THUNDER | INTERVIEW
Carl Marsh enjoys the onscreen company of Danny Bowes, lead singer of British hard rock institution Thunder, as their 13th and latest album All The Right Noises is released.
You’ve taken things to the next level on this new album. It’s like a step up over the last releases.
Danny Bowes: I think you’re right. It’s not something that we did deliberately or consciously. But I think it’s to do with a combination of factors.
The first is that we’ve settled into a working method where we do three sessions with months in between, which gives us the ability to change stuff around in the period between the sessions. It also gives Luke [Morley, guitar] a chance to write different tunes. So we only ever record the best tunes that he’s written: if he’s written six songs, and we record four, and then three months later we go back into the studio, he’s written eight songs, and we record six, we’re only ever letting the cream rise to the top each time. It means we’re really fresh when we go back in each time, and we’ve got a new perspective.
Were you keen to get another album out so soon after the last?
We were very desperate to make another rock album after [2019’s record of acoustic reworkings] Please Remain Seated, which was a brilliant experience. But it was seated! We enjoyed making it – reconstructing and changing the tunes about, and looking at them in a completely different way. And even the tour was fantastic: so different and so unusual for us, and our audience. To sit down for two hours every night was a bit of a weird one.
But having done it, we were desperate to turn it up again and make a rock album, which just added to the whole mix of stuff. I think what we’ve ended up with is a kind of celebration of all the best things about Thunder.
If the Please Remain Seated tour and album were such a success, why decide not to continue in that new mould?
Were we frail, and coming to the end of our career, then that would probably have been something that we would have looked at – why not? Many people expressed all kinds of misgivings about whether or not it would work – whether they would be capable of sitting down for two hours…
I could easily sit down for two hours at my age, but I’m not in a rock band.
[Laughter] I mean, there were a couple of nights where I almost jumped out of my chair because it’s just hard to stay sitting down when you’re performing tunes! People may have thought, “well, that’s it now. That’s what Thunder do,” you know? “They’ve all got old. So now they have to sit down, and now they have to play acoustic stuff.” And we just wanted to make sure that nobody was right about that. We get an enormous amount of pleasure out of making a lot of racket.
Thunder have been together for over 30 years now, but you did announce that enough was enough back in 2009. What changed your minds?
When we went away in 2009, we didn’t have any intention of coming back. We felt like we were done. We did a tour, said goodbye, and there was a lot of tears. When we came back in 2012, it was because a promoter rang me and said, “I’m doing some shows with Whitesnake and Journey. They’re all arenas. Fancy doing it?” We told him what the problem was: if we did do it, will people expect us to make another record? Because we haven’t considered that.
There are a whole bunch of reasons why we went away in 2009, and most of them were to do with the difficulty of running your own label. I was having a nervous breakdown trying to do everything and be the singer in a band. I had a broom hanging out of my arse, and I was sweeping the floor most of the time as well. It was hard work.
So what did steer you towards getting back at it?
I was pretty much at the end of my rope. So it wasn’t as simple as just saying, “OK, we’ll just do some arena shows and then go our separate ways,” but worked on the assumption that we’d see how it goes. Be in a bar by 8pm every night because we’re opening!
But the reaction from the audience was so good every night – they all had Thunder t-shirts on, all knew all the words, and were all in there at six when the doors opened. We’re thinking something is going on here – we must have gotten popular while we’ve been away. And having decided that was so good, we should probably come back and make a new record.
Did you have to make some sacrifices with your own label and not handle it all yourselves?
We had to make some changes – get new people in to help, and work with a good label that could take away a lot of the pressure. We didn’t want to fall into this formulaic pattern of smashing an album out, going out and making a few quid, and riding the wave. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to make sure that we made it all count – we didn’t know how many more records we’ll get to make. We’re all getting older and sooner or later one of us is going to… something’s going to drop off! [laughs]
We decided just to make sure that every record could be as good as it can be. [Since reforming] we’ve taken it very seriously: finding a way to make the process better, get more out of the tunes, the band and the performances. And to not rest on our laurels in any way and making sure that what we do is the best every single time.
Thunder’s All The Right Noises is out now on BMG. Info: www.thunderonline.com
words CARL MARSH
