It's surprising that Mike Peters, leader of seminal Welsh alt-rock band the Alarm, would release the nostalgic record Music Television, a Pin Ups-style homage to MTV's early days featuring covers of his peers like INXS, Modern English, Gene Loves Jezebel, the Blow Monkeys, Belouis Some, and even Michael Jackson and Phil Collins. Peters usually isn't one to look back — the Alarm's last album was literally titled Forwards — and there have been times when he has gone to especially creative extremes to avoid being pigeonholed as an '80s legacy act.
In fact, it was in exactly 20 years ago that Peters and the Alarm pulled off one of the greatest and funniest hoaxes in rock 'n' roll history, sneaking back onto MTV with the punky "45 RPM" — but only after they reinvented themselves as a shrouded-in-mystery teenage buzz band called the Poppy Fields.
Call it a false Alarm, if you will.
"We fooled the entire British industry, because they thought the record was by a bunch of 18-year-olds... when it was really the Alarm, and we were in our forties and it wasn't the original lineup anymore," Peters chuckles to Music Times. "We were in a place where people thought older artists can't make good music, or can't make music that lives up to the past. But we did. We just needed to prove it — with a bit of subterfuge to get the message across."
The subterfuge started in 2004, when Peters presented the Green Day-ish track, the Alarm's first single since 1991 and a bit of an artistic departure for the group, to a "powerful radio plugger who was doing Oasis and big Britpop bands at the time." But the executive didn't even bother to listen at first. "I took the '45 RPM' record to him and he said he didn't want to hear the Alarm. He said, 'Look, mate, there's no point. You're not going to get on the radio. You're too old. Everyone's got respect for you, but you don't fit the demographic anymore, so let's leave it at that,'" Peters reveals.
"But then he asked about anything else new I had going on. And I said, 'Well, I've got a new band in Wales. They're amazing! They're 18!' And he said, 'OK, let's hear that.' I put it on and he said, 'Mike, I'll get that on the radio just like that.'"
A week later, Peter admitted to the radio plugger that "45 RPM" was actually an Alarm original. So, when the executive began pitching it to U.K. programmers anyway, Peter assumed he'd "play it for people as a white label, and then when they said, 'Oh, that's really good,' he'd say, 'It's not what you think it is!' ... But when he phoned me back and told me, 'Mike, I've been playing the song to everybody and everyone loves it,' I asked, 'Well, what did they do when you told them it was the Alarm?' And he goes, 'They went so mad for it, I didn't have the guts to tell them!' So, they really went for it and put it on the playlist. [BBC DJ] Steve Lamacq was making his Record of the Week, and all sorts of things."
The Alarm decided to really go for it as well, re-pressing the "45 RPM" single with new artwork and even having a young, third-wave ska band from Chester, the Wayriders, lip-sync to the song for its music video. But as the song started to ascend the BBC charts and get some MTV play, neither the Alarm nor their radio plugger were "prepared for how big it was going to get." Eventually MTV invited the Poppy Fields to appear on the college-rock show 120 Minutes, and the Alarm panicked.
"We were like, 'Oh no! How are we going to do this?' I had to come up with a story that I was managing them and that they were doing their exams in university because they were only 18, so we'd have to wait a couple of months before they could appear on MTV," Peters laughs. "But MTV Europe did play the Poppy Fields video a few times — before the ruse got broken and everyone found out it was the Alarm in disguise."
In magnificent music-television fashion, the Poppy Fields revealed their true identity on Britain's biggest music program at the time. "The record charted as the Poppy Fields and then it got picked up to go on Top of the Pops, so we announced it that way," Peters smirks. "They broke the news on Top of the Pops and said, 'This record that's in the chart now at No. 21 isn't the Poppy Fields — it's the Welsh band, the Alarm!' And then they played the record."
Once the jig was up, the Alarm were getting more press than they'd had even in their '80s heyday. "It blew up the next day in the media, like a massive story. I was on the phone [doing interviews] nonstop for a week. Even Dan Rather from CBS News sent a film crew to do a big piece, like he was covering the war in Iraq or something. It was global news," Peters recalls, However, in retrospect Peters admits, "This has probably not been owned up to, but the reveal wasn't handled as well as it could be."
Peters explains, "I don't think the journalists and DJs who were saying 'the Poppy Fields are the best new band since the Clash and Rancid' or 'the best British band of modern times' were told in advance. I think they just found out on Top of the Pops, or when they opened their newspapers the next day. And I think the BBC felt they'd had their trousers pulled down, shall we say; it became a source of embarrassment for them, because everyone was having a go at them. The BBC became a bit of a laughingstock for a while — and that didn't bode well for us in the future! Because everyone had been fooled by it, they dropped [the song from radio rotation] like a hot potato. They just wiped it from their memory bank, as if they'd never played it — which I think said a lot more than really we were intending to say. And I thought that was a shame."
In the end, the Alarm did get the last laugh. The stranger-than-fiction Poppy Fields saga inspired the semi-autobiographical 2012 film Vinyl, starring Quadrophenia actor Phil Daniels and featuring an original soundtrack by Peters, and "The Poppy Fields" finally got to play their first official "secret" gig (opening for Killers guitarist Dave Keuning and with the Alarm amusingly opening for them) at New York's Mercury Lounge in 2018. And the Alarm, in various Peters-helmed configurations, have soldiered on, releasing more than a dozen original albums since the "45 RPM" scandal. Peters, a four-time cancer survivor, has been so "massively prolific in the last five years" in particular, he even managed to record Forwards from his self-described "death bed" in the North Wales Cancer Centre while dealing with his worst health scare yet.
But now that Peters has been given a clean bill of health, and the Alarm are preparing to crank out their iconic '80s hits like "The Stand," "Rain in the Summertime," and "68 Guns" at L.A.'s post-punk music festival Cruel World (alongside fellow early-MTV darlings like Duran Duran, Simple Minds, and Heaven 17), Peters is in a rare backwards-looking mood, releasing the limited-edition Music Television to sell on the road. The collectible record's "Program One" opens with Dire Straits' ironically MTV-lambasting "Money for Nothing" (the first video to air on MTV Europe in 1987) and the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star'" (the first video played on MTV in America in '81); "Program Two" ends with "The Man Who Sold the World" (a nod to both proto-MTV hero David Bowie and the Alarm's 1989 performance on MTV Unplugged) mashed up with a bit of the rifftastic MTV theme song.
"I thought it was good to remind everyone about how powerful MTV once was; people have forgotten," muses Peters. Many early fans viewers were in fact first introduced to the Alarm via MTV's "massively important show" IRS's The Cutting Edge (for which Penelope Spheeris memorably captured the band spray-painting graffiti poppies on an A&M studio lot backdrop for their one-take "The Stand" performance), or through their "Spirit of '86 Live Global Broadcast" special, shot at UCLA, for which the Alarm served as the "guinea pigs" for the cable network's new live broadcast technology.
As for why now, following the "intense" Forwards project, is the right time for the Alarm to embrace the past (maybe we'll get another Poppy Fields "reunion" one day?), Peters says of Music Television: "If a [covers album] was good enough for David Bowie to do Pin Ups 40 years ago, then it is valid reason for us to do a collection of covers that influenced and directed the band and who we are and where we come from. There'll be new albums on the horizon before you know it, I'm sure. But I think this is the lighter side of the Alarm. And that's good to show that at times."
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