Sometime in early August 1989, in a converted seventeenth-century country house in Milton Keynes, an ex-Duran Duran guitarist sat across the desk from five musicians whose last band had been dropped by Epic Records eighteen months earlier, and pressed record. By the time the sessions ended, six weeks later, the band had drunk through what its rhythm guitarist would describe as "60 per cent laughing, 20 per cent drinking, and 20 per cent work", filled twenty-four tracks of analogue tape with ten Luke Morley songs and one Spencer Davis Group cover, and produced what Classic Rock's Dave Ling would later call "one of the all-time great hard rock debuts".
Thunder were not a new band. Danny Bowes, Luke Morley and Gary James had spent the mid-1980s as three-quarters of Terraplane, a hard-luck Epic Records signing that had released two albums to indifference and then been quietly let go. The five songs Thunder cut for their EMI demo in early 1989 were the first thing they had made together that anybody in the British music business heard with rising hairs on the back of the neck. Backstreet Symphony was the album that followed, and over the next two years it would chart twice in the UK, hit the Billboard 200, generate five top-forty UK singles, and put a five-piece in front of 80,000 people at Donington from a position behind only Whitesnake on the festival bill.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Thunder |
| Album | Backstreet Symphony |
| Release Date | 5 March 1990 (UK); 9 April 1990 (US Capitol); 15 April 1991 (US Geffen reissue) |
| Label | EMI (UK), Capitol then Geffen (US), Toshiba EMI (Japan) |
| Producer | Andy Taylor |
| Studios | Great Linford Manor Studios, Milton Keynes (recording, August-September 1989); AIR Studios, London (mixing); Masterdisk lacquering by Ian Cooper |
| Genre / Subgenre | British hard rock, blues rock |
| Track Count | 11 (UK CD with bonus "Distant Thunder"); 10 (vinyl) |
| Total Runtime | 51:32 (standard); 56:28 (CD with bonus track) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 21 (March 1990; re-charted four times across 1990 and 1991) |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 114 (June 1991; ten weeks on chart) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | UK Rock and Metal Albums 4; UK Independent Albums 12; Scottish Albums 14 |
| Certifications | Silver UK (BPI, September 1990); Gold UK (BPI, May 1991, 100,000+ units) |
| Estimated Sales | Over 100,000 in the UK; combined worldwide figure unreported, estimated 350,000+ |
| Key Singles | "She's So Fine", "Dirty Love", "Backstreet Symphony", "Gimme Some Lovin'", "Love Walked In" |
Cultural Context
The week Backstreet Symphony appeared in British record shops, the Berlin Wall had been down for four months, Margaret Thatcher had eight months left as Prime Minister, and the Football League's First Division still had the four clubs that would eventually become the Premier League's founding members fighting for the title. The album that sat on top of the UK charts on 5 March 1990 was Sinead O'Connor's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Hair metal was at its commercial peak in the United States but already beginning to feel terminal; Mother Love Bone's debut Apple would be cancelled four months later when Andrew Wood overdosed; Nirvana's Bleach was twelve months old and selling slowly.
British hard rock, the subgenre Thunder were arriving into, had spent the 1980s being colonised by Americans. Whitesnake's 1987 had been a US-coast remake of the band as Foreigner cosplaying Led Zeppelin; Def Leppard's Hysteria had been mixed in Wisconsin; the Cult had decamped to Vancouver to make Sonic Temple. What had not really existed since the early-eighties heyday of Free's afterlife and Bad Company's last great records was a young British band that wanted to sound British, blues-led, witty, and a bit damp. That gap is the one Thunder walked into.
