If you don’t already know that Mike Peters is a rock star you might guess from the shaggy blond hair that sticks up in spikes, and his occasional use of the word “heavy”.
Otherwise he is an unlikely rocker. Married for 20 years to a woman he met in Prestatyn High Street, his drink of choice is a cup of tea, and when he talks about drugs taking the edge off him, he is referring not to illicit substances but to the chemotherapy he had after a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL).
If there is any irony in someone so clean-living being twice confronted by cancer, it does not strike Peters. Instead this gentle and affable man talks through a permanent smile about how he believes his own positive response to his illness has helped him to reach remission. “There is no guide book for having cancer; a lot of what you do is instinctive,” he says. “But I believe that some of the cure has to come from you, from within.”
During the 25 years that Peters has led the Welsh band The Alarm, they have clocked up 14 hit singles and seven albums. Their following is nothing if not committed, and Peters treats fans like an extended family, passing on his thoughts via the internet. It is in this spirit that he and his wife Jules (who does, at least, look like a rock chick) have become the subjects of a TV documentary that follows his recent treatment for CLL and their simultaneous attempt to have a second child through IVF.
Peters learnt that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma ten years ago, when he was 36. Doctors advised immediate chemotherapy, but his response was to go ahead with a six-week tour in America. To do otherwise would have been negative, he reasoned, and the doctors needed him in a positive frame of mind. He also consulted a faith healer called Bambi, who advised him to focus on the colour green. Peters interpreted this as a call to embrace the battle terminology so often associated with cancer.
“I got off the plane and thought, ‘I need to go to war with my mind’,” he says. “So I went to an army store in Connecticut and kitted myself from head to toe in combat fatigues. I didn’t tell anybody why. I just kept focused on positive thoughts, wore the fatigues all the time. Even in bed.”
This may sound potty, but Peters is not a stupid man. “For me, putting them on was like going into battle mentally. It prepared me for what I had to do, to stand on the stage and sing. I might have crumpled at times. It was like going out on to the edge of life where you let go of everything. You just keep thinking you’re getting through this.”
When, several weeks later, he arrived at the hospital near his North Wales home for chemotherapy, his blood count had inexplicably reversed and he no longer needed treatment. Ten years passed and, by the time he was found to have CLL last December, he and Jules had Dylan, who had been conceived through IVF after the discovery that an operation Jules underwent when she was 19 had scarred her Fallopian tubes.
This time Peters had a white blood count of 500,000: a normal one is between 4 and 7. The combat fatigues came out again, but he did not prevaricate about treatment. “I snapped to attention. It was scary, although my doctor reassured me that it was a disease that, in all probability, you will die with rather than of. I clung to that.
“That was said in the midst of an hour’s meeting that was like listening to a foreign language. The phraseology is hard to get used to, and the names of the drugs . . . it’s overwhelming and fearful. I wasn’t afraid of the worst, but I was prepared to battle it as hard as I could. You’ve got a child and you have got to make sure you get through it for him. It helped me last time not to assume the worst, so I assumed a positive position and believed that the drugs would work.”
What was frightening, Peters explains, was the unknown. He dealt with that by researching his condition, finding out how the drugs he was given worked. The more information he had, the more he felt in control.
“Mentally, you can help each drug along: imagine the rituximab attaching itself to defunct white blood cells and killing them off. Then you start to become immune to the fear.
“I decided to respond to things as they happened. I thought, ‘I’m not going to say this drug is going to make me sick or make my hair fall out. When that happens I’ll think about it. But I’m going to pretend it’s not going to happen.’ And it didn’t.
“As a musician you romanticise things in your mind. There’s always a part of you that’s looking for the next song. Sometimes I go through things and they don’t seem real. I’ve had this weird life where my dreams have come true. I sat there as a kid growing up in the village here, wanting to be in a band, projecting myself.
“All of a sudden you’re in hospital with needles sticking in your arms and it seems as unreal as going on Top of the Pops for the first time or doing a duet with Bob Dylan. Me? Unbelievable, I see cancer the same way. You think, this is the price you pay for that. So I accept it and think I’ll come through; I’ll find a way to meet the asking price.”
He also embraced several complementary therapies, including essiac tea, apricot nut kernels and aromatherapy, and a change of diet from acidic to alkaline (using fresh organic ingredients and cutting out manufactured food). “I feel that helps because it shores up the positivity that you’re applying to the situation.”
A key part of this mental attitude was making life as normal and hopeful as possible. Carrying on doing gigs reinforced his sense of optimism, as did the decision he and Jules took to undergo another course of IVF treatment using previously frozen embryos.
“Part of the drive was that, if I didn’t make it, at least a part of me would live on. When we had Dylan it made life complete because there’s another person that you put above yourself; he is an embodiment of our relationship, and we wanted more of that.”
The course worked and the baby is due in January. “That has really helped me to move on. You don’t have time to think about your chemo when baby No 2 is coming along.”
By May this year his astonished doctor told him that he had gone from having the highest white blood count he had ever seen to the lowest.
He has decided to protect his health by cutting his gigs to one a month, although he is planning charity events for next year, and continues to record and to update his fans with personal messages on the internet. “There are other ways of expressing yourself than going into the trenches of rock’n’roll,” he says. “Less can be a lot more.”
Mike Peters: When The Storm Broke, Sunday, October 1, BBC Two Wales/2W, 9pm (can be viewed outside Wales on digital satellite channel 991).
The Alarm’s new album Under Attack is out now on Liberty/EMI.
