It was the 19th of November 1987. I was watching the weekly Norwegian music chart countdown show called TopPop, hoping for something good to appear amongst the highly varied offerings.
Suddenly, out of the blue, a long-haired figure appeared on the screen. He was being interviewed about how important passion was in music and about the identity of his own band’s music. The show that was all about flash and style was immediately injected with real substance.
The man who was talking so passionately about these topics was Mike Peters of The Alarm, who had flown in for an interview to promote their new single. This was my introduction to both him and his band.
His sense of having deep roots in his homeland, and the pride with which he spoke about it, struck me instantly. “Many people hear folk influences in our music,” he said. “That’s where the roots of The Alarm are in vogue. We live in a country called Wales, and it’s a Celtic land. It’s a place that we go to and we draw from musically. Our album ‘Eye of the Hurricane’ was written there, and a lot of the songs have a subtitle on the album sleeve, and that is the place they were written.”
The interviewer followed up with, “In these synthesised times you’re still a guitar-based band. Why?” Mike just grinned and said, “Because that’s what rock’n’roll is about.”
A typical answer, perhaps. But it felt real. It didn’t come across in a gimmicky way. This didn’t seem like a gimmicky guy. This was a guy on a mission, with a real sense of what he wanted and how he wanted it.
By the end of the interview, I was a fan of this man – before I had even heard his music! I was totally sold on this guy’s mindset, his positive stance, his obvious passion, his sense of what was important, the love he had for his country, his open and unashamed embracing of folk/Celtic influences from his homeland, and just by how he obviously wore his heart on his sleeve.
All of these things reminded me strongly of the mindset of Big Country – one of my very favourite bands. Which, funnily enough, Mike Peters would end up fronting for a few years between 2010-2013. The connection was definitely not just imagined.
The interview was followed by the music video for Rain In the Summertime. It was the first song I ever heard by The Alarm. I loved it instantly – the imagery, the message, the passionate vocal delivery, the slinky guitar licks, and just the overall sound of the band. Also, not to forget: they looked very cool in that video.
I knew this was a single – a “hit” – with everything that meant as far as being representative of the band’s sound. It was a very good sign that I liked the song geared for radio play, which definitely made me curious to hear more of the rock’n’roll (and perhaps even the Celtic/folk influences mixed with that) that Mike had talked about.
Before too long, I would be digging my way through their back catalogue. I may have been slightly late to the party, but better late than never, and I would make up for lost time. The combination of that interview and the video started a love affair that has been ongoing since.
Given how upbeat and positive the song is, it was a bit of a surprise to learn that the album sessions it stemmed from were difficult and had been fraught with conflict. When The Alarm came together to start recording for what would be their third album in early August 1986, tensions were threatening to split the band.
Part of the problem was that the band had two songwriting camps. On one side, there was the highly creative and prolific pairing of Mike Peters (lead vocals/guitar) and Eddie Macdonald (bass/vocals). They constantly wrote songs, and had always been able to present an abundance of demos and ideas whenever the band had gotten together to record. Most of their albums contained material written by that duo.
The other songwriting pair in the band, Dave Sharp (lead guitar/vocals) and Nigel Twist (drums), also wrote material but were not able to match the volume (and, perhaps, the consistency) of the others.
From the start, all band members had agreed that the best material would be used independently of who wrote it, leaving the final selection up to the producer who (in theory) would be impartial. Very frequently, however, the producer would favour the Peters/Macdonald material. This had started causing real resentment on the part of the others.
It was not necessarily about the money. Early on, the band had signed an agreement to split 40% of their publishing income equally – a move designed to avoid monetary squabbles later on. In the liner notes to the 2000 remaster of the Eye of the Hurricane album, Mike Peters felt it had more to do with direction.
“Dave and Nigel were mainly unhappy with the way we worked creatively.” Mike said. “What Dave really wanted was not only parity from a publishing point of view, but much more creative control over the musical direction the band was going in. Dave hadn’t contributed any of the songs included on the previous ‘Strength’ album, apart from a co-writing credit on the title track. Instead of concentrating on writing the best songs and therefore influencing the direction of the band that way, he set about trying to create a power-base which would enable him to turn the band away from the MacDonald/Peters songwriting-led Alarm.”