Alongside Backstreet Symphony, the spring and summer of 1990 produced Alice in Chains' Facelift, Megadeth's Rust in Peace, Judas Priest's Painkiller, Iron Maiden's No Prayer for the Dying, AC/DC's The Razors Edge, Pantera's Cowboys from Hell, the Black Crowes' Shake Your Money Maker, the Almighty's Soul Destruction, Skid Row's Slave to the Grind sessions, and the slow build to Metallica's black album. Thunder were not the heaviest or fastest band on that list. They were close to being the most fun.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
The friendship that became Thunder went back to school in Wimbledon. Danny Bowes and Luke Morley had played together since their early teens in a band called Nuthin' Fancy, named after a Lynyrd Skynyrd album. Gary "Harry" James joined them on drums in 1982 in a unit they renamed Terraplane after the Robert Johnson song. Terraplane signed with Epic in 1984, released Black and White in 1985 and Moving Target in 1987, and were dropped before they could make a third. The band ended without ceremony in late 1988.
What Bowes and Morley took from the Terraplane experience was a decade's worth of songwriting, the certainty that a singer like Bowes deserved a heavier vehicle, and the conviction, repeated in interviews ever since, that the second band would be built more carefully than the first. Morley spent the early months of 1989 writing alone. Ben Matthews, a Wimbledon multi-instrumentalist who had played in a parallel scene of South London bands, was the first new recruit; Mark "Snake" Luckhurst, a bassist Morley had been pursuing for over a year, came in to complete the line-up.
The five of them cut a demo in early 1989. One of the tapes reached Andy Taylor. Taylor had quit Duran Duran in 1985 and spent the second half of the decade in the Power Station with Robert Palmer, John Taylor and Tony Thompson; he had since produced Rod Stewart's Out of Order and was looking for a project of his own to develop. He flew to London, heard the band rehearse, and agreed inside a fortnight to produce the record and to introduce them to EMI. The band signed before the summer.
"We had a guitarist, two guitarists, a drummer, a bass player and a singer, and what we had was the right people in the right room. Terraplane had been the wrong people in the wrong room for years. Within a week of Thunder being a real band, we knew the difference."
Danny Bowes, Classic Rock, 2010
Pre-production and Demos
The pre-production at Morley's South London flat was almost more useful than the studio. By July 1989, the band had run-throughs of every song that ended up on the album, plus four that did not. "She's So Fine", "Dirty Love" and "Backstreet Symphony" were the three Morley played to Taylor first; the producer, in interviews afterwards, said he knew the album would be made on the strength of those three songs alone. "Until My Dying Day" was the only song genuinely shaped by Taylor in writing rather than production: his co-write added the bridge that lifts the song out of its ballad opening and into a six-and-a-half-minute climax.
A Flexi-disc single of "Fired Up", an early Morley song that did not make the album, was given away by Kerrang! in July 1989 ahead of the band's first publicised gig at Opera on the Green in London on 16 July. The Flexi was the first commercially distributed Thunder recording. The B-sides that emerged later from the Backstreet Symphony sessions, "I Wanna Be Her Slave", "I Can Still Hear the Music", "No Way Out of the Wilderness" and "Until the Night Is Through (Dance Dance Dance)", were all fully tracked at Great Linford with the rest of the album and held back for single releases through 1990 and 1991.
- "Distant Thunder" was the CD-only bonus track on the UK release, an upbeat Morley rocker recorded last in the Great Linford sessions.
- "I Wanna Be Her Slave", co-written by Morley and Taylor, became the B-side of "Gimme Some Lovin'".
- "No Way Out of the Wilderness" was the B-side of the "Backstreet Symphony" single and remains a favourite at modern Thunder shows.
- The 2009 EMI double-CD reissue collected nearly all the contemporaneous B-sides and the Town and Country Club live recordings.
Creating the Album
Recording began on 7 August 1989 at Great Linford Manor, the seventeenth-century country house Pete Winkelman had converted into a residential studio in 1987. The studio's Neve VR console and its 24-track Studer A800 were the spine of the room. The band lived on site for six weeks. Bowes, in his retrospective interviews, has been blunt about the working pattern: the band would track for ten or twelve hours, eat together, and then drink heavily until the small hours, every day. Matthews's "60 per cent laughing, 20 per cent drinking, 20 per cent work" line is, by most accounts, accurate.
