Legendary UK rockers Thunder have announced reissues of their first 3 albums, ‘Backstreet Symphony’, ‘Laughing On Judgement Day’, and ‘Behind Closed Doors’.
Released on BMG on 28th April, the reissued expanded albums feature rare, deleted, and unreleased bonus live versions of hits from each album. The albums will be available on CD Digipak, as well as on 2LP Limited Edition Colour Vinyl – the first time that the trio will be available on vinyl since their original release. We caught up with guitarist, songwriter and band leader, Luke Morley, to talk all about the re-issues and to reflect on the band’s career in those early years.
Lovely to catchy up with you again, Luke, We last spoke around the release of the ‘Dopamine’ album (click here to read that interview). Let’s get the important thing done first and ask how is Danny doing and how is the rehabilitation going?
Yeah, he’s doing well. It’s a tricky business and not something that can be rushed but he’s coming back very well. Danny is 100% mentally fit and now he just has to get himself physically back up to speed and that can, obviously, take a while. He’s working really hard and doing all of the physio that they are throwing at him and, as you would expect from Danny, he’s being very stoic about it all too. (laughing)
It’s a bit of a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question in some ways but we’re all hoping it won’t be too long before he is fit enough to get back up on stage but we’re not quite sure how long that will be and we just need to give him as much time as he needs.
The Just Giving campaign raised £72,000 for Danny’s treatment when the target was £30,000. What impact has that had on Danny, and your relationship with the fans who contributed?
The impact it’s had on Danny is phenomenal. Without wishing to go too far down a particular wormhole, what we’ve found out about the current state of the NHS throughout this whole process has been terrifying. Had it not been for the generosity of everybody that contributed to the Just Giving campaign I think Danny might well have been in a bit of trouble, to be honest.
The guys that operated on him did a fantastic job but he found himself in a facility that was supposed to be a clinic for specialist brain injuries but they told us that they just didn’t have the facilities to treat him properly and they even recommended that if there was any way Danny could go private, he should do it!
So, the campaign changed Danny’s life. That, obviously, effects the rest of the band too. It has given him a fast track and a much better chance at a full recovery. So, we are massively, massively grateful to everybody who contributed to that. It’s not an easy thing to do, right, to go to your fan base and ask them for money. We agonised over it but we got to the point where we felt like we had no choice. Danny’s injury came at the end of a difficult period for everybody in terms of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis – the coffers weren’t exactly overflowing for us or for everybody else at the point. We can’t over state the importance of what people helped to do, though, and how grateful we are.
I was absolutely delighted when the news came through that you are re-issuing the first three albums on vinyl. Andy Taylor (Duran Duran) was a big part of your careers in terms of writing and producing with you on those albums. He hasn’t been very well recently, either. What impact did Andy have on your careers?
I don’t think it would be over-stating it to say he was absolutely crucial to our success. Back before Thunder when myself, Danny and Harry were a band called Terraplane we made two albums on Epic records but we floundered a little bit because we couldn’t quite settle on what it was we were supposed to be doing or what we really should sound like.
There are many reasons for that, one of which was that Epic or CBS, as a label, didn’t really understand Rock music. It was a fantastic label for Pop acts like Paul Young and Wham, who were our label mates, but that was no good for us. We got ourselves into a bit of knot trying to take on board what the label wanted us to do versus what we wanted to do. Then we met Andy Taylor and the simplicity of what he told us was incredible. He was like, ‘What the fuck are you messing around for? You’re a Blues-based Rock band with a fucking great singer. Turn it up, drink more and have fun.’
That was the slap around the face we needed at the time to wake us up. Coming from somebody who had had as much success as he had had gave us some confidence to do something else. Me and Andy became very good friends and still are today. He was the shot in the arm that we needed. He came in and produced ‘Backstreet Symphony’ and we wrote a couple of tunes together too. We got back together to record ‘Laughing on Judgement Day’ but after the first two weeks I think Andy realised that he didn’t need to be there because we’d got it covered! (laughing)
We’re still great friends today. I went to see him and we hung out a bit before Christmas. He’s on good form and he’s dealing with his health issues as well as you can too. It’s weird, right? It’s what happens when you get old. (laughing)
I paid £50 on eBay last year for an original copy of ‘Backstreet Symphony’ on vinyl because I only got the CD first time around. Is that what the motivation behind re-issuing the first three albums on vinyl is? Getting quality, affordable vinyls out to the fan base?