When the band reconvened to start work on their third album, Dave Sharp presented an ultimatum: that all compositions on the forthcoming album had to be written by the band collectively. This came as a surprise to Macdonald/Peters who had already written and demoed tons of material for consideration.
The prospective change to their creative approach was debated for a while, but the band could not agree on changing the way they had worked previously. With no way forward, the two factions retreated to separate studios to work on their own. It may have been a needed time-out to think things over, but the basic disagreement was so fundamental and genuine that nobody knew whether they would be able to reconvene again at all.
During this period, stories leaked to the press (music and otherwise, even getting a national spread in Daily Mirror) that The Alarm had split up. Everything seemed to be up in the air. For a while during this time, they probably WERE split up in practical terms. Nobody were sure what would happen.
After a while, they reconvened for a business meeting at The Alarm’s accountants. Mike Peters gave an impassioned speech about not throwing away all the hard work they had put in to take the band to where it had gotten. Sharp and Twist responded by sharing a prepared paper which openly accused their manager Ian Wilson for fraud. Things were actually getting worse – not better.
It was agreed to do an investigation into Ian Wilson so that the allegations could be properly addressed one way or the other, but the two sides of the band would carry on working separately.
The situation seemed locked, and lasted until December 1986. At that point, Miles Copeland (head of their record label IRS) had had enough and called a meeting. He was keen for the band to make their third album and they went through every issue point by point. The investigations into their manager had been completed and he was cleared of the charges against him.
A middle ground was also agreed on as far as the creative process, which mainly included deciding that Steve Tannett (who had signed the band to IRS back in 1982) would get the job of listening through the demos made by everybody and decide which songs would make the cut. All parties agreed to abide by Steve’s decision.
The band picked up work again as a four-piece in January 1987, but the initial sessions were a disaster. Three songs had been selected by Steve Tannett for those particular sessions – all Macdonald/Peters songs. The writers had produced demos for these songs which were considered finished, and they were quite set in their ways when it came to arrangements, guitar parts, etc.
There really wasn’t much room nor need for creative input from the other two guys, who ended up having to play on carbon copies of the demos. For Sharp and Twist’s perspective, this was worse than before. The band had always at least worked on arrangements together irrespective of who the writer of the song had been. Now they felt reduced to session men. Things quickly turned sour and after some attempts, the sessions were scrapped.
The band came together again in February, after agreeing to go back to the approach they had always used: songs were brought in and then worked out, arranged and put together in its final form as a band. That worked a whole lot better and with that approach they finalised demos for a lot of new material.
Rain In the Summertime was the last song to emerge from these sessions. Mike Peters fondly remembers it being written and put together as a band, with contributions from everybody: “Nigel Twist had got himself a drum machine as a means to experiment with different rhythms. He had turned on the drum machine and was messing about with a groove. Eddie Macdonald liked Nigel’s pattern and chose this as the moment to introduce a chord sequence for a new song he had been working on. Dave joined in on guitar and Eddie heard something in the way Dave was playing and made him keep repeating one small section over and over. I joined in and made up some vocals as I went along. This was the dawn of Rain In the Summertime.”
The song was not yet finished. It was still just a jam, based on the ideas that they had come up with there and then, and it lasted some 20 minutes. But they had it on tape, and could get back to it.
The search for producers started once they had songs on tape. Amongst the ones the band met up with during this time was John Porter. He was known for his production work with The Smiths as well as his stint as bass player in Roxy Music. Crucially, he was known as a mellow person with a calming influence – a clear asset in this situation. On top of everything he also had solid technical knowledge, was a living guitar encyclopaedia, and knew a lot about how to get specific sounds. The band were impressed with his knowledge and excited to work with him.
They started looking through all the song ideas completed by the band, but before they started recording Porter asked if they had any other material. Mike brought out the tape which contained the embryo of Rain In the Summertime and played it for the producer.
“It was a bit of a jam and it lasted for about 20 minutes,” Peters later said to Songfacts. “I played it for John, and he said, ‘There’s something in that. Leave it with me.’ In his producer’s suite, he had original Atari computers that came into music-making in the mid-’80s. And he laid out the song arrangement from the best parts of the tape. All of a sudden, he had me singing a guide vocal in the studio, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is something really special here!'”
Nobody in the band were sure what direction the song would end up in, but Porter was excited and reassured the band that the outcome would be spectacular. Twist and Macdonald would join Porter in the control room and work out a backing track for the song full of electronic beats, bass guitar samples, and sweeping synthesizer lines. “It was the first time I had ever seen an entire backing track created on a computer,” Peters later said.