Taylor produced in a hands-on, performative way that suited the band's looseness. He played twelve-string acoustic on "Until My Dying Day" and was credited as a co-writer on two songs. His instinct on the guitars was to layer Morley's Les Paul into a thick, slightly dry stack, often two doubled rhythm parts panned hard, with a third room-mic'd amp for ambience; the McCready-meets-Kossoff lead sound that became Morley's signature is essentially a Marshall JCM800 through a 4x12 with an SM57 and a U87 in a phase-aligned pair. Ben Matthews's Hammond and piano were tracked in the manor's library, miked at distance to keep the room sound.
What Taylor delivered, after six weeks, was a record that needed a different ear for the mix. Mike Fraser was that ear. Fraser was, by 1989, the AC/DC house mixer (he had cut Blow Up Your Video the year before and would shortly cut The Razors Edge) and was on the rise as the producer-mixer of choice for big, sharp, transparent rock records. He moved the album to AIR Studios in London for two weeks and gave Backstreet Symphony the wide, airy mix it has now. Ian Cooper mastered. The Geffen US reissue in 1991 was remastered by Greg Fulginiti at Artisan Sound in Hollywood.
"The booziest time of my career, no question. I once did a take of 'Backstreet Symphony' so drunk that I genuinely could not remember playing it the morning after, and when we listened back it was the take we used. I don't recommend it as a working method."
Gary "Harry" James, Giving the Game Away: The Thunder Story, 2016
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Thunder | ||
| Lead vocals | Danny Bowes | All lead vocals and most backing harmonies |
| Guitar | Luke Morley | Primary songwriter, rhythm and lead guitar, backing vocals, album cover concept |
| Guitar and keys | Ben Matthews | Additional rhythm guitar, piano on "Love Walked In", Hammond organ across several tracks, engineering assistance |
| Bass | Mark "Snake" Luckhurst | Backing vocals; left the band in October 1992 after the second album |
| Drums and percussion | Gary "Harry" James | Drum kit and shaker; featured on the album cover |
| Additional musicians | ||
| Twelve-string guitar | Andy Taylor | Acoustic 12-string on "Until My Dying Day" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | Andy Taylor | Recorded at Great Linford Manor, August-September 1989; co-wrote "She's So Fine" and "Until My Dying Day" |
| Mixer | Mike Fraser | AIR Studios, London |
| Engineering assistance | Peter Peck, Russell Leahy, Andy Strange, Rupert Coulson | Tracking and overdubs at Great Linford |
| Mastering | Ian Cooper | Original UK release |
| Mastering (1991 reissue) | Greg Fulginiti | US Geffen and Japanese Toshiba EMI reissues, Artisan Sound Recorders, Hollywood |
| Artwork | ||
| Cover concept | Luke Morley | Asked his mother Christine Morley to sketch the original alleyway scene |
| Original artwork | Christine Morley | Initial sketch from which the cover photograph was staged |
| Photography | Andy Earl | Original cover shot at Artillery Passage, Spitalfields, London |
| Photography (reissue) | Ross Halfin and Charlie Best | 1991 Geffen and Japanese reissue artwork |
| Art direction | The Complete Works | Design and layout |
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "She's So Fine" | Morley, Taylor | 5:30 | Lead single (Oct 1989, reissued Sept 1990) | UK 34; the song Taylor heard first that convinced him to produce the album |
| 2 | "Dirty Love" | Morley | 5:21 | Second single (Feb 1990) | UK 32, US Mainstream Rock 10; the song that broke them on American rock radio |
| 3 | "Don't Wait for Me" | Morley | 5:32 | Album track and recurring live opener through 1990-91 | |
| 4 | "Higher Ground" | Morley | 5:06 | A blues-rock workout, no relation to the Stevie Wonder song | |
| 5 | "Until My Dying Day" | Morley, Taylor | 6:32 | US single 1991 | Andy Taylor twelve-string overdub; the album's central ballad |
| 6 | "Backstreet Symphony" | Morley | 4:30 | Third single (Apr 1990) | UK 25; the title-track statement of intent, written for a non-existent street community |
