Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The art of re-imagining, of taking something so pure and sometimes corrupting it just to suit your own ideal of perfection is one the most part an art to avoid, it never captures the spirit for which it is intended and can lead to frustration in many fans eyes.
Like Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, it can be ridiculed and derided and whilst thankfully the new stories, effectively prequels in their own right can help get over the scorn in the public gaze, the image is still there forever imprinted into the retina.
One re-imagining though that just sits in perfect connection with its original is the new version of The Alarm’s debut album Declaration. Thirty years ago this beast of an album was unleashed onto the British public’s conscience; the themes of alienation, of despair and anger at a system that still remain broken, filtered through and those that fell in love with Mike Peters, Nigel Twist, Eddie McDonald and Dave Sharp because of the beauty contained within each song still feel that burning desire to shout it from the very heights that they have aspired to. Over 30 years later The Alarm, through the only remaining member Mike Peters and a select additional musicians have remade the album and if anything the beauty has become more profound, it has become more resonant and sang perhaps not with the bitterness of anger but the solitude of regret that things have not changed.
Declaration was such an important album in its day that each song was anthem like, they had the power to cut through an audience bathing in the heavy glow of a stage light and make them feel emotions that were perhaps alien to them at the time.
The 2014 version does exactly the same thing but it with the power of a poet’s voice rather than the young angry man guiding it. Tracks such as Where Were You Hiding When The Storms Broke?, Howling Wind, Blaze of Glory and Sixty Eight Guns have become deeply passionate, soul searching and hauntingly melancholic but the real coup de grace is on the track The Stand. This track originally was just so complete that to ever think it could be played in a different way would be to consider musical heresy; riots have been caused over lesser actions. Now it really captures the imagination, it plays with misdirection, of subtleness and the listener might find themselves thinking for the first time of Stephen King’s book The Stand, an idea that you didn’t know was lost, the fear of complete annihilation and damage to humanity if we continue to let certain people get away with what they are doing. The line has been drawn surely and The Stand says it must be defended and guarded at all costs.
A fantastic album by Mike Peters, by The Alarm, sometimes re-doing a piece of art is worth it. The strength of character needed has proved that it is more than worth it.
Ian D. Hall