A little personal vignette for a Thursday afternoon…
Summer 1992: I was a teenage metalhead wannabe, reading either Circus or Metal Edge magazine (I don’t remember which), when I stumbled across a review of a new CD from a band I’d heard very little about — a British band called Thunder.
I was somewhat familiar with two of their songs, “Dirty Love” and “Love Walked In”; they had gotten a little bit of airplay back when MTV showed music videos all the time:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8-9zFpIazQ]
(Yes, that’s a young Pamela Anderson in that video, before she became a “huge” star.)
Anyway,the review raved about the disc, track by track. So I figured I’d pick it up… and I was just blown away by it. That disc, “Laughing On Judgement Day,” become a permanent fixture in my life, right next to Aerosmith’s “Pump” and Tesla’s “Psychotic Supper” as my three “desert island discs.”
Every song hit me then, and they still do today: “Does It Feel Like Love?,” “Everybody Wants Her,” “Long Way From Home,” “Today The World Stopped Turning,” “A Better Man”… there isn’t a bad track on there. The studio version of “Like A Satellite” is one of my favorite songs of all time — but it’s well worth the effort to track down the “Trident Sessions” acoustic version, which is gorgeous. (And hard to find, so it might be worth just picking up their 1998 double live disc, which includes a live recording of the “Trident” version.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALLSN3pP9-k]
Looking back, “Laughing” was on the fast track to wild success; it had a hit producer (Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor, a long-time friend of the band), a world-famous cover designer (Storm Thorgerson, best known for his work with Pink Floyd, including the iconic “Dark Side of the Moon”), and legendary A&R; man John Kalodner, who appears in the “Dirty Love” video above, drumming alongside Harry James.
Sadly, Thunder fell off the map for me after that, as they never hit it big here in the States again. Before the Internet, it was much harder to keep tabs on what bands were up to if they weren’t on MTV or in the metal magazines.
Several years ago, I came across a Thunder import CD single for a song called “Just Another Suicide” in a dollar bin at a record store. I was thrilled to see that one of my old favorite bands had kept on keeping on, as they say, and I immediately researched them — only to find that they had broken up earlier that year. I faithfully tracked down all the albums I’d missed and fell in love with the band all over again… just in time to find out that they were getting back together and recording again!
Thunder’s been an enormous part of my life the past six or seven years. I’ve bought everything they’ve released, even when the American dollar was so bad it meant I was spending $30 or more on a single CD. (Sorry, honey.) I was sure that they’d make it back over here and be big stars in the U.S.; back in my former life as the Director of the first-year Orientation program at Old Westbury, I even contacted their management company to see how much it would cost to have them play on campus. (Way too much, as it turned out.)
Why should you care? Well, on the heels of their latest disc and tour, they’ve decided to call it quits again. Twenty years is a long time to be making music, and Thunder has certainly delivered, over and over again for their small but rabid fan base. I have all nine studio albums, all eleven live discs (with the twelfth on the way, ordered last week), and lots of other tracks I’ve found over the years. It’s hard to think that this is the end, and that we won’t see new music from these guys any more, and I’m disheartened that I never got the chance to see my favorite band live in concert. I hope we’ll continue to see them record in other places… and I’ll always hold out hope we’ll see Thunder Mark III down the road.
Thanks, guys.