DAN PEEK will forever be remembered for the '70s mega hit for the band America, "A Horse With No Name". But there's more, much more, to this veteran singer/songwriter, as Mike Rimmer found out.

He explains, "I tried everything. I went to AA; it didn't quite seem to click. I would go to healing meetings and have them smack me on the head and fall over. I humbled myself because I really wanted to be free and clean. It was a slow process. But in some ways God used a traumatic event in my life, where I had to make a decision."

It was in 1979 that Dan Peek released the solo debut album 'All Things Are Possible'. At this point he had left the band and was recording the album in Nashville. He was still struggling to overcome his alcohol dependency and working on the album in a studio when a call came through. He remembers, "I got the news that my home had burned and possibly my wife and sister and mother-in-law who were there had died too. It ended up that they weren't dead but I thought at the time that they were. I jumped on an aeroplane to fly home. I had a first-class ticket where the booze is free! I sat there thinking, 'I would just love to have a drink! I'm so nervous and I feel so bad!' And I thought, 'No. If I take a drink now, I will never, ever, ever, recover. I will never climb out of the bottle again.' That was such a tremendously difficult moment and yet I just said, 'Lord, you gotta help me here! I can't go back down that road again!' And from that day forward I've never had another drink."

The legendary Pat Boone was involved with launching Peek's solo career as a Christian artist. "I had left the band and was considering a number of deals as a solo artist." He elaborates, "Everybody was expecting me to make a pop record. But God had transformed my life and I just desired to share it through my music. I had a label and they said, 'We'll just do like nine pop tunes and one Gospel tune.' At the time I just felt if I didn't become totally committed to every track being about the Lord or about some aspect of this spiritual change in my life, it was just not going to work!"

He was completely ignorant about the emerging American CCM scene but met Pat Boone who had started his own Christian label, Lamb & Lion Records. Boone invited Peek to make an album. "I was delighted and excited because I felt like, here's the first person to understand where I'm coming from. I made the album 'All Things Are Possible'. The title song was written at this tremendously difficult time when my house burned and the whole thing with America was dissolving. And God spoke to me and just said, 'Look, when you turn misty blue, in other words, when life just seems a mess, and when everything seems like problems, I will make things work.' He promises in his Word that 'all things work together for good to those that love him and are called according to his purpose'. With 'All Things Are Possible', it gave me the opportunity to make a record which was Christian from start to finish. I felt like that was an accomplishment!"

These days that album has become a classic early CCM album and the songs have that typical '70s sound, swathed in melody complete with fine harmonies. I first heard the title track from the 1984 follow up album 'Doer Of the Word' in the mid '80s when I was living with some housemates in Leeds. The attic resident, Andy, was going through tough times and had been given the album. There was something about the message of the song that encouraged him so he would play it. Then he would play it again. and again. and again. and again! I once spent an entire Saturday morning hearing the songs played for three hours on repeat play!

After an episode like that you might be surprised to find that the song has become one of my favourite Peek numbers. Fans of America were delighted to find Peek's former bandmates joining him to add their vocal harmonies to the track. "In fact that was very exciting," Peek remembers today. "The song and the whole arrangement and the feel were very much in America's style. It became a very popular song. It was an album that again I'm very proud of because it was true to my spiritual roots, and yet it was accessible to pretty much anybody who listens to music."

His desire to establish himself in the Christian scene wasn't all easy. He remembers, "It was unusual when I got into contemporary Christian music because oddly, everyone in CCM was trying to get into the pop world! So I felt like I was really swimming against the current in some ways. I encountered that time and time again - people would say 'Well how can I get into pop music?' And I was like, 'Are you kidding?! I was just there and I wanted to come over here!' And in fact some people maybe even resented it and felt like I was poaching on their territory. Aside from that there was a great response from many newer believers who had been in the pop music industry. Many of them ended up being integral to the contemporary Christian music scene."