It would take some time for Mike Peters to get final lyrics ready for a lot of the songs on this album. The lyrical concept for Summertime was at least ready from an early stage, and Peters later revealed the key lyrics in the song.
If I run fast enough
I can leave all the pain and the sadness behind.
“That’s really what that song is trying to communicate,” he said.
With the backing track and a scat vocal put on tape, it was time to add the guitars. Sharp had not played the song since the initial jam session, so the song was played back for him so he could be reminded of it and get a feel for how it went. Once he had a rough idea, Sharp gave the signal to roll tape. He felt his way around, found a good rhythm, looked for and found a way of playing harmonics during the intro, and searched his way back to the main riff again.
A lot of exploration happened while Sharp recorded his track, but as he got into it he settled very nicely into the song, improvising tasty blues breaks and ending up with a great, innovative part that elevated the song even further. Everybody were ecstatic – this sounded great!
Then they asked the guitar player to patch up the bits he had missed, and found that he had no intention of doing it.
In the liner notes of the 2000 album remaster, Mike Peters recalls how everybody’s jaws collectively dropped as they realised what was happening: “John said to Dave, ‘Right Dave, let’s go back to the top of the song and play the correct guitar riff before the vocals come in.’ Dave replied, ‘No way man, that’s a piece of rock’n’roll history right there. The fact that I’m tuning up at the start is part of it dude.’ None of us could believe it. He just put down his guitar and walked out of the control room and headed for the pub.”
Mike had no intention of letting him get away with it. “I went ballistic. I stormed after him and tried to get him to come back and finish the track, he refused again. That’s when the red mist descended. I picked Dave up by the scruff of the neck, held him up against a wall outside the studio and I had to totally restrain myself from hitting him. I couldn’t make Dave come back and so I went back to the studio. In the control room I found John Porter unperturbed by what had gone on. He said he had ‘techniques’ for moments like this. What he did was record Dave Sharp’s correct riff from the end of the song on to a piece of ¼” tape on another recorder and ‘fly’ it into the beginning of the song. It took a lot of attempts and required a lot of patience, but by the time Dave Sharp came back from the pub, Rain In the Summertime sounded like Rain In the Summertime.”
Episodes like this one did nothing to enhance the band mood, and indeed Dave Sharp in particular would become increasingly fed up with the way the album was going. He refused to be dictated on guitar parts, and would insist that each song should only have one “live” track and would not do patch-ups on other songs either. This led Mike Peters and even John Porter to play additional guitar as needed, including on the album’s title track where Sharp does not appear at all.
Still, the album (and the usual assortment of b-sides, etc) was eventually finished. This was the start of yet another struggle for the band, as IRS felt the album should be remixed. While the band was on a short holiday ahead of going out to tour the album, Miles Copeland ordered a new mix to be made which was lighter on the guitars. This did at the very least serve the purpose of pulling the band closer together, as they were united in their dislike for that new mix.
In the end, eight of the album tracks – including Rain In the Summertime – would go out in the new mix, while two mixes were retained from the original batch. All of the original mixes would eventually be released for the 2000 remaster of the album.
The album was done, but it had taken a lot out of the band. “We had a huge battle and it tore us apart,” Peters later told Songfacts. “To get to the end of the record and have the Rain In the Summertime song, it felt like we’d weathered a massive storm. We’d come through the eye of the hurricane, and here was the rain at the end of this intense period just to wash away all the ill feeling and bad experiences that we had, to bring us together.”
Summertime rain can indeed provide welcome relief from a blistering sun, just like the song can be seen as a symbolism for the internal struggles The Alarm were facing and coming through it all in the end, finding some sort of relief.
Rain in the Summertime was the first single from the album Eye of the Hurricane. It was released before the album, reaching number 18 in the UK singles chart.
In a perfect world, the song would have been released in time for the summer and been a lovely and topical summer hit. Unfortunately it was late autumn when it finally appeared in October 1987, but it still reached #18 in the UK charts – their second-best placing ever. In the US, it reached its peak position of #71 in January 1988.
RELATED ARTICLE: The Alarm at the Wang Centre for the Performing Arts in Boston MA, 26 April 1988
The song was also released in a 12” mix.
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