Thunder
Back Street Symphony

THE REVIEW

Thunder was a classic 70s London-based blues-rock band, deeply inspired by the likes of Cream/Led Zeppelin/Free/Bad Company/Whitesnake that marked the most fruitful season of British Blues. This quintet decided to draw heavily from their musical styles and solutions, without worrying too much about originality, preferring instead to focus on compactness, energy, freshness, enthusiasm, balance, grit, power, fun, and feeling.

In other words, they invented nothing new, but they put together (to my taste) great and exemplary records and revealed significant personal talents in vocal performance (thanks to the frontman Danny Bowes), compositional clarity and efficiency (credit to guitarist Luke Morley), instrumental thunder combined with charisma and communication (belonging to drummer/humorist Gary James, featured on the cover dressed as an orchestra conductor), and lastly, a sensational performance in live shows, sparkling and gripping.

All this without any pretension, focusing on substance, on music, and throwing themselves earnestly into records and concerts for twenty long generous years, before throwing in the towel in 2009 and dispersing into other projects (except they changed their minds... the latest news reports a new tour set for this summer).

The album in question marks their debut, dated 1989, on the rock scene at a time clogged with AOR and class metal, whose excessive and flashy bleached big hair and increasingly uninspired machine-gun guitar solos provided more plausible reasons for detractors. Meanwhile, the grunge scene, destined to supplant lycra pants and stallion poses a few years later, was still running in the unknown underground.

Thunder then burst onto the scene with this great platter of traditional, straightforward and direct hard rock, familiar but brilliant and contagious: England seemed at the time to be waiting for nothing else, they dived right in, and "Back Street Symphony" ended up selling over two million copies between their homeland and the rest of the world, remaining their biggest career success.

My opinion is that the following albums are even better: here the band's personality (as already mentioned, not particularly overflowing due to their derivative tendency) was still shaping, a certain Thunder sound (which indeed there will be, although one probably needs to be a fan of the genre to "isolate it") still needed focus, and the production to improve. Nevertheless, this remains by far the best-known album of the quintet, as often happens with debut works.

The most acclaimed tracks, which became classics for the fans of the band and are almost always performed live, are in order of appearance "Dirty Love", then the title track and especially "Love Walked in", all straightforward rock tunes, for the first two of which the sole composer Morley gets help from the album's producer Andy Taylor... yes, the guitarist from Duran Duran, a rocker long lent to the glamorous new-romantic scene, who as soon as he could, moved, with much less fame but more intimate satisfaction, into the realm of classic hard rock.

Ultra-conservative is also the choice of the only cover on the album: the classic "Gimme Some Lovin'" by Steve Winwood and company of the Spencer Davis Group. Danny Bowes, with his stunning Paul Rodgers-esque tone, reinterprets it in his own way, the rhythm section amplifies it, adapting it to the genre and the band's intents, Morley and the other guitarist Ben Matthews (also an organist) confidently pound on their Gibson and Hammond.

For those who, after careful observation or instinctively, expressed their "No thanks, I don't smoke" to many or perhaps all developments in the music scene between the 1990s and 2000s (grunge, indie, post-rock, rap, industrial, techno, nu-metal, alternative, brit-pop...) immersing themselves in Thunder's honest and vigorous classic bluesy rock should be a remedy.