E-Mail This Article to a Friend Saved by rock and roll Mike Peters brings back the Alarm BY BRETT MILANO

Even in their ’80s heyday, the Alarm used to get knocked for writing too many anthems — as if coming up with rock anthems that worked were an easy thing to do. But the Welsh quartet wrote virtually nothing else: they took "The Stand," they made the "Declaration," they confronted the "Eye of the Hurricane," they went out in a "Blaze of Glory." And they proved that good, rocking songs could be wrapped around such lofty titles.

Maybe they weren’t the most sophisticated band that punk ever produced, but the Alarm — who broke up in 1992, have lately re-formed under original frontman Mike Peters, and are in the midst of a November Wednesday-night residency at the Middle East — had enough hooks and heart to turn their idealism into a virtue. At their best, they evinced the same kind of camaraderie that would become a trademark for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Although they got compared (and not always favorably) to U2 and the Clash, they had at least as much Beatles in them, in part at least because of Peters’s classically Brit-pop voice. The best song on their 1983 debut album, Declaration (IRS), was "We Are the Light," a wide-eyed ballad that owed a few chords to "You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away." And it’s no coincidence that Peters is now playing in the side-project band Dead Men Walking with bassist Glen Matlock, who’s alleged to have got kicked out of the Sex Pistols for saying something nice about Paul McCartney.

These days, Peters is testament to all those clichés about lives getting saved by rock and roll. Diagnosed with lymphoma in the mid ’90s, he told his doctors that treatment would have to wait until he wrapped up a scheduled American tour. He now has a clean bill of health, and he says that’s partly because he never stopped working. "I started getting books about self-healing and came to think that negativity was part of the disease," he explained after getting off stage at the Middle East last week. "I realized that I needed to take back my life, and my life is the Alarm." The other original members declined to come along (though they did tape a one-shot reunion for VH1 this month), so he’s formed a new Alarm with guitarist James Stevenson (ex–Gene Loves Jezebel), bassist Craig Adams, and drummer Steve Grantley.

Apparently still running on adrenaline, Peters has worked a blue streak in recent years. Mission of Burma billed their reunion tour as "inexplicable," but the current Alarm tour is just plain impossible: they’re playing four cities — Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — on a weekly basis through November, using four sets of rented gear and racking up loads of frequent-flyer miles. "It’s our little commando raid on the country," is how Peters describes it. "We’re trying to do all those things that bands always say they want to do — to have artistic control and creative freedom. But I don’t want to sound self-aggrandizing here. This is what I do; it’s what I live for,"

On disc, the new Alarm have been equally prolific. Last year they announced a subscription deal through their Web site; fans would get a few singles with exclusive B-sides followed by a new album, In the Poppy Fields. The project grew into five separate albums, all recorded and released within a year. It was also a participatory experience for fans, who got on-line updates as work progressed and heard the songs within weeks of their recording; they also voted for the numbers that will make up next year’s single, commercially released disc.

Best of the lot is the disc that sounds the least like the old Alarm and the most like the Who. The fourth in the series, the 33-minute rock opera called Edward Henry Street throws no end of Tommy and Quadrophenia references into 14 linked songs that deal with a young band’s first year of existence. The autobiographical story makes a handy frame for Peters’s trademark optimism and melodic sense. Elsewhere, the best songs find him loosening up on the optimism. "Swansong" (which closes the first, most old-Alarm-sounding disc) deals with the fallout from a broken friendship; disc three’s "The Drunk & the Disorderly" is a big guitar epic in the vein of the old band’s "Spirit of ’76," but without the sense that anyone’s necessarily bound for glory. And "Rain Down" proves he’s got a lot of Brill Building songwriter in him, latching onto another band’s trademark sound — in this case, Coldplay’s pianos and angst — and writing something that band would be proud of.

The Alarm played surprisingly little of the new material at the first Wednesday show, preferring to stick with the familiar hits and fist-waving rousers — including a Slade cover, "Get Down & Get with It." They quieted down on only one of the new songs, "The Rock and Roll," where Peters ponders the loss of friends and bandmates and concludes, "The rock and roll still burns in me." But here’s where he got off the U2 train, because he didn’t deliver that line as an anthemic sing-along or a world-saving gesture, just as a simple statement of fact.

The Alarm play their final Middle East residency show this Wednesday, November 19, at 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; call (617) 864-EAST.