Interview: Eddie Macdonald, The Alarm

GOING (BACK) OUT IN A BLAZE OF GLORY

The ALARM were one of the bands from the "Celtic fringe" that surfed the post-punk energy that fed into Live-Aid-era stadium rock. Unlike U2 and SIMPLE MINDS, however, the band broke up in 1991, when charismatic frontman Mike Peters walked away. Ironically, having killed the goose that could have laid a lot more golden eggs, Peters went on to revive the Alarm name with different line-ups but no major success. After his death in 2025, you could be forgiven for thinking that the story was over. But strangely that tragic event did not weaken the legacy. Instead it provided room for other original members to step back into the limelight and pick up the torch, none more so than Eddie Macdonald, the band’s bass player and Peters song-writing partner from their glory days.

Last year Macdonald launched Alarm 2.0, a project dedicated to recreating the sound of the early Alarm, as he explained on a Zoom call to the Revenge of Riff Raff.

“We did our first two gigs at the Lexington in London,” he says proudly. “The audience got it—and I loved it. We went away into the night and I think everybody felt happy. It is the right thing to do and it works.”

But this wasn’t the original surviving line-up. It was essentially Macdonald taking over Mike Peter’s post-Alarm project—James Stevenson (guitar) & Steve “Smiley” Barnard (drums)—with Matt Peach guesting on vocals, and pointing it squarely in the direction of the Alarm's 1980s achievements.

“I enjoyed it so much, playing with the other guys, because I haven't really had what I call an Alarm experience,” Eddie explains, referring to his relatively low-profile post-1991 career. “I've had some solo shows, I've played the albums myself a couple of times, I've done a couple of shows in London playing the Declaration album and the Strength album, and I really enjoyed it, but I love the idea of playing all the songs rather than individual albums.”

He has also done some of the Alarm material, like the 1982 anti-war anthem "Third Light," on which he originally did the vocals, with his SMALLTOWN GLORY project back in 2016.

The new incarnation of the Alarm, however, is a step up from this, and has a seven-show tour lined up for early March hitting 200-to-300-capacity venues in Birmingham, Paisley, Hull, Liverpool, Lytham, and Norwich (details and tickets). The main difference from last year’s Lexington shows is that Eddie will be handling more vocal duties with Craig Adams (THE MISSION, SPEAR OF DESTINY, etc.) taking up some of Eddie’s bass duties, as he explains:

“The guys asked me, ‘Look, Eddie, would you mind standing up and singing the songs? You wrote them with Mike, and you've just got to get up in front, because you know these songs, you know where they come from. you know the feeling, you know where you were when you wrote them and the backbone of what the material is.”

That material will always hold a special place in the hearts of Alarm fans. In addition to its musical qualities—see the epic sweep of songs like the “The Spirit of 76” or the hypnotic tug of “Rain in the Summertime,” etc.—it encapsulated the mood of optimism and defiance that characterized much of youth culture in the late 70s and early 80s.

A remarkably unwithered-looking Macdonald casts his mental eye back to the very beginning:

“Mike was a one-off,” he recalls his departed comrade from those days. “It's really funny, when we started off, Mike had his own band and I went 'on tour,' not supporting, but just following a band, called the RICH KIDS, sleeping in bus shelters and railway stations, because I came a bit later to the whole punk scene than Mike did.”

The Rich Kids included such punk, post-punk, New Romantic, and New Wave luminaries as Glen Matlock (SEX PISTOLS), Midge Ure, Rusty Egan (both later VISAGE and ULTRAVOX), as well as the eccentric Steve New.

“I actually followed these guys around the country,” Eddie recalls wistfully. “I actually got to meet them as well, and I said, ‘I write songs.’ And Glen [Matlock] said, ‘Well, good luck, mate. Go away and write some songs.’ And so I came back off that tour, met up with Mike and said, ‘Look, Mike, I've been writing songs, I've been on tour, and I know I want to be in a band.’ And literally that's how we started.”

In addition to the RICH KIDS, other musical touchstones included the BEATLES, BOB DYLAN, NEIL YOUNG, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, and more contemporary inspirations like the THE JAM and THE CLASH.

“They were our go-to artists, really. We used to play their songs. We loved playing Dylan songs and we [later] toured with Dylan.”

Thing happened fast in the late 70s/ early 80s, with the Alarm emerging out of a succession of earlier projects and crystalising as The Alarm in 1981 in the North Wales town of Rhyl. Macdonald and Peters were joined by Dave Sharp on guitar and Nigel Twist on drums. The band soon moved to London and were releasing early Alarm classics like “Marching On” on IRS and appearing on stage with U2 the very next year.

In 1984, sporting giant demented mullets, they released Declaration, an album full of ebullient energy and manifest purpose that landed on the wrong side of Britain’s cynical music press, but which found its own audience and also appealed to the visual semantics of early MTV.

In fact, the Alarm were one of the first, if not the first, bands to do MTV Unplugged, which first aired in December 1989, although this was largely down to the other band members:

“Mike and I decided we wanted to go home for Christmas, but Twist and Dave Sharp decided to stay in New York and they recorded the first ever MTV Unplugged. So when you open the book about that, the first page of the book is the Alarm, Dave and Nige.”

Their love of a Dylan tune helped. It also endeared them to Dylan himself, whom they supported on his 1988 tour, on which the Alarm were promoting 1987’s Eye of the Hurricane album.

During the tour, the band were working on their next album 1989’s Change and were pleased to get some feedback from ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ himself.

