In case you have been living under a rock, THUNDER are back with an excellent new album and touring heavily in the UK, where they have just lined up their 2nd tour this year! Between his busy schedule Luke Morley found the time to call me for another interesting interview, where to begin he explained the reason in the delay of the record coming out in Europe:
Last year we founded our own label in the UK, which we wanted to do for a while, with this album basically - we had some sort of experiences with independent labels with the previous two THUNDER records, and we wanted to take control with this one ourselves. The reason it was late arriving in Europe was, because we were talking to several different people as possible licensees and Frontiers agreed to put the record out the way we wanted it. We haven't relinquished any control, so we still own the record, so we are using their resources basically, they're helping us do it.



Last year you released the brilliant "Moving Swiftly Along" - in my opinion not so much different than THUNDER, for example a song like "If I Can't Feel Love" could easily be on BOWES & MORLEY record. So was this record not a success outside Britain because of the name?
It wasn't even a success in Britain!! Ha,ha,ha!!! It did ok in Japan. No I think we had terrible problems with the label in the UK (Eagle Records).
And this is why we wanna release albums on our own label. The good news is we gonna be making another BOWES & MORLEY record, and that's gonna come out again thru our own label in the UK, who knows maybe again thru Frontiers in Europe. We actually starting recording it on Monday! (which was September 1st - gl)

Some comments on your BOWES & MORLEY record: 3/5 of THUNDER were there as Chris Childs played bass there also, that's what I meant as some songs have that THUNDER feeling obviously ...
Yeah, obviously the same person writing the songs and the same singer, it's naturally, some of the songs were not applicable to THUNDER; "Your Drifting Away" for example is a Pop-ballad, really it's a Pop-Song. That could be done by BOYZONE! It makes to be handled fairly lightly, and if THUNDER played it, it would become a big power ballad, ha!! I wanted the song to stay kinda small and intimate.

My favourite track on that disc was "Change" ...
Yeah, I think that's a good song. I wrote that with Joey Tempest and Chris Braidie, who is a very successful pop writer over here. We went to a kind of songwriting-convention thing, it was good fun actually, we just sat and talk for three hours, before any work. Joey is a very talented boy people just think (now he starts singing - gl) "It's the final countdown", but there's a lot more to him.

Luke, we have to talk about the lyrics of "Somebody Get Me A Spin Doctor" ... as I only know for a short time what a spin-doctor actually is, because a German magazine ran a long article about that Alaister Campbell guy and how the liars around Blair act and try to cheat the public ...
Yeah, absolutely right, it's ... ah ... a spin doctor is somebody who adjusts the truth, ha, ha, it's not actually lies but it's very close to it. It's altering perception by distorting facts. Obviously there's been a hell of it in England recently because the Blair Government is very famous for it.
So the song is a bit of a political statement against the government, but it's not just about politicians, it's about media people, and magazines like "Hello", they don't print necessarily anything truthful. It's about the manipulation of people by the media, by government but I try to see it with a sense of humour. I look at it in a strange sort of humor it's like, when a guy come home from a pub very drunk and his girlfriend is very angry with him, he's lying on the sofa drunk and thinks to himself "If I had a spin doctor, he could talk me out of this!"

Another song I wanna ask you about is "The Pimp And The Whore" - if I get that right it's a statement from yourself against all these stupid casting shows? (that we also have here in Germany all over)
You got it right, that's exactly the plot of the song. Once again I tried to inject a little more humour and er ... there's two guys over here that are very famous almost kind of talent show. One is Pete Waterman, as in Stock Aitken and Waterman, the producers, and the other guy is Simon Coul, who is now taken a search for a Popstar to America. This is an English guy who worked at a label, very unpleasant person, he's just incredibly cruel to people. I disagree with the concept that you can stand in front of somebody sing acapella for like three minutes. And I don't think that person can than make a judgement on your life! Like say "Go away - you're useless you're too fat". It's terrible! I mean it's like Lou Reed can't sing, ha and look at his career. Mick Jagger isn't a great singer ... where do you draw the line, you know? The only thing these shows produce is little puppets and little cartoons and little facsimiles of people that have been before. No originality, people aren't judging their ability to be different, they're just judged by people who profess themselves to be knowledgeable, they don't! I mean, Christ, one of the judges on one of these shows was Geri Halliwell! What the fuck does she know about singing! Ha,ha,ha!!!

We have these bullshit all over here now, too! I agree totally with you, here it's people like Oli P., who can not sing himself or lip-sync artists like Jeanette Biedermann judging nominees!
Yeah, it's terrible. And it got nothing to do with musical talent, that's what really fucking pisses me off about it. If somebody is fat or the teeth are not right, I mean look at Elton John, he's bald, he's fat, so ...