| 7 | "Love Walked In" | Morley | 6:25 | Fifth single (Feb 1991) | UK 21, the album's highest-charting single, prompted by Ben Matthews's piano part written before the lyric |
| 8 | "An Englishman on Holiday" | Morley | 4:27 | A holiday-romance lyric in the British self-deprecating tradition | |
| 9 | "Girl's Going Out of Her Head" | Morley | 4:18 | The fastest song on the record, written for an early Thunder set as a closer | |
| 10 | "Gimme Some Lovin'" | S. Winwood, Davis, M. Winwood | 3:51 | Fourth single (Jul 1990) | UK 36; cover of the 1966 Spencer Davis Group single, included at Taylor's suggestion |
| 11 | "Distant Thunder" | Morley | 4:56 | CD-only bonus track in the UK; recorded last in the Great Linford sessions |
"She's So Fine" opens the album with the Morley-Taylor co-write that did the most to define what Thunder would sound like. Bowes's vocal is unsupported in the first verse, just a clean guitar arpeggio under him, then the band crash in for the second; the song has the bluff confidence of a band that has waited five years for a debut and is not about to undersell it. It was reissued as a single in September 1990, on the back of the album's Donington-fed second wind, and reached the UK Top 40 second time around.
"Dirty Love" is the song that broke them in two territories. In the UK it was the band's first Top 40 single, debuting at 40 the week of release and climbing to 32 the following week. In the United States it was the song American Mainstream Rock radio actually played, reaching number 10 on the Billboard chart and number 55 on the Hot 100, an unusual crossover for a British hard rock single in the immediate post-glam moment. The riff is one of Morley's cleanest: a sliding fifth figure with a country-blues bend in the middle.
"Backstreet Symphony" is the title track and the song that named the album. It is also the song that staked Thunder's claim to a British identity at a moment when the path of least resistance for a band like them was to sound more American. The chorus is a small civic anthem to nowhere in particular. It debuted at UK number 25 on release in April 1990, the band's highest-charting single until "Love Walked In" overtook it the following February.
"Love Walked In" was the album's strongest emotional moment and its highest-charting single. Ben Matthews's piano part was written before Morley had a lyric for it; once Morley filled in the words, the song's six-and-a-half-minute build became the song many casual UK listeners would associate Thunder with for the next decade. Its February 1991 release pulled the album back into the UK charts for a final five-week run and was the single that took it from Silver to Gold certification.
"Gimme Some Lovin'", the Spencer Davis Group cover, was Taylor's suggestion. The band, after a slightly grumpy initial pass, took to it; the album version is a faithful but tougher reading of the 1966 original, with a Hammond part Matthews has said he tracked in a single take. It became the album's fourth UK single in July 1990 and reached number 36.
"Luke would sit at the piano in the manor's drawing room and the rest of us would wander in to listen. 'Love Walked In' arrived almost finished, with Ben playing piano while Luke was working out the lyric. By the time we tracked it, we already knew it was the one that would do the heavy lifting."
Ben Matthews, Powerplay, 2015
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Thunder were a singles band by accident. The UK market in 1990 still demanded multiple CD and 12-inch formats per single, each with one or two unique B-sides, which meant the band needed to leave Great Linford with two albums' worth of recordings: the LP and the singles' worth of off-cuts. They obliged. The list of Backstreet Symphony-era B-sides is unusually deep for a debut.
- "Fired Up" was issued as a one-sided 7" Flexi-disc by Kerrang! in July 1989 ahead of the album, then re-recorded for B-side use in 1990. It became a fixture of the live set throughout the early 1990s.
- "I Wanna Be Her Slave", the Morley-Taylor co-write that did not make the album, surfaced as the B-side of "Gimme Some Lovin'".
