Thirty years, 17 Top 50 hits and five million album sales on from their debut gig in June 1981, the latest incarnation of The Alarm (Peters is the only surviving member from the classic 80’s line up) finds them in bullish form, re-recorded versions of Unbreak The Promise, Shelter and The Rock offering stomp-rock anthems every inch as strident as anything on Declaration.
If Peters’s sonic touchstones – The Who, Springsteen and The Clash – remain unchanged, time has given his impassioned odes to self-help an added edge, made all the more poignant by his own battle with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia, diagnosed in 2006 and mercifully now in remission.
“The time for change is here to stay!” he declares in For Freedom, while epic finale Howling Wind finds him back on the teenage wasteland hollering, “I refuse to lay me down”.
It’ll send a shiver down the spine of anyone who has ever sung along to 68 Guns.
