MIKE PETERS
With their album Equals out now, Mike Peters of anthemic rockers The Alarm tells Why Vinyl Matters author Jennifer Otter Bickerdike about the sense of magic and discovery a new LP brings
“My mum and dad had a radiogram in the living room. My sister was five years older than me, and she came home with a record that had a tramp on the cover… with a beard. It was Aqualung by Jethro Tull. I can remember her playing that record in our living room and hearing the way the singer would distort his voice. I loved that record. When I finally came of age to go and buy my own records, the first one I ever went to buy was by Slade, called Slade Alive!. When I got to the record shop to buy it, I was looking at the back cover and I didn’t realise that songwriting credits were what they were. I thought that when Slade Alive! had Born To Be Wild with brackets (Mars Bon re) on it, I thought that was another artist on the record! And it had Darling Be Home Soon in brackets (John Sebastian), and I thought, ‘I don’t want to hear those guys, I want to hear Slade!’ [laughs].