He describes the progress of his music in the '80s. "I began to go out on the road and to try to broaden the base of what I was doing. I live not too far from Nashville and some of my music has more of a country flavour to it than perhaps others, so it almost seemed a natural and logical progression. And also, within country music, there seems to not be quite so much resistance to the Gospel message. So it seemed like a natural extension of what I was doing and I started doing a lot of country venues and some Nashville Now television programmes. I was poised to sign with a country label and literally began to work out of Nashville. But at the time, my marriage was really going through a lot of trouble because I had been on the road so much. My wife and I patched things up. I realised I'd spent the last 20-odd years on the road and I began to rethink that it was the road life that caused many of the problems in the band America. Then, I had a whole career of touring in the pop world with America, then I had a whole career of touring as a contemporary Christian artist. I was poised to now have a third career as a country artist and actually, people in country probably tour more than anyone! I realised I'd been down this road literally before and I didn't want to go there again. My marriage began to be more important to me than a new career."

Peek bravely pulled the plug on the country career which upset a few people because he had put a band together and had label, management and booking agencies all set up. "I really just walked away from the whole thing," he remembers. "My wife and I left the country and moved to the British West Indies. Both of us just wanted to have kind of a fresh start and start over again. So we bought a little cottage by the sea. I spent a lot of time in the Word; probably four or five hours a day reading not only the Bible, but books about the Bible. I spent a lot of time in writing and I started painting! I just had an explosion of creativity that went beyond anything that I had ever experienced before. And the odd thing was that I wasn't trying to be creative. The pressure was off, I didn't have to go on the road. I didn't have to deliver an album by a certain date, I didn't have someone breathing down my neck. As a result, I had probably the most fertile time of creativity in my life. I wrote many, many songs. I wrote two books that were fiction, which I did not publish, but I'm in the process of having one of those published now. And then I also began to get the seeds of the idea for writing the book An American Band: The America Story."

I was contacted by my old label Warner and they were wanting to do a retrospective of the band. They interviewed me at length, I mean, for many hours over the phone. And I thought, 'This is an interesting story, it needs to be put down!' They basically just did some liner notes for an album and I thought, 'I'd like to turn this into a book.'"

He moved back to the USA just before a hurricane wiped out the island. "I think that God's hand was in that! I didn't want to go through yet another disaster after losing my home to a fire and I was very grateful. Sad for those who lost everything there but God pulled us out really in the nick of time." On his return he began to set down all the experiences of how America started. Essentially the book is a biography of the band America. Although it's not been published in the UK, Peek has made it available via amazon.com, barnesnoble.com and his own website danpeek.com.

I wondered whether it was a difficult book to write given that his experiences in America were not always positive and his relationships with other band members remain strained to this day. "Yeah, it was! I think in some ways there's still this unresolved dream. We had this rocket-ship ride to the top and managed to stay together for 10 years from the very beginning root of the band till I departed. And they're still continuing to tour as America! But certainly my 10 years with the band were very volatile because of a lot of the pressures. I felt like we never really achieved our potential. I think the three of us, all we wanted to do was make a living in music. If I just had a roof over my head and a bun on the table that would be fine! But things went beyond, I think, anything that we could have imagined. And yet my departing has kind of left an empty space I think, certainly amongst the fans. There's always this rumbling for a reunion and a constant kind of an undertow hope that the band will get back together."

He continues, "I have no idea what is in store but there have been some near misses in terms of us reuniting but it's just never really taken place. I suppose that will always haunt me in a way. They were my friends before we started the band and due to all the different changes in our own lives, we went our separate ways essentially. But I will always think fondly of them and was greatly blessed. Dewey and Gerry are extremely talented people. I was very, very fortunate to be linked up with them. I'm an extremist. In many ways I was my own worst enemy, in terms of living out the rock'n'roll fantasy lifestyle to the hilt. So I bear responsibility for creating HUGE problems within the band! I think maybe that's the sense of tragedy that comes across through the pages of the book. There's a lot of conflict that takes place. Certainly I wasn't shy about revealing it. I mean, there was a lot more I could have said and a lot of people were greatly shocked that I said some of the things I did say! But trust me, there was another couple of volumes-worth of things I didn't say!

"I felt like it was necessary to roll up my sleeves and be very honest about a lot of the things that did happen. I think I was sensitive to omit stuff that was truly damaging to any of us on a personal level. But I think the reader gets a sense of what life was like in a working rock band and people struggling from obscurity, to fame overnight. I've had a great response to the book. I'm very encouraged because I was able to present not only a biography of the band and certainly my own life story, but I think I included a bit of hope in there and a challenge to the reader."

Dan Peek continues to record albums independently but mainly for his pop audience. A lot of his solo back catalogue recently became available at iTunes. He seems to enjoy the space of rural Mississippi and who can blame him?