- "I Can Still Hear the Music" was the B-side of "She's So Fine", a six-string acoustic ballad that Bowes has said remains one of his favourite vocal performances of the period.
- "No Way Out of the Wilderness" backed the "Backstreet Symphony" single and is the rare Morley song the band still drops into modern Anniversary tour sets.
- "Until the Night Is Through (Dance Dance Dance)", on the limited red 10" of "Love Walked In", was the album cycle's last released outtake.
- "Distant Thunder", on the UK CD only, was held off the vinyl pressing for length reasons and is the closest thing the album has to a hidden track.
The 2009 EMI double-disc reissue gathered most of the contemporaneous B-sides on disc two alongside live recordings from Opera on the Green (16 July 1989), the Maritime Bar Southend (20 November 1989), the Town and Country Club London (7 March 1990) and Donington (18 August 1990).
Album Artwork and Packaging
The cover is Luke Morley's idea, sketched first by his mother Christine, then staged by photographer Andy Earl in Artillery Passage, the narrow brick alleyway in Spitalfields that links Bishopsgate to Sandys Row. Drummer Gary James stands on the right, hands in pockets; a man dressed as a tramp (cast for the shoot) sits against the wall opposite a woman in a long coat; a single sodium lamp lights the scene. The cover is unsigned by the band, an EMI marketing concession the label resisted and lost.
Mark "Snake" Luckhurst, in the McIver biography, called the artwork "an example of Thunder's take-no-prisoners attitude" and said the EMI marketing team opposed the lack of a clear band shot on the sleeve, asking for at least the inclusion of a poster insert. The band refused. The original UK and European LP and CD all carried the alleyway image. The April 1991 Geffen US reissue, when Thunder moved away from Capitol after eighteen months, swapped in a new sleeve shot by Ross Halfin and Charlie Best for the American market; the Toshiba EMI Japanese reissue from June 1991 onwards used the same Halfin artwork plus a bonus disc of live material.
Release and Reception
EMI released Backstreet Symphony on 5 March 1990. It debuted on the UK Albums Chart at number 21, its peak, and held on in the Top 40 for a second week before falling out of the Top 100 at the end of a four-week opening run. What kept the album commercially alive was the slow drip of singles. It re-entered for three weeks in May, came back for a week in July following "Gimme Some Lovin'", spent three more weeks in the chart in September after the Donington appearance and the "She's So Fine" reissue, and finally returned for a five-week run in March 1991 on the back of "Love Walked In". By May 1991 the BPI had upgraded its certification from Silver to Gold.
In the United States, where the album was first issued by Capitol in April 1990 and then by Geffen in April 1991 after a label-jumping fight, the reissue debuted at Billboard 200 number 185 in the week ending 1 June 1991 and peaked at 114 over a ten-week run.
| Publication | Reviewer | Score | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classic Rock (retrospective) | Dave Ling | "Greeted with critical rapture; one of the all-time great hard rock debuts" | |
| AllMusic | Alex Henderson | 3/5 | "A decent hard rock offering that should have done better; a mixture of Bad Company and Deep Purple" |
| The Encyclopedia of Popular Music | Colin Larkin | "A stunning album of bluesy rockers and atmospheric ballads, widespread critical acclaim for their dual guitar attack" | |
| Kerrang! 1990 Albums of the Year | Number 7 | Voted into the magazine's annual end-of-year poll | |
| Kerrang! Readers Poll, 2008 | Number 84 | "100 Best British Rock Albums Ever" |
