Ripping Up The Rulebook: Luke Morley On The Evolution Of Thunder
Wednesday, 22 February 2017
Written by Simon Ramsay
Having spent the best part of three decades making top notch bluesy rock 'n’ roll records dripping with soul and swagger, Thunder surely deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Free, Bad Company and Whitesnake when it comes to great British bands of our time. ‘Rip It Up’, their new album, is an artistic tour de force that exemplifies that claim, with the group delivering everything we’ve come to expect while also pulling a number of delightful rabbits out of their hat.
We spoke with guitarist Luke Morley about that cracking new release, while also quizzing him on everything from the deadly impact of grunge to the making of their most successful record, ‘Laughing On Judgement Day’.
How did the success of ‘Wonder Days’ seep into the writing and recording of ‘Rip It Up’?
It felt like a continuous process between the two albums. There was probably about a four month period after ‘Wonder Days’ where we doing other things, touring and stuff, but I was writing as soon as the decks were clear. One flowed out of the other, that’s how it felt. As a songwriter, you have to have the desire to make a better album than the last one all the time. Some of the time that happens and some of the time it doesn’t, but on this particular occasion we seem to have moved along and made another very consistent record. It’s difficult for me to be objective about how good it is, all I know is I’m very pleased with it.
Danny [Bowes, vocals] has said you really pushed yourselves and couldn’t have made ‘Rip It Up’ 10 years ago as you weren’t good enough. Can you give examples of avenues you went down that you may have pulled back from in the past?
If you look at No One Gets Out Alive, it’s an up tempo rock song and the intro’s about a minute until the singing comes in. If you know how much Danny spoke, how much noise he makes as bloke, it’s quite hard for him, all that restraint. But the guitar solo is an interesting left turn, it goes off into a trippy, acidy, almost Santana-ish sort of moment, and then comes back. Things like that, when you’re writing, you think ‘I’m not sure if that’s gonna work’. But at my vintage I’ve earned the right to do what I like. I impose way less parameters on myself creatively than I used to, because it’s a band that’s been together a long time and has a very definite style. Everyone is a very capable musician so when we do veer off what people consider to be our usual path, then hopefully it’s still gonna sound like us because the character of the individual musicians and Danny’s voice comes through.
How do fans react when you try new things because there’s always a minority who still want you to sound like you did on ‘Backstreet Symphony’?
Music is a powerful thing and lots of people like ‘Backstreet Symphony’ for various reasons. Perhaps it captures a point in their lives, they were a teenager, something was happening, and that stays with people. And people, generally, are quite conservative and don’t like too much change. However, with any kind of art, whether you’re making films or writing books, you have to push forward, otherwise you’re not doing it with your heart in it and the effect of that is far more damaging than a few people saying it doesn’t sound like ‘Backstreet Symphony’ anymore. There’s nothing we can do about that. We are who we are and music should be a natural thing. So if there’s a few naysayers along the way then so be it.
‘Wonder Days’ looked back nostalgically but ‘Rip It Up’ focuses on appreciating the moment and making the most out of life.
Yes it is, definitely. There was a willingness to look back and embrace our teenage years and the ‘70s, have a look at music and how it changed. Where your head is at when you’re writing the songs, you never can tell. You’ve just got to go with it and if you feel something strongly get it down and hope people relate to it. I think that one of the nice things about us all being in our mid-50s, a lot of our audience have been with us nearly 30 years, so a lot of them can probably relate to the subject matter of ‘Wonder Days’ and, hopefully, the new album.
A song like Right From The Start is a very grown up song. I’m not really quite sure where that came from. It’s about missing people who have passed away and love for your family. Its embracing life now and I think No Gets Out Alive states that quite clearly, too. But it is wrapped up in a lot of today’s issues. There’s a couple of political moments in Shakedown and Chosen One, both about things that happened recently that pissed me off.
And what’s that?
Chosen One is really about Rebekah Brooks, the whole phone hacking thing and the fact she was able to walk away from that shit and the people that worked for her got sent down. Murdoch packed her off to New York for a few years until the heat died and then got her back here. Shakedown, that’s about feeling extremely disappointed and deceived by Blair’s government, the promise they brought with them and huge mandate for change they came in with. And they did absolutely nothing. Probably turned out to be as crooked as everybody else. He lied about weapons of mass destruction. He knew and he lied. That’s not good enough. A lot of people really believed in him and I feel like he let us all down. As the song says, there’s a line about his smile and sleight of hand. It was all a bit of a con.
