we you know we were i was from a small town we had no sven garley

upbringing like the pistols have had the benefit of an older guy like malcolm mclaren and and vivian westwood to dress them and jamie reed to do their artwork we had none of that you know the clash had bernie rhodes and he'd been in the Pistols camp and they were helping shape those bands and shape the way give them books to read give them clothes to wear help them with their stance and the way educate them a little bit about when they spoke to the media we had none of that it was we were just four kids from real North Wales who wanted to be in a band and we learned our lessons the hard way and so we wanted our politic if you like to be in a band and we learned our lessons the hard way and so we wanted our politic if you like to be personal and we wanted it to be um a message that the listener got that empowered them a little

bit or made them ask questions to go and find their their own answers and um and again we we grew up in a very extreme political time in the 80s that was, you know, came down from the Iron Lady at Margaret Thatcher. And, you know, we were brought up in a very musically aggressive time in the music papers in Britain. The enemy was very politicized in the 80s. There was the miners strike and there were closing steel steelworks down and it was a tough time and every band that walked into the enemy offices it was demanded that they had the political rhetoric to back up what they wanted to hear and and we we weren't like that we were our politics were different to that it was easy to me to write about the villains they were

they were all there on the newspaper every day you could knock them down easily but to write about somebody who was struggling to make something from nothing in the aftermath of the political turmoil that that required a different sort of approach musically and uh and that was what i was interested in and uh and you know i think I'm lucky that there's still people who come to see me play now who were at a gig in Omaha, Nebraska, who had their life changed by seeing the alarm in a positive way. Or someone who comes back to me and say they were at the brink

of doing something drastic with their life, and they put on the Strength album as their last record before they were going to do something they would regret, and it pulled them back from the brink and and to me that how having that those testimonies come to me through the internet now or through the facebook or the alarm.com that's um that's all i ever wanted from our music was to touch people and and be meaningful to them and have some value. Yep. And so you are out now, we're sitting in Akron, Ohio. You're going to play here in a little bit and you are, a big part of what you're doing is the 30th anniversary of the Strength record. I was curious, looking back on that record now, and you've done some re-recording

of it, what does the song Strength mean to you today, 30 years after you wrote and recorded it the first time? We'll be right back. Oh, oh, oh Well, it means more to me than it ever did because in the opening lines it says, Who will be the lifeblood coursing through my veins? Now, that was more of a metaphoric line when I was writing it in 1985, but it's a literal line for me now because I've had to live with cancer for 20 years.

I'm at the point in life where I might need to have a transplant and have somebody else's lifeblood flowing through my veins. That's a very real step in life I might have to take at some point in the future. So when I sing that song, and in particular that line, it always stops me dead every night because it's literally come true in my own life. Now, one of the things that you did as you have battled cancer is you founded the Love, Strength, and Hope.

Love, Hope, Strength. Love, Hope, Strength. Thank you, foundation. That has done a lot of work for people with cancer one of the things you've done has been registering a lot of people to be as i understand bone marrow donors will you be doing that at the show tonight yeah we will be tonight always a host of donor registry all our gigs okay and uh through the charity's formation in 2007 we've been able to work with over 10 000 other recording working artists in the world from robert plant and foo fighters enrique glacius frank turner yeah we had frank on the show yeah

fan you know we've worked with all drop kick murphy's all kinds of bands right down to the alarm and and thousands of bands you know that are just up and coming who embrace what we do, which is we try to turn rock concerts into life-saving events by holding a donor booth at those gigs, getting people to sign up to the International Bone Marrow Donor Registry by giving a cheek swab, giving their information, personal information, so we can track them in life if they're lucky enough to be called to save the life of someone who has blood cancer,

like leukemia like I have. And we've signed over 100,000 people to the registry. We've found close to 1,800 potentially life-saving matches of people. And it's become as much of my life's work as the alarm. But it's a real communal effort it's it's run by volunteers we haven't hardly got any staff we've got no staff in britain it's a completely voluntary uh charity in the uk but with america being so big and we're working with so many bands every night we've got staff to facilitate some of it, but we still rely on volunteers and public donation to help fund what we do.