“I was working on a song backstage in Berkeley called ‘How the Mighty Fall.’” Eddie recalls. “And him and Neil Young were sitting there. I was playing in a room and basically he just said to me at the time, ‘That's a good song, you should finish it.’ I said ‘I'm still working on it.’ He goes, 'You should finish it. It's a good song.' And we did finish it.”

The song is slated to be one of the highlights on the new tour, but instead of the more polished, Tony-Visconti-produced version that graces the Change album, Eddie is going to take the song back to the rawer version that Dylan approved of:

“I'm going to be playing that song on this tour we've got coming up, my version of it. I'm going to go back to the one I was doing in Berkeley rather than the finished version that we recorded.”

But with great songs like this and with Bono, MTV, and Bob Dylan backing them, the question has to be asked how did the wheels come off? Why weren’t the Alarm able to step up to global superstardom?

“That's a really good question,” Eddie ponders as if for the first time (if it were me, I would have been obsessing about it for the last 35 years!) “I listen to the music now and, to be honest, I always had criticisms sometimes of the quality of the finished recording. I have firmly believed in the songs always. And I feel that certain bands made a certain sounding record at a certain time that went further, and it's really hard as an artist because you always do your best. I came back after my wedding at the time, when I got married, having just finished the Strength album, and I was not happy with the quality of the recording of the Strength album. I listened to the album and played the songs live, and I do believe there was so much more in that record. I mean, Springsteen had this story about the amount of times he remastered Born to Run as an album. He wasn't happy with it. He heard it and he wasn't happy. Time and time and time again, he went back and got someone to remaster that record. I think, when you have an element of success, you can have more control over the finished product.”

But there was more to the Alarm’s missed opportunities than putting out a better mix. The sheer emotion of a band that constantly wore its heart on its sleeve must have taken a toll on frontman Mike Peters. I remember seeing them perform in 1989 in Japan to an audience that didn’t "get it" for the first half dozen songs, until Peters got down off the stage and took the show into the crowd, finally getting the response the band needed.

That kind of thing must have put a lot of the pressure on Peter’s shoulders and may at least partially explain his out-of-the-blue decision to break up the band at the end of a 1991 show at London’s Brixton Academy.

“Mike was my brother,” Eddie remembers bitter-sweetly. “We grew up together, we played football from like the age of three or four. And I was really angry with Mike when he left the band, because I think anybody else would be. It's like getting divorced. It was really, really painful. And it lived with me for years and years. I never forgave him and I never will, and when I see him hopefully in heaven or hell or wherever it may be, I will tell him exactly that.”

The unexpected demise of the band coincided with a general downturn in Macdonald’s life:

“When the band ended I went through a very dark phase indeed in life. I got divorced, I lost my house, I had to literally go back to ground zero. I had to start again from scratch, rebuild my whole life, and like most people you've got to get out there and earn a living, you've got to support yourself, you've got to support your family. I had to rebuild from the ground up, and it made me a much stronger person because I realized how reliant I was on the Alarm as my foundation, and when that foundation has been torn away you're exposed and that is when you realize you've got to come back, rebuild.”

Eddie turned to photography with music pushed more or less into the background.

“I was lucky to have been taught by some of the best photographers on the planet when I left the band. I put myself through college, uni, retrained, and got myself back again. I love photography, and that was it.”

But it’s a funny old world, and the sabbatical from music ended up leading him back to music in the most odd and interesting way with a chance encounter with Richard Jobson, the frontman of fellow new-wave legends THE SKIDS.

“We were both doing an Adobe Conference. He's an incredibly accomplished filmmaker. His role there was to talk about film and direction, and, if you've seen any of his films, they're really gritty films. He's a strong geezer, and he said to me, ‘What are you doing here,’ and I said ‘Well, what you do in film, I do in photography. That's the reason I'm here today.’ We both started out as musicians and we then went into another world that we both love.”

With Jobson doing film and still dabbling in music, Eddie got the message.

“I had a good conversation with Richard. I mean, I really respect Jobbo, and I think he's a strong, strong man, and he gets shit done. I like that. I think, honestly, he's a tour-de-force. You don't get in Jobbo's way. No way.”

This regaining of musical confidence and mission has been further heightened by various gigs that Eddie saw in recent years.

“Who did I see recently? I suppose it's OASIS when they were playing at Wembley. And the KILLERS as well. All the fans were singing their songs as they got onto the train, and I love the idea that the people take their night with them. That's the one thing we used to try and do as the Alarm. We would make people take those memories and the music home with them, as much as in the gig itself.”

While Alarm 2.0 and the coming tour is very much focused on reviving the songs and the style of the 1980s incarnation of the band, Eddie is already feeling new stirrings of creativity and had even penned a new song recently titled "Crash and Burn."

“The next stage is working on new material, because I'm surrounded by great musicians who've worked with some really good artists through the years, and they're all encouraging me, saying, ‘Look, you've got to start getting this material that you've had in your head or on little demos out there. Why don't you go out, get these songs and show people what the Alarm may have done post-Brixton?’”

So, how do the other original members of the band feel? Apparently, they are more than supportive and big things are planned after the next tour is finished.

“I was talking to Dave and Nigel the last couple of days. They are 100% behind what I'm doing because they know that it's really important to keep the band going. They're going to be joining me later in the year on a completely new project we're working on. The fans are going to get to see Nige, Dave and myself, plus James, Smiley and Craig, and we'll all be getting together and doing something which is incredibly exciting.”

In the meantime check out the tour...