The contemporary press in the UK was unusually warm. Kerrang! placed Thunder on the cover in March 1990. Sounds ran a feature in April. Q, then six years old and beginning to consolidate its place as the gatekeeper of British rock-album coverage, ran a four-star review. By the end of 1990, with the band fresh off a triumphant Donington and with a fourth UK Top 40 single in the bag, Thunder were on most British rock writers' shortlists as the breakthrough band of the year.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Release Date | B-side(s) | UK Singles Chart Peak | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "She's So Fine" | 30 October 1989 | "I Can Still Hear the Music" | 34 (reissued September 1990) | The band's debut single, originally a slow burner; reissued after Donington |
| "Dirty Love" | 5 February 1990 | "Fired Up" (live) | 32 | First UK Top 40; US Mainstream Rock 10, Hot 100 55 |
| "Backstreet Symphony" | 30 April 1990 | "No Way Out of the Wilderness" | 25 | Title-track and band's then-highest UK chart position |
| "Gimme Some Lovin'" | 2 July 1990 | "I Wanna Be Her Slave" | 36 | Spencer Davis Group cover suggested by Andy Taylor |
| "Love Walked In" | 11 February 1991 | "Until the Night Is Through (Dance Dance Dance)" | 21 | Album's highest-charting single; pushed the album to Gold |
| "Until My Dying Day" | 1991 (US only) | US Mainstream Rock 47 |
Thunder shot music videos for all five UK singles. The "Dirty Love" clip, the one most British viewers will remember, is a high-budget, brightly-lit performance video staged in a soundstage warehouse, intercut with band-on-the-road footage. The "Backstreet Symphony" video used the same Artillery Passage location as the album cover. "Gimme Some Lovin'" was a faux-live in-studio piece. "Love Walked In" was a melancholy treatment with a narrative subplot, the band performing in a black-and-white house with intercut colour exterior scenes.
At the end of 1990 EMI released Backstreet Symphony: The Videos, a VHS compiling the band's first four music videos with four live performances from the Donington Monsters of Rock set in August. It is the only commercial release of the Donington 1990 video footage and is now long out of print.
Touring and Live
The Backstreet Symphony Tour opened on 22 February 1990 in Dublin, two weeks before the album was released, with a UK leg that ran for six weeks and ended back in Dublin on 1 April. The band were already a hard-touring live unit by reputation by the time the album was on the shelves; the Dublin shows had been booked at Mean Fiddler venues that sold out within a fortnight of being announced.
- 25 April-13 May 1990 - European support for Heart: the first time the band played mainland European arenas; Bowes has since said the Heart audiences were the toughest of the cycle.
- July 1990 - German and Dutch dates supporting Love/Hate: a short, club-level run with the LA band whose Blackout in the Red Room had appeared three months earlier.
- 18 August 1990 - Monsters of Rock, Donington Park: Thunder were second on a bill headlined by Whitesnake, with Aerosmith, Poison and Quireboys also on the line-up. The 80,000-strong crowd was the largest the band had ever played to. Luke Morley has called it the moment the cycle changed gear.
- October-December 1990 - second UK headline leg: larger rooms than the first leg (academy and theatre-level), most dates sold out within a week of going on sale.
- 1991 - North American tour and ZZ Top support: following the Geffen reissue, Thunder spent April-June 1991 touring the US and Canada, partly on their own and partly as ZZ Top's opening act on a leg of the Recycler tour.
- 7 March 1990 - Town and Country Club, London: the Town and Country show was professionally recorded and provided the bulk of the live material on the 2009 reissue.
The Donington appearance is the night most British rock fans of a certain age remember Thunder by. The set ran for 45 minutes, opened with "She's So Fine" and closed with the band tearing through "Gimme Some Lovin'". Kerrang!'s Donington 1990 review opened with the line "Thunder ate the lot of them", and the second-on-the-bill slot was the band's first sustained piece of UK national press attention.
"It was uplifting and special. We were a band of friends in a beautiful country house, and we'd written some songs that I thought were better than anyone realised yet. The record I always tell people I'm proudest of producing is that one, partly because of how easy it was to make."