We work in partnership with Delete Blood Cancer. They're an organization with a massive donor registry, and we put the people we find at our gigs through our Get On The List campaign onto their registry. And so someone who signs up to the show tonight in Akron, Ohio, could become a lifesaver for someone in Britain or Germany or anywhere in the world who matches their DNA profile. And now if you do become a life-saving donor,

it's just an outpatient procedure. 99% of the times it's just giving blood in hospital and it's an in-and-out procedure in a day. And then your blood will then give someone life. of the times it's a just giving blood in hospital and it's an in and out procedure in the day and then your blood will then give someone life yeah we'll definitely put on the show notes to the page and all that links to the foundation and fantastic thanks and here's the rest of the interview with mike peters in the 2000s there was some new alarm work um it came out it was a little bit i love the energy and the and the aggressiveness of some of one of them is a song called Situation. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really

Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts is under control. Everything is black and white. There's the roof. Since all around me, everything is upside down. There's a cardboard box at my feet I'm going through hell

And I can't speak I'm going through hell And I can't breathe Oh, the situation Is under control Everything is as it should be But that's acceptable Can you tell me a little bit about what went into the writing of that song and what was going on with you when you wrote it? Yeah, I think life was completely out of control when I wrote that song.

I had not long been diagnosed with leukemia, and I'd just made an album for the album called Under Attack. And I didn't know really 100% why my instinct was telling me that was the album title. And we'd finished making the album. We'd recorded a video for every single song in 24 hours. It was an audio-visual release as much as it was just about the songs want people to see the music as well as hear it and uh and then all of a sudden i was diagnosed

with leukemia for it was my second cancer diagnosis i had lymphoma before that and i was off the charts ill and i didn't know it and I went into hospital with some symptoms and and they wouldn't let me home they sent me immediately to another hospital for treatment to bring me out of the danger zone the doctors didn't know I'd even walked in the hospital my blood was so thick with what they thought was dead white blood at the time that it was like oil in it just wasn't even moving and so I was taken to hospital to get out of the critical uh region i was in and and while i was there my wife brought my ipod in so i could have some music to play while i was going through these procedures and um and i'd forgotten i'd put this under attack album

on while i was out and about listening to it randomly to get a sequence going for the record and i was lying in hospital i was having this pretty intense procedure called leukophoresis and uh i was kind of in a bit of shock at the time as well and going under and my ipod was on and this track came on i didn't know know what it was and it had the title came to the title and it said, I'll never give up without a fight. And I knew that was the alarm, that was our new record. And then I realized then I was so ill, my subconscious was driving this record. And then Situation Under Control was part of a series of music we created that was called Counter-Attack.

And it was like the opposite to under attack where i'd written the record under the pressure of cancer coming into my life taking over i decided to write music that was my counter-attack to that was me fighting back against the cancer and songs like situation under control were really me writing music that gave me a mental arsenal to be able to fight cancer in my mind and fight it psychologically as well as physically and and I think I've always believed that music is is a great tool to have whenever you're facing any adversity in life, it can release you from some of the pressure. It can help you fortify yourself for that big day that's coming up or when you've got to face that situation that you're nervous about.

You can play that favorite piece of music and it lifts you up and it gives you that little bit of courage to face the day. And so the situation, the control and um and and i and so the situation the control and the counter-attack series of music was was really my way of being able to put myself in in a position to stand up to cancer you've battled cancer twice um you know i'd say you're still battling it right that's got to take a toll. You remain so outwardly positive. Where do you turn when you are really internally struggling? When you just, you know, that optimism isn't there. What do you turn to, to give you the strength that you're then able to project out in

the music? I'm lucky to have a really solid life outside of rock and roll. I've got a really strong relationship with my wife. She's my best friend. We've been married for 28 years you know we met we got engaged within a week and nothing has taught we've been tested and tested all through life in that time but nothing has ever tore us apart from each other and we've got two beautiful boys that we've had to fight hard to get had to go through all my wife had to go through IVF to get the kids because of all the situations we've been in. She's been to Kilimanjaro with me, helped build an account center in Dar es Salaam in Africa

and suffered a DVT, nearly lost a life on the way back from Africa. And we've both been through an incredible amount together and we fall back into each other when we're really struggling to cope with certain situations in life as a hobby and it still is a hobby for me. It's still my passion. It's still where I would go if I had a normal nine to five job. I'd be playing in the garage at night or setting up the gear at the weekend and ripping into a gig because I love it. And I'm very lucky that I can express myself within my passionate thing in life every day. And I'm also grateful for the life I can come home to. And I've got people there who love me, who understand me, who stand up for me when the stones are getting thrown,

you know, because that's what happens. That's what you put your head above, the power of pit in rock and roll. And it's not always praise. Stones are getting thrown as well. always praise stones are thrown as well. Um, and, um, you know,

you have to have a really good, um, fallback to be able to cope with that because it is hurtful at times, you know, and you, and you see it from people who love you the most musically, they can still want to tear you down and, and challenge everything you do.

And you can't please all the people all of the time. Yeah. As the famous american quote goes but uh so you need that and i and when i close the door on rock and roll when i come home and i see my boys and it's the best thing in the world how old are they now they're my boys are eight and eleven dylan and evan they're into music they play piano and drums and guitar they're brought up to see it as a hobby like I am. And they come to the shows with Jules.