Looking back 13 years I have seen you play with LOVE/HATE in front of maybe 50 people at the Rockfabrik in Kehl, I was wondering how you felt when you played sold out shows in GB and then came here for empty clubs ...
Yes, I remember we did a couple of Rock-Fabriks on that tour. The good thing about THUNDER's live act is we always enjoy playing, we love playing. When you play in front of a sold-out audience it's easy, when you play in front of 50 people - especially when the 50 people came to see somebody else, ha, ha! - then you gotta be really good to convince those people to go home happy, it's challenging. That's what we're trying to do every night whether it's 50 or 50.000.

To your live set: You have a LOT of covers in your set, that you throw in for example "Stay With Me" (FACES), "Gimme Shelter" (STONES), "Sunshine Of Your Love" (CREAM), and "I Wish" (STEVIE WONDER) which you play into "Just Another Suicide", "Woman From Tokyo" (Purple), "Bell Boy" (THE WHO) and so on. How do you decide which one do you play on a day, is it spontaneously or planned?
When we're starting a tour we all sit down, er ... you know, might be we all coming with one suggestion, or I'm coming with two suggestions or Harry. It's good to do, cos you rehearse your own material and your own material is sort of great to play, but, you know we're not very much into rehearsing. THUNDER never rehearsed very much (laughs). We like to keep it as fresh as possible, we're not into perfection, we mess around quite a lot. So one minute we might be doing a MADONNA song, the next minute we might be doing a STEELYE DAN song. Sometimes we find a song that's within the area that is THUNDER. So yes, normally we have 5 or 6 cover versions, that we could do, if we felt like it, and the tour you're talking about, the last tour in Japan, er, we thought it was the last tour we were gonna do, then we thought it would be great to the fans just try and play as many different songs as we could.

But "Welcome To The Party" will always be the opener?
No!! Ha,ha,ha!! We did some shows in the UK in May, we didn't play "Welcome To The Party"! We had "Backstreet Symphony" on it. We opened the show so many times with that song, so we changed it.

Your records are always very long - I remember "LAUGHING ON JUDGEMENT DAY" was almost 70 minutes ...
That was too long! It was maybe 2 or 3 songs that didn't need to be on that record. I think now as in generally LPs are becoming longer, you know because CDs means you can get up to 80 minutes. Some artists feel that's the reason to have more material. I don't think our new album is particularly long, I think it comes in under an hour.

Yes, it's 55 minutes, without the three bonus tracks we have here ...
Ah, yeah the three bonus tracks, on the UK version we didn't have them. (I think in the meantime they have released them on the single for "Loser" there - gl)

I asked Luke, if those little things at the end of some records are a running gag for them, for example on the end of "LAUGHING ..." after "Baby I'll Be Gone" someone's practising piano, on the BOWES & MORLEY album we have the nice "On with the shooow!!" singing part.
It's nearly always spontaneous, if something happens during the recording of the album, that we think is funny or makes us laugh, or becomes a kind of theme of the few weeks in the studio, so when the album's being mixed, I'll go "Lets just put that on the end". It's really like schoolboy humor, ha,ha.

Then I asked Luke, if he's keeping in touch with younger British bands and if he for example knows FALCONER or SHADOWKEEP, but he doesn't know them (But he will check out the last SHY record!). (Er, Falconer are a Swedish band, aren't they? - rls)
I switch on "Kerrang-TV" occasionally and watch that and a little bit of MTV sometimes, but I tend to, ehm, I listen to all sorts of music, but most of the music I listen to, I have to be honest with you, is quite old when it comes to music. For me the BEATLES are the greatest band. The level of musicianship when I listen to QUEEN or LED ZEPPELIN or BAD COMPANY is far greater than anything I hear today. Not all of it, I like some, I think NICKELBACK are very good, I think QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE is terrific, I like the FOO FIGHTERS, these are all good bands. The kind of more extreme end of it, ehm … who are the guys who wear the masks? SLIPKNOT - there you go! Absolute shit! And I don't understand why people like that.

But he told me of a very talented young 19-year old guy called Peter Shoulder from North of England, whom he is producing 4 tracks, he's a incredible guitar player and sings like a young Joe Cocker / David Coverdale.
At then end of our interview I wanted to know from Luke what he does not like about Germany! He thought long, and couldn't really find anything, we are both a little arrogant, we both sometimes drink too much, but then he got it: We in Germany have better beer and nicer looking women! And he didn't like "Lederhosen"!!

PS: And he is sworn to secrecy about the line-up of "Danny and the Doowops"! ;-)
Thunder will be appearing on the TV show AVO Sessions
Venue: Messe Basel, Festival Hall, Basel Switzerland
Date: 14th November 2003
Thunder's Stage Time: 20:00 until 21:00
The band will be supporting Deep Purple and both bands' sets will be filmed in front of a live audience and broadcast all across Europe, via TV, Satellite, Radio and Internet.

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