Andy Taylor, Wonderful Wonderful Times: My Autobiography, 2008
In TV, Film and Media
Television in the UK in 1990 still had the kind of mainstream rock-music outlets that have since disappeared. Thunder played "Dirty Love" on Top of the Pops in February 1990, performed at the BBC's Rock at the Beeb sessions in April, and recorded a Channel 4 The Tube spin-off appearance. The Word picked them up in early 1991. American syndication of "Dirty Love" on MTV's Headbangers Ball and on the Z-Rock satellite network through 1991 gave the song its Mainstream Rock top-10 lift. Film and TV syncs since have been modest: "Backstreet Symphony" appeared in a 2004 episode of Channel 4's Top Buzzer, and the song has been used several times as walk-on music in Premier League football coverage.
Controversy and the Label Fight
The biggest behind-the-scenes battle around Backstreet Symphony was not the album itself but Thunder's American label situation. Capitol Records, the US arm of the EMI family that had released the album in April 1990, was, in the words of journalist Mick Wall, "notorious at the time for not supporting acts signed to EMI in the UK". The Capitol pressing of the album under-promoted "Dirty Love" through 1990 despite its growing Mainstream Rock airplay, and by early 1991 the band had asked to be released from the deal. Geffen Records picked them up almost immediately and reissued the album with a new sleeve on 15 April 1991, which is when the US chart trajectory finally happened.
The other minor controversy was domestic. The "Dirty Love" single sleeve, depicting a half-dressed woman draped across an antique car bonnet, was withdrawn from sale at WH Smith and rebranded with a plainer sleeve for the second pressing. The video for the song was given a late-night-only MTV slot in the UK for the first three months of its rotation.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
Thunder themselves were the song's first significant cover artists, with Backstreet Symphony's "Gimme Some Lovin'" cover. The album's afterlife as a covers source has been modest. "Love Walked In" has been performed acoustically by Joe Elliott of Def Leppard at a 2018 Hyde Park show; "Dirty Love" was covered by the Quireboys at the 2013 Steelhouse Festival. Sample use has been close to nil, a reflection of the band's relatively restrictive licensing and the album's status as a fan-cherished British classic rather than a Stateside catalogue staple.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
The first reissue was the Geffen US release of 15 April 1991, with new sleeve and a Greg Fulginiti remaster. The Japanese Toshiba EMI release in June 1991 added a bonus disc of live recordings from Donington and the Town and Country Club. The band's catalogue passed through several Japanese reissue cycles across the 1990s and 2000s (1991, 1993, 1999, 2004), each with slightly different bonus tracks.
The definitive modern edition is the 6 July 2009 EMI European double-CD. Disc one carries the original eleven-track album. Disc two collects the contemporaneous B-sides ("Fired Up", "I Wanna Be Her Slave", "I Can Still Hear the Music", "No Way Out of the Wilderness", "Until the Night Is Through (Dance Dance Dance)") and live recordings from Opera on the Green (1989), Maritime Bar Southend (1989), Town and Country Club London (1990) and Donington (1990). For the album's 30th anniversary in March 2020 the band were on the road on what would have been a UK headline tour; the pandemic forced the postponement of the planned anniversary shows into 2021, when Thunder eventually played the album in full at Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham and at the Hammersmith Apollo in London.
Legacy and Influence
Thunder's debut is the British hard rock album with which the late 1980s really ended and the modern British rock-band template really began. The lineage that runs from Backstreet Symphony through the Almighty's Soul Destruction and Powertrippin', the Wildhearts' Earth Versus the Wildhearts, Skunk Anansie's Paranoid and Sunburnt, Terrorvision's Formaldehyde, Reef's Replenish, Feeder's Polythene and ultimately into the late-1990s wave of British rock bands, owes more to Thunder's debut than is usually acknowledged. The aesthetic is the same: an unembarrassed, slightly wry, riff-led British rock band that takes its songcraft from American sources but its accent and its humour from home.