It feels like an angry sequel, because you welcomed that government optimistically on 1997’s ‘The Thrill Of It All’.
You have done your homework. That’s absolutely right. That’s the other reason that it interested me. I thought it was a kind of answer to that and, as you say, a neat part two.
Going back to the theme of ‘Rip It Up’, and in particular the title-track, you must have been writing that last year when many of your musical heroes were passing away. Did that feed into the record?
Strangely, yes. Very perceptive. I mean, the song [Rip It Up] was written about three weeks after David Bowie died. I was a massive fan and when he died I had his albums on repeat in my car for a while. So the apparent likeness to Jean Genie probably isn’t an accident. I can assure you it wasn’t intentional, it just kind of came out that way. I thought it was a vaguely ‘70s sort of groove, went with it and somebody said ‘It’s a bit like Jean Genie’ and I went ‘Oh dear, so it is. Never mind. He’s dead. He’s not going to sue us.’
You mentioned Right From The Start. A lot of these new songs have more textured guitar solos, but that track finds you in full on guitar hero mode at the end.
It’s an interesting solo. I’m a massive fan of the Isley Brothers, particularly their ‘70s stuff like Summer Breeze, Who’s That Lady. All of those have got massive long guitar solos at the end. Right From The Start, the chord sequence at the end reminded me of Summer Breeze so I thought let’s go the whole Isley ticket and have a huge great guitar solo. The solo that’s on the album is one I did at home. I did three or four takes and it was always my intention to replace it when we got into the proper studio to record the album, but it was there over the track and we thought ‘it feels nice, let’s leave it’. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time trying to recreate something you did where you were only half paying attention.
You’re well known as a guitarist but are also Thunder’s principal songwriter. You’ve penned some great tunes over the years and it makes me wonder, do you feel your songwriting has received the recognition it deserves?
I don’t know. It’s not really for me to say. It does piss me off sometimes that the band have been largely ignored by the mainstream media. BBC radio has not looked kindly on Thunder, ever. That’s very sad. The band is nearly 30 years in existence, has a pretty consistent level of output and some good songs that would have been at home on the radio. But they’ve never really supported us. So that does stick in my craw somewhat. Perhaps if we’d had more exposure more people would have heard the songs and with that comes the kudos. It doesn’t bother me. Everybody wants to be appreciated for what they do, but don’t forget that every time we get on stage and there’s a few thousand people singing it back, that’s pretty good. I’ll make do with that.
It’s currently the 25th anniversary of ‘Laughing On Judgement Day’, your most successful record. What are your memories of making that album?
The first thing I remember is that, two weeks into it, we told Andy Taylor we didn’t need him anymore. He produced the first album and with ‘Laughing...’, we got into the studio, and he was kind of preoccupied with several business things he had going on at the time. So I ended up taking over. It wasn’t ‘get out of here I’m in charge’. He would wander out and I’d take over and after a couple of weeks it became apparent that his input, great as it was, we didn’t need it. With ‘Backstreet Symphony’ he was absolutely crucial, his input and management of the individuals was very important and he gave us a lot of confidence and nudged us in all the right directions. By the time ‘Laughing…’ came around we had a very good handle on what we were doing and it just seemed like the natural progression.
We attempted to record a load of songs, 20-something, which is probably too many in hindsight. So that brings its own pressure, trying to get everything done. The other problem was that Mike Fraser, who engineered and mixed the first album, wasn’t available. So we had another engineer who was great, but he wasn’t quite Fraser. There was technical pressure from that point of view. But we had a lot of fun. The parties during that album were legendary and we really enjoyed ourselves, because obviously ‘Backstreet Symphony’ had been very successful and it was a relief that we’d established ourselves and were in a position where we could enjoy it. So we did.
The follow up - ‘Behind Closed Doors’ - also did well but grunge seemed to derail things for the band. Do you feel bitter about that?
