Luke wanted to go a bit further with the songwriting, and we actively encouraged him to push it as hard as possible. We decided to set the bar higher – we didn’t want to make another comeback album, we wanted to explore our musicality. “This album was harder than the last album for me, and I think it was harder for all of us in various ways.
It’s the sound of a band pushing themselves further than they ever have before.
There’s a moment of vocal interplay in the title track that echoes the Beach Boys at their golden best, if Brian Wilson had come from Lewisham. There’s more piano, groove, understatement, space, nuance, light and shade. It’s an album that gives up its secrets slowly. Space to reflect, time outside the studio, familiarity (“Rockfield is a return to the comfort zone, very conducive to getting a lot done”) and the desire to push Thunder in a more sophisticated and newer direction all played their part in the making of Rip It Up.Ī first listen would not surprise any long-standing Thunder fan. “So I think those three separate recording sessions – and he would probably never admit this in a million years – gave Luke, subconsciously maybe, the ability to say to himself: ‘Where’s this idea going? I’ve got something like this already, best investigate this.’ So it gives you a little more movement to reject material.”ĭanny Bowes pushed himself hard with the new album “In the past you go in and write fifteen or twenty songs, record the best ones, come out six weeks later and it’s all done,” says Bowes. They also decided that with this album it was time to try something new. It worked so well that they decided to repeat the formula for Rip It Up. It’s a bit ludicrous”, says Bowes.įor the Wonder Days album, they tried something new: recording incrementally in three distinct, extended sessions in the residential Rockfield Studios in the leafy Welsh countryside. The tour with Journey and Whitesnake in the spring of 2013 led to more offers and 25 shows that year: “That’s a lot of gigs for a band who are supposed to have broken up. And that seemed like a very attractive proposition: regular hours, regular money, it wouldn’t be eighteen hours a day, every day of the week.”īeing an agent lasted two years, managing bands a few years more. And I said to the other guys in the band: ‘If I don’t stop, I’m going to have a heart attack or a nervous breakdown or both.’ And then at that point I was offered an opportunity to become an agent.
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“I’d been running the band’s label for six or seven years, we had great communication with the fans, but the problem is that it’s too much work when you release five albums and a lot of live DVDs and have an online store when it’s doing its thing… you’re running around at full tilt all the time.
“I very much pulled the rug out from under everyone’s feet when I said I wanted to stop doing it,” he says. Remarkable, really, that Wonder Days ever got made at all. There were introspective conversations about how and why the band had ended, and how they could begin again and do things better this time. Its release followed a trying period when Bowes had quit the band, they’d reunited to tour with Journey and Whitesnake (and walked away as the best band on the bill on more than one night), and then struggled to reconnect as guitarist Ben Matthews underwent treatment for cancer. It’s not to belittle Thunder to say they were doing what they do best. It was the familiar Thunder blueprint writ large: rousing, larger-than-life good times that were occasionally tempered by rueful reminiscing and the thrum of an acoustic guitar. Two years ago they achieved something of a fait accompli with their commercially and critically acclaimed album Wonder Days. Thunder have been all things to all people for the better part of 27 years. The band most likely to written off broken down reunited.
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