And we're very, very, very close. Wonderful. Wonderful. And you open up your heart and soul But that's not enough for most I remember this much There is nothing you shouldn't speak of If you've got something to say And there's no one to be scared of Just get them out of the way

Going out in a blaze of glory My heart is open wide You can take anything that you want from me, there is nothing left to hide. Going out in a blaze of glory, my hands are held up high. I'm learning how to hit back, I'm learning how to fight. Tell me about the song Blaze of Glory. Well, that was written really when we first played with U2. It was on the war tour and we played with them in December 1982,

just before A New Year's Day came out as a single and the album wasn't out until 83. And we played a momentous night with them in london and and one of the songs that were new to their audience and them as a band was a song called surrender now that was the the theme of war i think you know bono described it as like a you know slap in the face against pop music was his quote but really it was it was seeing war as a different from a different perspective seeing war from the through the color well without the color with a white flag the war where people surrender to win

and um and and that that was what bono was putting across in that music, and I saw them ripped to pieces in the music press in Britain, and I think it was only because I think people were envious of the fact that they were taking their music to America and they were starting to help other bands. I think the British press thought it was their preserve to make or break bands, and all of a sudden a band like U2 came along and opened the door for unknown musicians like The Alarm to get to America for the first time, which we did. We came with them in 1983. No one had heard of us in America.

We were almost unknown in Britain. And we had our first hit record in America because of the tour we did with U2. We had our first hit record in America because of the tour we did with U2. And U2 were going on the radio and championing the Alarms record, The Stand, and saying, don't play New Year's Day. Play the band that are opening for us tonight. Come and see them. They're amazing.

And they were breaking us, and they were creating their own power base. And the music press in Britain didn't like it one bit. And they started trying to smash them. And they tore them down. And I see, and I had this image, saw this image of Bono with his arms held high, surrender, on the war tour, and the line came into my head, it's funny how they shoot you down

when your hands are held up high, because up to that point, you two had been praised, and all of a sudden, here they were, on the verge of breaking, and they were being torn apart, and it was so obvious to the world that that you set them up you knock them down and it was it was such a cliche and here's the music press accusing bands like youtube being cliched when they were pulling out all the cliches in the book

there was no depth to the criticism of youtube it was just targeted at them they would target their christianity or target the the fact that we're selling out playing huge gigs and it wasn't the same anymore and there was no real balance to it so um that prompted the line it's funny how they shoot you down when your hands are held up high but the song really became more than that when the full the song really became more than that when the full lyrics came down. And it was all, I think it's all about really staying strong, believing in yourself. You know, when I first went out as a punk rocker in real and ripped up my jacket and went out with safety pins,

people want to tear you down because they're scared of the way you look. And it's easy to back down to that kind of peer pressure. It's easy to give in and think, oh, I'll just go along with the flow of the river and i'll look like everyone else and life will be easier but life isn't like that you have to have courage to take those steps forward out of the crowd to to find your own inner self, find the place where you belong in life because we're all brought up in the image of our parents and really we're all individual and we want to be ourselves. And some people, they give in to the peer pressure

and they suppress who they really are. So we wanted our songs to liberate people, allow them to find the courage and be who you really want to be. Yeah, there's a sense in a lot of your music, I'll say this, a military sense, in that there's a lot of marching. You put on the camouflage when you were battling cancer. There's those sort of analogies,

and yet there's maybe the right word that you used is, you know, fighting war by surrendering. But I've always been sort of amazed how you've managed to weave those two things together in a really powerful way. Yeah, I don't know how we've done it really. It has always been there and I don't know why. I don't know. I think the first thing that I sort of got into where I remember seeing the Who with medals on their jackets and that was pop art. And I remember putting some medals on my jacket and then I got into the sort of seeing the 60s psychedelia thing and people wore those red guardsman's jacket.

And that was sort of the start of our early look in the Alarm, a Western psychedelia look. But the term military got attached to us rather than pop art psychedelia. And I think our image didn't help our music in some ways because I think it threw up some conflicts that people would read these lyrics and they wouldn't quite kind of lie with the big hair or the over-the-top look that we had on stage because we all adopted it and it was it

was very the front line of the band was it was all attack it was all out bang yeah and um the we didn't have a john entwistle like we the who did that we could be the polar opposite of we had three guys flowing themselves around the stage and there wasn't the quiet member you know the the who amplified the power of the individual in the band we we came across like for like a gang yeah and and i think and we weren't really a gang that I think when people met us, they could see that we were all quite different, but we did have this gang mentality that came out of, of the look of the band and the way we played on stage.