No, no, certainly not. I think the music industry is always looking for the next big thing to hype up and get excited about. Nirvana were a very good band, as were Soundgarden, Alice In Chains. I think it was a little bit divisive of the industry to call it grunge and then react so badly against more traditional music. But that settles down after a while and now those differences don’t really matter. It’s all melded into one again. I was in my early 30s when that happened so was probably a bit old to grasp the true momentum of it. It didn’t really catch in England in the same way, but in America when we were over there in ‘92-‘93 doing various bits and pieces, and even ‘94 when recording ‘Behind Closed Doors’, that movement was at its zenith. You could see it was quite exciting for people and I think it’s the closest thing the Americans ever had to punk. So it’s just one of those things. Our timing was very good everywhere else, just fairly rubbish in America.
Looking back on your career, what’s been the highlight and do you have any regrets?
I think the only regret is probably that, in ‘92-‘93, when the first album came out in America, we sold about a quarter of a million copies and Dirty Love was a minor hit. We certainly had a foothold but once grunge kicked off our label Geffen Records, who coincidentally had Nirvana and a couple of the other Seattle acts, wouldn’t support us. We decided we wouldn’t bother with America, we’d come back later. So we concentrated elsewhere and I think we should have said we’ll go out and tour without the record label’s support and probably lose a bit of money, which we could have afforded to do because we were making money elsewhere, and try and build on what we’ve done. But we decided not to, for all the best reasons in the world.
High points? Donington 1990 will always stand out because I think that was the first time we realised we’d become quite popular. Eighty thousand people, beautiful day, we were the opening band and were very nervous. We weren’t quite sure what to expect. The reaction that we got that day was amazing and we went from being a band playing in clubs, did that show, and the next time we sold out three nights at Hammersmith Odeon. That shows you how important that one gig was.
I have to ask about the strong, somewhat scandalous, mid-’90s rumour that David Coverdale was trying to poach you for Whitesnake and Thunder had fallen out as a result. Was that really a story you concocted yourselves to drum up interest in the band?
Yeah, it was.
Did it work?
I’m not sure. I think people were confused by it to be honest. We concocted it because we wanted to generate as much publicity as we could before ‘Behind Closed Doors’ was released. And the kind of ‘Thunder, cheerful cockney chappies, knees up mother brown’ and all those stereotypes were really getting on our nerves so we wanted to do something a bit darker. But there’s no truth in it at all. We’ve always got on very well with David Coverdale and what spurred it on was he said a couple of nice things about me somewhere in a magazine, then somebody put two and two together and made five. The next thing you know people were asking about it. The funny thing was that David kept quiet about it. I think he was grateful for the publicity as well.
The band have split up twice but are you together ‘til death do us part now?
You never know. It’s impossible to say. The one thing that makes us a little unusual is that we’ve never split up because we’ve fallen out with each other. It’s always been due to external forces so I think we’re way too old to fall out now. That’s not going to happen. As long as health permits and as everybody’s enjoying it, that’s the key. I think the reason that this album and ‘Wonder Days’ were both among our best work is because everybody’s really enjoying it. That’s half the battle, really.
And finally, what are your hopes for the future?
Just to continue doing this. To make a living, to be playing to people. Things it’s very easy to take for granted but I never have. If you’re fortunate enough to get yourself into a position where a lot of people like you, want to come and see you, buy your records, then you’re very lucky. Talent is one thing, but you need a bit of luck as well. You look around these days and there’s so many people, my heroes, who are in that age group now where they’re dying, you just think ‘I hope that doesn’t happen to me for a few years yet because of all the stuff I want to do’.
Thunder Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri March 17 2017 - MANCHESTER O2 Apollo
Sat March 18 2017 - SHEFFIELD Sheffield City Hall
Sun March 19 2017 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE City Hall
Tue March 21 2017 - LEICESTER De Montfort Hall
Wed March 22 2017 - GLASGOW SEC Armadillo
Fri March 24 2017 - CARDIFF Motorpoint Arena
Sat March 25 2017 - SOUTHAMPTON O2 Guildhall
Sun March 26 2017 - IPSWICH Ipswich Regent Theatre
Tue March 28 2017 - LONDON Eventim Apollo
Thu March 30 2017 - DUBLIN Vicar Street
Fri March 31 2017 - BELFAST Mandela Hall
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