Born on March 10th 1952, Alain Péters is a central figure in the revival of maloya in Réunion. It all began back in 1976, when some young musicians looking for new avenues to explore started mixing Hendrix with séga and maloya rhythms, as illustrated by name they gave their group, Caméléon. René Lacaille, Joël Gonthier and Alain Péters were among them. Loy Ehrlich, just arrived from France, joined them, and the ségatiers of the Lacaille family came to record in their home studio.

It didn't last long. It was the end of all the sleepless nights and excesses of the local herb zamal and alcohol into which Péters had plunged without thinking twice. The respite was brief; Loy came back from France in 1979 and the community got back together, and Carrousel, one of the key groups of the musical revolution of the time, was formed (with Joël Gonthier on percussion, Loy on keyboards, and Alain Péters on bass and voice). Alain began drinking even more, sliding into total alcoholism after his father died in 1980, and, "dan' cbaton la colle", drifted away from the rest of the group.

Even soaked in alcohol, Alain Péters continued writing and composing on his takamba, a guitar of African origin Loy Ehrlich had brought him in 1979. "I think of myself as a transistor," he said in an interview published in "Témoignages Chrétien de la Réunion" in October 1979. "I pick up multicoloured sound waves from all over. The creative work consists of translating these sensations into musical notes. As far as words go, I don't trust them. I feel them as a kind of uproar, a sense of enormous disorder that perverts the sounds. When I'm inspired, lyrics come straightaway as a by-product of the musical outpouring. These words, which come straight from my heart, not my head, blend harmoniously with the rest of the work."

These are the songs we find on "Paraboler", an extraordinary CD released in 1998 on the Takamba label and produced by the Pôle Régional of new music in Réunion, and covered here in "Rest' la Maloya". This album, recorded in concert at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis in December 2000 as part of the Africolor Festival (the project subsequently toured Réunion in October 2001) is a homage to Péters. Not before time, either: struck down by a heart attack in a busy street in Saint-Paul on July 12th 1995, Alain Péters died several hours later in hospital, under a full moon.