“I had to focus on something or I wouldn’t get through those next few months. I thought of Lennon wearing his army jacket: I went to war against the illness”: The turbulent story of The Alarm, the band who could have been the new U2

The Alarm posing for a photograph in 1987.

Welsh rock band The Alarm followed in the footsteps of their friends U2, rising out of the fertile late 70s UK post punk scene to some of the world’s biggest stages before acrimoniously splitting in the early 1990s. But for frontman Mike Peters, it was a cancer diagnosis in 1996 that would change his life forever.