And I don't think that helped some of the, the subtlety that was in the music in a way. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never

know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Just,

you know, as, as you go through life and you, and you know, the, the, you make a record in the eighties, it stay,

it stays in the eighties, but you write a song in the eighties. It lives beyond that. It comes alive in the nineties, comes alive again as you get older in life. And that's what interests me about the alarms music, not just what we made in the 80s, but what it continues to be today. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how you interpret that music this evening.

What would you say is the lesson that's taken you the longest to learn in life? To keep my mouth shut. You know, I've been brought up to answer people politely. And if someone answers your question, then you answer it back. And sometimes I should just stay quiet. Yeah. One of the things we talk about on the show a lot is um we talk about spirituality being this very nebulous thing does does the word spiritual have any meaning to you and if so what what does that

word mean to you i equate it with with with faith really i'm in faith that that life's going to work out the way you hope it is going to work out and um you know some people think in the short term and some people think in the long term and some people think in the long term. And I like to think I fall in the latter category. And so I've always trusted my instinct in life. And I think that sometimes gets confused with spirituality. I think instinct is a very powerful force. And if you can learn to trust your instinct, then you won't go far wrong in life.

And there's so many outside forces you make us distrust ourselves and the way we think as individuals, that it's easy to be sidestepped from your mission in life and your goals or what your hopes are. Again, I think spirituality, i think of as as instinct really and uh i you know try always try to follow my instinct and it when i've really followed my instinct it's never very rarely let me down if ever um and when you take advice from someone else sometimes and you you go along with it and you think it, and you think it doesn't feel right and you end up, bang, there's a crash at the end of the road and you think, why didn't I trust?

Why didn't I trust myself? Yep. And, uh, so last question. Um, I think the song, uh, we are the light. That's sort of what I took from that. You know, we are the light of our lives. We're our own light. I think so.

Yeah. That was written in for declaration. was written in uh in london it it was a little folk song i put together in a major key and uh i think that's what i was trying to get to i didn't understand spirituality or instinct so much in 1981 when we moved to London and 82 when that song was written. There's a failure who is standing on the corner For he cannot see hope There's a blind man standing at the crossroads For he cannot see light And as we fire the candles

We must make sure they burn through the night But if they should die There'd be no light We are the light We are the light We are the light We are the light of our lives We are the light We are the light of our lives

You play it in concert and you see people really get hold of it and they're all saying, we are the light. And you think, wow, how come that's taken hold? and you see people really get hold of it and they're all singing, we are the light. And you think, wow, how come that's taken hold? And then you start asking a few questions yourself and thinking, what does it mean? Not just to me, but to others. And it was always the song that was,

it was like a little communion in the gig. It was the moment really when the sound and the fury would come to an end and our instinct as a band or my instinct is a as the singular band but let's not leave everyone right up there let's just let's have a moment to calm it all down and and just celebrate in a really human way this experience we've all had where the audience have given everything to this band they've jumped up on the stage they've given physically they've lost tons of weight jumping them down to the band they've sung along every word and i always remember saying to my let's get down

to the front of the gig let's leave the drums behind there let's get one acoustic guitar we'll gather around the microphone and we'll sing this song with the audience and we'll just enjoy what we've all just been through. And I think that's how it seemed to us, that we were creating a little bit of light for ourselves in the darkness. You know, we were, again, as I say, in the early 80s, it was a very dark time in Britain. Politically, it was divisive.

We saw all the politicians i saw i always thought politics was supposed to be about bringing us together as a community and uniting people and here they were doing the complete opposite and really polarizing opinion and i think it was the first times you know in in the war time that not you know it wasn't that it only there was only a couple of decades before us it politics brought everyone together and then all of a sudden in the in the 60s we started to see that division come and uh and i think it really became massive in the 80s and so i think we all felt like unsure of who we we were it felt very difficult to have an opinion because everyone was telling you what to think the government was telling you who to vote for the enemy was telling

you who to get behind and you it was very hard to think for yourselves and and find that light in the of of enlightenment that you need you know that so we i think thinking back to it now that they were the moments that really made the relationship we have the audience strong that little communal moment when we just all sang together you know sometimes we'd lose the power in a gig and we just jump in the middle of the audience and it was always we are the light and we'd play that stood in the middle of the audience and there was no amplification no pas no stage lights just complete darkness and that i remember doing it in hamburg and what one of the most amazing special nights of all time and special moments because it was taking us back to the simplicity of music we love woody guthrie and the simplicity

of uh one person with one guitar singing in the street with a message wonderful well thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me it's been a real pleasure look forward to hearing the podcast now all right bye thank you you can learn more about mike peters and this podcast at one you feed.net slash peters