3rd June 1982 : EMI Recording Studios, Abbey Road, London NW8, England – The Alarm – Demo Recording Session

The band record 3 demos for EMI. The songs are Lie Of The Land, Reason 41 and The Deceiver.

When we actually got down to London, we started getting a lot of interest from record labels and things like that. One of the first things we did when we were starting to play with U2 and all that, we started to get some interest and got to make some demos for Polygram and all these other kind of record labels. At the time we were just 3 acoustic guitars and a drum kit. We had no bass, but we had this theory that if we mic’ed up the base-drum that’d be enough. But when we made these demos it sounded terrible and all the interest we had started to evaporate. We just didn’t get anywhere. Eddie took on the bass role because he was a good guy basically. He gave up a lot of his guitar aspirations to fill a hole in the sound of the band. Then we got to make these demos for EMI and that started to turn it round for us. I’ve actually included the demos that we did for EMI, they’re included in the first part of the box set in “The Alarm” titled album from 1981 to 1983. It was the first thing we did where we had proper bass going on. We actually got offered a singles deal by EMI and we agreed to do it. It was for two singles and we thought “Great!” and then we went out to celebrate and got drunk and talked ourselves out of doing it cause we wanted to make a proper album. We though “Let’s bin it and we’ll get a proper album” but we never got another record company after that interested in us until Miles Copeland came along. – Mike Peters, 2000