Thunder themselves have remained, with two short hiatuses, a working band ever since. Laughing on Judgement Day in 1992 outsold the debut and reached UK number two. The band's catalogue now runs to fourteen studio albums; the most recent, Dopamine, appeared in 2022. Luke Morley is widely regarded as one of the most consistently underrated British rock songwriters of the past four decades. Danny Bowes has been described by both Joe Elliott and Glenn Hughes as "the best straight-rock singer Britain produced after Paul Rodgers". Gary James drums for Magnum and for the Steve Harris solo project British Lion when not with Thunder. The line-up that made Backstreet Symphony survived intact only until October 1992, when Mark Luckhurst left and was replaced by Chris Childs, who has now been the band's bassist for thirty-three years.
"It is, with hindsight, one of the all-time great hard rock debuts: a British band who sounded British, wrote songs that lasted, and refused to pretend they were from California. Backstreet Symphony was the album that proved you could still do that and sell records, and it is the template that every good British hard rock debut since has either followed or had to argue with."
Dave Ling, Classic Rock, 2002
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Terraplane DNA | Three quarters of Thunder, Danny Bowes, Luke Morley and Gary James, had previously been in the Epic Records band Terraplane, dropped in late 1988 after two unsuccessful albums. |
| Andy Taylor's audition | Thunder did not audition for Andy Taylor; Taylor flew to London after hearing the band's demo and offered to produce them within a fortnight. He arrived at EMI with Thunder already attached. |
| The Wimbledon connection | Bowes and Morley had played together in Wimbledon school bands since their early teens, fifteen years before Thunder released a record together. |
| The Flexi-disc | The first commercially distributed Thunder recording was a one-sided 7-inch Flexi-disc of "Fired Up" given away by Kerrang! magazine in July 1989, several months before "She's So Fine" was issued. |
| The booziest sessions | Rhythm guitarist Ben Matthews summarised the Great Linford sessions as "60 per cent laughing, 20 per cent drinking, and 20 per cent work", a description the rest of the band has never disputed. |
| The mother's sketch | The album cover concept came from Luke Morley, but the original sketch the photo shoot was staged from was drawn by Morley's mother Christine. |
| Artillery Passage | The cover photograph was shot by Andy Earl in Artillery Passage, the narrow Victorian-brick alleyway in Spitalfields between Bishopsgate and Sandys Row. The location remains identifiable today. |
| Mike Fraser's other 1989 record | The album's mixer Mike Fraser was simultaneously cutting AC/DC's The Razors Edge with the Young brothers; he moved between AIR Studios and Vancouver throughout late 1989 and early 1990. |
| The Taylor 12-string | The acoustic twelve-string guitar at the start of "Until My Dying Day" was played by producer Andy Taylor himself, the only musical contribution he made to the album beyond co-writing two songs. |
| The Capitol mistake | Thunder were dropped by Capitol Records in 1991 after the US label was accused of under-promoting "Dirty Love" despite its Mainstream Rock top 10 chart position. Geffen signed them three weeks later. |
| The Donington afterglow | "She's So Fine" was reissued as a single in September 1990 specifically to capitalise on the Donington Monsters of Rock appearance. It reached the UK Top 40 second time around, after missing it on first release. |
| The single-sleeve withdrawal | WH Smith pulled the original "Dirty Love" single sleeve, showing a half-dressed model draped across a car bonnet, after complaints. A plainer second sleeve was used for the remainder of the pressing. |
| Five for five | Every single released from Backstreet Symphony in the UK, five in total, reached the Top 40 of the UK Singles Chart, an unusually clean strike rate for a debut album from a new hard rock band. |
| The Snake departure | Original bassist Mark "Snake" Luckhurst left the band in October 1992 after recording the follow-up Laughing on Judgement Day. He has not played with Thunder since. |
| The Town and Country tapes | The bulk of the live material on the 2009 EMI double-CD reissue came from a 7 March 1990 show at the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, a venue now better known as the Forum and where Thunder have played many times since. |
The Podcast
The Riffology podcast covered Backstreet Symphony in episode 48, walking through the Terraplane back-story, the Andy Taylor production approach, the Great Linford sessions, the five-single UK promotional run and the album's slow-burn US Geffen second life. The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts: Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Overcast, Pocket Casts and on the Riffology site itself.
Comments