Mike Peters, singer for Welsh rockers the Alarm, dead at 66 after cancer battle

Mike Peters, who toured with U2 and Queen, had publicly battled cancer and earned an MBE for activism. He has died at 66.

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Mike Peters, the singer for the Welsh rock group the Alarm, has died. He was 66.

Peters died of cancer, which he had battled publicly as an activist and fundraiser for treatments. Peters lived with lymphoma and, later, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. His death was first announced in a statement from his band and his charitable foundation.

The Alarm formed in 1981 in Rhyl, Denbighshire, emerging after the U.K. punk wave of the late ‘70s with a more hook-driven, approachable but fiery sound that won acclaim in the U.K. and abroad. The Alarm sold millions of records and joined a small list of Welsh acts, including Tom Jones and Bonnie Tyler, to find worldwide fame.

Singles like “The Stand,” “Sixty Eight Guns,” “Blaze of Glory” and “Rain in the Summertime” embodied the band’s rousing songwriting. And the group became a favorite opener for stadium-rock acts of the ‘80s including Queen and U2, whose 1983 tour introduced the Alarm to the United States.

The band, proud of its Welsh heritage, in 1989 released “Newid,” a Welsh-language version of its 1989 album “Change.” Peters quit the group in 1991 and performed with his wife Jules — who also fought her own cancer — in the Poets of Justice (he also briefly fronted the Scottish act Big Country). He reunited the Alarm in 2000 and hit the U.K. charts in 2004 when, in a clandestine stunt, he wrote and recorded a single as a fictional teenage punk band, the Poppy Fields. The prank inspired a 2013 feature film, “Vinyl.”

Peters was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1995 and spent two decades undergoing intensive treatment. In 2005, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, which returned in 2015.

With his wife, he co-founded the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which helped recruit bone marrow donors at live concerts. He performed in unconventional locations to raise money for the charity, including Mt. Kilimanjaro and “Big Busk” walking concerts between cancer wards in Wales. Acts including Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young joined him onstage for charity events, and in 2019 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his cancer activism.

Peters shot a documentary, “While We Still Have Time,” about his and his wife’s cancer battles. This year he fell ill with a recurrence of Richter’s syndrome — an especially dangerous form of lymphoma.

Peters is survived by his wife and their children, Dylan and Evan.

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