14 February 2020
Newsdesk
As a prelude to The Alarm’s March 2020 Sigma UK Tour in Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and London, Mike Peters and The Alarm are proud to release details of The Gathering 2021, and a unique 40th Anniversary Celebration concert at St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, Wales on June 5th 2021 (exactly 40 years on from the date that band performed their first ever gig as The Alarm, at the Royal Victoria Hotel, Prestatyn on June 5th 1981). Buy tickets below.
The St. David’s Hall concert in Cardiff will be the finale to The Gathering 2021 which gets underway in the band’s hometown venue of Rhyl Town Hall on May 21st / 22nd 2021, with lead singer Mike Peters promising to take fans on an intimate acoustic journey through four decades of Alarm music and lyric.
On May 23rd, 2021 Mike Peters will undertake OFFA’s DYKE ROCKS, an epic 177 mile / 12 Day Love Hope Strength fund-raising trek in support priority cancer projects.
“By hiking the 12 day / 177 mile journey to South Wales, I will literally be linking The Alarm’s past to the present,” says Mike Peters. “Walking from the site of our first ever show to St. David’s Hall in Cardiff ,where we will celebrate our official 40th Anniversary from 1981-2021’.
The first event of Mike Peters and The Alarm’s 40th Anniversary calendar year will take place in North Wales with the creation of The Alarm’s Love Hope Strength Sanctuary. “To mark the beginning of our 40th Anniversary year in January 2021, we will be holding a public ceremony and planting 40 trees at a secret location in North Wales”, reveals Mike. “I hope that the Sanctuary will become a lasting reminder of our time on earth, a place for loved ones to gather, to celebrate and to remember the loved and the lost, and to give back to planet earth. One tree for every event of The Alarm’s fortieth year, one tree for every year of The Alarm’s time on earth and one branch for every member of The Alarm Family.”
The Alarm’s Gathering 2021 40th Anniversary event, is the only event planned for the UK for 2021 but there will be other unique ‘Alarm Gatherings’ taking place during The Alarm’s 40th Anniversary World Tour ‘To The End of The Earth and Back’. The tour will take The Alarm to all seven continents where they will perform concerts in the Arctic Circle (Svalbard), A rock cruise and fundraiser in the Caribbean under the Love Hope Strength banner ‘Saving Lives at Sea’, followed by events in South and North America (including Patagonia and Hawaii), before venturing to Australia, Asia and Africa before an end of year run of Gathering weekends in Scandinavia, Italy, Holland, Germany and Belgium.
The Alarm will be preparing the way for their fortieth anniversary year, with a series of four UK concerts beginning on Saturday March 20th in Manchester at the O2 Ritz, followed by The Garage in Glasgow on March 21st. The following weekend The Alarm will depend on Birmingham’s O2 Institute on March 27th) before a final concert at the Electric Ballroom in London on March 29th. These concerts will be the groups only live appearances of 2020, bringing the curtain down on an incredible two years of creativity and touring that saw the band release two albums in 12 months. The critically acclaimed = / Equals was released in 2018 and followed exactly one year later, by the UK Number One Rock Album ∑ / Sigma, with each release attaining excellent chart positions on both sides of the Atlantic and receiving some of best reviews the band has ever had (see below).
2020 / 2021 will add further chapters to an already inspirational story that has seen The Alarm sell more than six million albums world wide while clocking up 17 Top Fifty singles in the UK. Formed in 1981 in the Welsh seaside resort of Rhyl, The Alarm broke through on the back of the singles Sixty Eight Guns, Rain In the Summertime and Spirit Of ‘76, their music a passionate blend of amped-up acoustic guitars, harmonica and Mike's stirring voice. A string of successful albums saw them bracketed alongside U2, The Waterboys, Simple Minds and Big Country as part of Eighties rock's distinctive Celtic fringe. After an emotional swansong at Brixton Academy in 1991, the original line-up splintered, with Mike going it alone and joining forces with Billy Duffy of the Cult in a short-lived band called Coloursøund. The lingering allure of his old group proved hard to resist, however, and Peters entered a new millennium back at the helm of The Alarm. The group's activities since that 1999 re-launch have included an ambitious album project, the Poppy Fields Bond, that saw them release five studio albums of original material in the first five months of 2003 and a 'fake band' escapade the following year, in which they concealed their true identity by releasing a single, 45 RPM, as The Poppy Fields. They created a global news story when the song unexpectedly hit the UK charts. Mike Peters was diagnosed with Chronic Leukaemia in 2005 and although disabled from touring still managed to continue making new music through the albums Guerilla Tactics and Direct Action, which was followed in 2018 by = / Equals which charted on both sides of the Atlantic and exactly one year later the release of ∑ / Sigma gave The Alarm it’e first ever UK Number One Rock Album.
Mike Peters is also co-founder of the Love Hope Strength Cancer Foundation and after taking musicians to many of the world’s most iconic mountain locations to perform fund raising concerts (Everest, Kilimanjaro, Snowdon and later this year to the SAHARA DESERT), signing up over 250,000 people to the stem cell donor registry that has resulted in over 4,500 potentially lifesaving matches for blood cancer patients who need a second chance of life.
Mike Peters is a man lucky to be alive. “Time is of the essence now, and for our 40th Anniversary year, I want the band and the fans carry on the way we came in - Unsafe, Marching On, in the knowledge that we have given more than we have taken, created more than we have destroyed, loved more than we have lost, and built up more than we have taken down.”
The Alarm will perform the following UK Tour dates in March 2020:
20.03.20 MANCHESTER - O2 RITZ
21.03.20 GLASGOW - THE GARAGE
27.03.20 BIRMINGHAM - O2 INSTITUTE
28.03.20 LONDON - ELECTRIC BALLROOM
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