Garbage Days Revisited #70: The Alarm - "Declaration" (1984)

 

"Going out in a blaze of glory/My arms are held up high/I'm learning how to hit back, I'm learning how to fight" - The Alarm - Blaze Of Glory

So let's go right back to the beginning here in terms of your writer's musical journey - 1988-89 sort of time. At this point, I hadn't really started to form my music taste as such - I used to watch Top of the Pops and the ITV Chart Show every week and I knew I liked bands like the Wonder Stuff, the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, Guns 'n' Roses and Poison because they were something different from the non-stop PWL conveyor belt that pretty much had a near monopoly on the Top 10 at the time. Occasionally I'd pick up a copy of Smash Hits or its oft-forgotten rival at the time Number One from the newsagents but that was as far as my knowledge really went. However, my main memory of those teeny-pop magazines at the time were that there were two bands who were pretty much the running punchline of every joke about crap music and they were the Alarm and Tears For Fears.

Looking back, it's probably not that much of a surprise - both bands were a few years past their commercial peak at this point - Tears For Fears had just released the incredibly overblown (even by their standards) Seeds Of Love album (although the title track and Advice For The Young At Heart sounded better than I remembered when I chanced upon them again many years later) while the Alarm were pretty much in their dying throes at this point and churning out overwrought nonsense like that New South Wales single (complete with kids' choir which is always a bad sign). Indeed, the band would grind to a halt just a year or two later but I'm kind of ashamed to say that the stigma of those early encounters with music journalism stuck in my head for (early memories and all that) and I ended up regarding them as a bit of a joke band for many years afterwards.

It wasn't really until about a decade and a half after that that started to change but there were a few incidents fairly close to each other that made me look back and realise I'd actually been a bit harsh on Mike Peters and co. I suppose the obvious place to start is the group's biggest hit 68 Guns which seemed to crop up on a few goth compilations I had around this time (I mean, I'm really not sure why, there's a couple of tangential links there as we'll see but you could never really confuse the Alarm with being a goth band in my opinion) and I ended up warming to it. As I mentioned in the Stiff Little Fingers GDR column many moons ago, I was very much an angry young man with a chip on my shoulder the size of a King Edward potato by this point and that rallying cry to stay true unto thine self only ("They're after you with their promises/They're after you to sign your life away") definitely hit home. It's still a great song now - as we'll see, if there's one thing that the imperial phase Alarm were good at it was writing anthems for the downtrodden.

I think it was shortly after this that I saw the Alarm supporting the Damned in Leeds and I was really pleasantly surprised. I mean they were never gonna upstage Vanian, Sensible and co who were on good form that night as well but they definitely gave them a run for their money, attacking their set with an impressive energy and I'm pretty sure that the Declaration and Strength albums would end up in my CD collection not too long afterwards. Around the same time, the group scored a shock Top 30 hit (their first in well over a decade) by releasing their new single 45rpm under the pseudonym of the Poppyfields and getting a group of early twentysomething Busted/McFly lookalikes to star in the video (the incident was the inspiration for the Phil Daniels/Keith Allen film Vinyl). As someone who was frequently railing against said group of major label mannequins' scrubbed and anodyne take on pop-punk taking what little menace there was out of the genre to make it appeal to the teenybopper market, I'll admit I had a good smile about that one.

But anyway, as with the Mission last week, there were a couple of Alarm albums that were under consideration for this slot, either Declaration or Strength. I basically decided to go with the former as it just shades it by a hair's breadth as their best in my opinion but the latter is a fine album too - the clarion call of the title track and the heart-wrenching Spirit of '76 (a real “no, it’s just something in my eye” ode to Peters' teenage years travelling from Rhyl to Liverpool to see his first gigs and what became of the friends he left behind - “Some nights when I can’t sleep, I still think of you, of all the promises, all the dreams we shared…” - when people call the Alarm the Welsh Springsteen, this is very much what they mean) are pretty much compulsory listening if you're just getting into this band. 2004's In The Poppyfields deserves an honourable mention as well, not just for the 45rpm single but for some other sterling moments such as the title track, Coming Home, Right Back Where I Started From and especially the heartbreaking ode to a down and out The Drunk And The Disorderly which takes the Spirit of '76 template and crosses it with Won't Get Fooled Again to come up with something genuinely great (it's also a song along with Big Country's One Great Thing that saw me through a particularly horrible time in my life when it really did feel as if all hope was gone and I'll always have a soft spot for it for that reason alone). With Peters being backed up by a supremely talented new Alarm line-up featuring James Stevenson (ex-Generation X and Gene Loves Jezebel), Craig Adams (ex-Mission and Sisters of Mercy) and Steve Grantley (Stiff Little Fingers) it's an oft-overlooked gem in the band's back catalogue.

I think in the end it had to be the band's debut album Declaration though - it's one of the most genuinely uplifting albums out there in this writer's humble opinion and I've lost count of the times that Blaze of Glory and 68 Guns have lifted my spirits when it's badly been needed over the last couple of decades. Add to them other classics such as Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke?, Marching On, We Are The Light and The Stand and it's pretty much all killer no filler. I remember joking a few years ago that they should prescribe this as an anti-depressant, it's always got that way of making me realise there's something to move forwards toward if I'm ever starting to doubt it.

The Alarm remain very much a going concern today and have put out some pretty good albums in recent years including 2018's Sigma, 2019's Equals and last year's War (Nite Songs review here) which show that they're anything but a spent force despite Peters' long battle with leukaemia. The man is a genuine force of nature and definitely deserves his status as something of a national treasure. At present, he's currently taking an enforced break from touring after being laid low with pneumonia but appears to be making a good recovery - get well soon Mike, we're rooting for ya here. In the meantime, for those unlucky enough to be unaware, I heartily recommend Declaration, Strength and In The Poppy Fields as a start off point for your Alarm discovery voyage as well as the excellent recent albums. They may have been the target of pretty much everyone's ridicule when I first became a music fan but recent events have shown that they're anything but. Respect, I think, is (over)due.