That definitely influenced the timing of it. Vinyl has had this tremendous surge in popularity recently and I think with Rock music and fans of that genre, a lot of those people tend to be collectors. They like to have whole sets of everything. It’s also fantastic to listen to that type of music on vinyl and having everything to hold in your hands is, to me, as a guy that was a teenager in the 70s, how music should be consumed. It shouldn’t be a little digital file with no visual information, I just don’t get that. It’s nice to be able to stick your toes back in history a little bit and get these albums out in a way that they were supposed to be done.
Modern vinyls also sound so much richer than the mass produced ones from the 70s and 80s too.
They are made better now. They are more of a specialist, niche thing now. When anything is mass produced the quality isn’t going to be as good. It’s fascinating to me. They are really fucking heavy now, too! (laughing)
‘Distant Thunder’, which is one of my favourite early songs, is not on my original vinyl copy of ‘Backstreet Symphony’. Can you remember why it was left off originally?
D’you know, it’s really funny but I’d forgotten that. When we started going through this process for the re-issues Danny said, ‘Did you know ‘Distant Thunder’ wasn’t on the album to begin with?’ We’d both forgotten! I think what it was was that when we were making the album we needed to generate some extra tracks for B sides or Japanese versions, you know, everyone did that back then. We had one evening where we had a few drinks and bashed out a few cover versions of songs like ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ and ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’.
After we’d recorded ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ Andy Taylor came in and said that it was an unbelievable cover and that it had to go on the album. Once we’d sobered up and listened back to it I think we all thought that it should be on the album too. We were on our first album and when no-one knows who you are it’s not a bad thing to bung a cover on there and that probably relegated ‘Distant Thunder’ off the project but none of us can remember having a conversation where we agreed to do that though! (laughing)
The band has lots of B sides and unreleased songs knocking around that have featured on various projects over the years. Did you consider putting any of them on the new vinyl re-issues? How did you settle on the live songs that you have chosen to go on them?
To be honest with you, there aren’t many, if any, unreleased songs that haven’t already appeared on other projects left anymore. We wanted to to expand the vinyls a little bit because we didn’t want people to think we were just putting out the vinyls to get more cash, well, we are (laughing), but we also wanted to put a few unreleased tracks that haven’t been on any other projects yet.
The one thing we do still have lots of is live recordings. We’ve always tried to record wherever we can. So we went with live recordings of songs that featured on those particular albums that people won’t have heard before as a way of adding a little bit of an extra incentive.
I can’t wait to hear the acoustic version of ‘Preaching From a Chair’ on the ‘Behind Closed Doors’ re-isse. That’s one of my favourite songs of yours.
Yeah, that’s just me and Danny in a room but it works really well on that level.
Of the three albums, is ‘Laughing on Judgement Day’ considered to be the most commercially successful? It hit number two on the charts and was only kept off the top spot by Kylie Minogue’s ‘Greatest Hits’!
Whilst chart positions are a measure of something, I suppose, I’ve always felt that I’d rather keep selling records regularly over the years than have one that went in at number 2 in the charts one week and disappeared the week after. (laughing) Commercial success and chart positions are, to me, a bit like awards. They have a value but you can’t think about that when you are making music. You just have to make the best music you can and hope other people like it over a period of time.
Music itself has an inherent value in that it enhances people’s lives and I’ve always been more interested in that than commercial success. Coming in at number 2 was great, I’m pleased that enough people bought the album for it to do that and coming in behind Kylie Minouge has given us a funny story to be able to tell over the years but all three of those first three albums played an important role in establishing the longevity and popularity of Thunder.
‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ was released in September 1991. Did you get a feel that the zeitgeist was changing in terms of Grunge and what would go on to happen to the commercial success of hard rock whilst you were making ‘Laughing on Judgement Day’ which came out in 1992.
We kinda saw the epicentre of it in a way. In ’91 we did a few shows in America, some on the east coast and some on the west coast. We’d done a Canadian tour and we were invited to play the fifth anniversary party for an American magazine called ‘Rip’, which was their equivalent of something like Kerrang. That was in LA.
We’re probably talking Autumn 1991, right before ‘..Teen Spirit’ was released. The bill for this show, at the Palladium in LA, was very peculiar. It was us, Spinal Tap, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. There seemed to be two distinct audiences in the building! (laughing) You had younger, ‘cool kids’ on one side and the more traditional Rock fans on the other. We’d heard about this movement coming out of Seattle and I’d heard ‘…Teen Spirit’, I thought it was a good record, a bit on the punky side, you know? But what was interesting that night in LA, was that Soundgarden sounded a bit like Black Sabbath to me and it was great. There was big guitars and great vocals in every band and a commonality in terms of us all being Rock bands.
I think it was the American music industry that caused the divide and manufactured the ‘Grunge’ scene in terms of putting out the message that everything that had come before these bands was shit, just to sell their records to teen fans, right? I think people can see it now for what it was, which was just Rock music…..in a plaid shirt with a goatee beard and tattoos.
The thing with this business is that if you are lucky enough, like we have been, to make a career out of 30+ years you see trends come and go. Our longevity, in itself, is testament to something – or maybe we are just a bunch of obstinate gits! (laughing) One of the things we learned in Terraplane back in the 80s is that if you go chasing fashion you won’t last.
‘Behind Closed Doors’ came out in 1995. Right in the middle of both the Brit Pop and Grunge trends. Did the label put any pressure on you to go chasing those sounds or did they leave you just to get on with being you?
I think EMI knew better than to get involved with trying to change us. The guy who signed us to EMI was a guy called Nick Gatfield and Nick was originally the saxophone player in Dexy’s Midnight Runners! (laughing) He came to see the band rehearse and wanted to sign us right away. We liked him because he was a musician. He treated us really well and also, like Andy Taylor, seemed to know who we wanted to be and what we wanted to sound like. That relationship with EMI continued throughout those first three albums and they were quite happy to leave us to get on with it. I think cutting our teeth in Terraplane first worked to our advantage there because we were a bit older and had already made a few mistakes.
Of the three albums that are being re-issued do you have a particular favourite or is that like asking someone to choose between their children?
(laughing) It is a little bit. They all represent different times in our lives and career. The first album was great because it changed our lives. There’s a tremendous amount of energy behind it because we were throwing off the shackles of Terraplane and we were free. ‘Laughing on Judgement Day’ was satisfying for me from a songwriter point of view in that we brought in a bit more depth on songs like ‘Low Life in High Places’, ‘Empty City’ and ‘A Better Man’. You could feel the band expanding and evolving a little bit on that album and I feel the same about ‘Behind Closed Doors’ as well.
‘Behind Closed Doors’ goes into some new areas and difficult subjects in terms of infanticide and domestic violence. Oddly enough, I feel like a song like ‘Future Train’ could have just been written last week! I could feel myself stretching as a writer on ‘Behind Closed Doors’ so I like them all. They are all very different in terms of what they said and did whilst still being typically Thunder. All of them are special in their own different way.
Bon Jovi have got ‘Livin on a Prayer’, Europe have ‘The Final Countdown’. Would you consider your signature song to be ‘Dirty Love’, ‘Love Walked in’ or ‘River of Pain’ in terms of the song the fans want to hear the most from you?
That’s a tough one. It would probably be between ‘Love Walked In’ and ‘Dirty Love’ I think. If you put a gun to my head I would say that it would be ‘Love Walked In’.
You can pre-order Thunder’s first three albums now on expanded vinyl from the link right here.
