Gimme Some Lovin'

The Zoo Crew has got Thunder cranked up on the board right now, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks riding along with us over at THE ZOO, you already know the rule. We play the long way around. Tonight that means "Gimme Some Lovin'" off Backstreet Symphony, the 1990 debut that still sounds like a Saturday night that refused to end. This is not the Spencer Davis Group original from 1966, the one Steve Winwood cut when he was still a teenager and the Hammond organ was doing most of the talking. This is the London hard rock version, tougher in the guitars, looser in the groove, and sung like Danny Bowes had somewhere better to be only after the last chorus.

Here is the story the band has told more than once. They were a song short. Luke Morley, the guitarist who writes almost everything Thunder plays, has said it plain. They decided they were missing a tune, and that is how "Gimme Some Lovin'" landed on the record. Andy Taylor, the former Duran Duran guitarist who had already told these guys to stop messing around and play blues rock, was the one who suggested the cover. The band took a slightly grumpy first pass at it, the way musicians do when somebody else picks the song, and then it caught. Morley has said he adores the original, that he is a massive fan of Steve Winwood, and that Spencer Davis had a great band. He also said theirs has a kind of energy about it that he still likes. Ben Matthews, the other guitarist and the man on the Hammond, has said he tracked that organ part in a single take. You can hear it. It does not sound fussed over. It sounds like somebody who grew up on the right records sat down and played.

They cut the whole album in about four weeks at Great Linford Manor. Matthews has described the sessions as a party that an album would break out of now and again. Morley would sit at the piano in the drawing room and the rest of them would wander in. "Love Walked In" arrived almost finished that way. "Gimme Some Lovin'" was the ringer, the one that was not theirs, and it still belonged. EMI put it out as the fourth British single on July 2, 1990. It reached number 36, which was enough. The band later marked the anniversary on their own page by remembering the formats: seven-inch, twelve-inch, CD, cassette, and a lipstick-red ten-inch gatefold. The B-side was "I Wanna Be Her Slave," a Morley and Taylor co-write that never made the album proper. The single also got them their first appearance on Top of the Pops. Fans still write under that anniversary post that the television spot is what hooked them, and that they bought the single at lunchtime while they were still in college.

Backstreet Symphony itself came out on March 5, 1990, and walked into the UK album chart at number 21. It went gold. Kerrang! put it on the albums-of-the-year list. The cover was Luke's idea, sketched first by his mother Christine, then photographed by Andy Earl in Artillery Passage, that narrow brick alley in Spitalfields. Bassist Mark "Snake" Luckhurst called it a take-no-prisoners sleeve. EMI's marketing people wanted the band on the front. The band put their foot down. When the record crossed to America it got a different jacket, and on the Billboard 200 it peaked at 114 after Geffen reissued it. "Dirty Love" was the one that dented American rock radio. Over here on the freeform side, the cover is the one that feels like a handoff from the old British beat bands to the crew that came up behind Bad Company and Free.

Thunder did not invent themselves in a rehearsal room in 1989. Luke Morley and Danny Bowes met at Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College in south London in the mid-seventies. They were about fourteen. Luke already had a band going with some other boys. Danny could not play an instrument, so he claimed he could sing. They auditioned him and kept him. The kid he replaced got moved to bass and, by a twist you could not write cleaner, later became the band's manager. Danny has told the bedroom version of the same story. A drum kit got set up in Luke's room, the lot of them skipped school one afternoon, and Danny walked in, saw the kit, and decided he needed to be around it. Next day in economics class he told Luke he had heard they were looking for a singer, and that he had a microphone. The microphone belonged to an uncle who had been in a band with Danny's dad. That was enough.

The school band called itself Nuthin' Fancy and worked the London pubs, even putting out an independent single called "Looking For A Good Time." When Harry James came in on drums they renamed themselves Terraplane. Terraplane got the Marquee, a spot at the 1982 Reading Festival, and a deal with Epic. Two albums followed, and the record company kept trying to steer them toward pop because Luke could write a pop tune. Danny has called Terraplane a master class in every mistake a band can make. They were out of step, managed by ideas from ten years earlier, and pushed toward a sound that was not theirs. A trip to America showed them a rock scene that still had room. They came home ready to stop asking permission.

On New Year's Day 1989, at the group's usual meeting, Bowes and Morley folded Terraplane and started Thunder. Matthews and Luckhurst completed the first lineup. The advice that stuck came from Andy Taylor, who told them they were a great blues-rock band, and that they ought to drink more, turn it up, and have fun. Morley has said that one sentence uncomplicated the whole process, and that he had already written "Dirty Love" and a couple of the other first-album songs by the time Taylor walked in. EMI signed them off a demo audition the same year. Before any of that, Danny had been a self-employed carpet fitter in the family business. He gave it up for the van and the gigs. He has talked about a Terraplane run through the worst snow in years, three beds for five people, and a night when he and Harry slept in the Transit until Harry went blue and they had to walk him around a cafe. He calls it earning your stripes.

By August 18, 1990, they were on the Monsters of Rock bill at Donington, under Whitesnake. Morley has said they did not realise how far they had gone until that show. They had already opened for Heart in Europe and done a run with Love/Hate. Aerosmith had them out at the NEC in Birmingham. Danny has said Axl Rose even tried to sign them to his label, and that the celebrity fan club helped because good players recognise each other. Grunge arrived later and knocked a lot of bands sideways. Thunder kept going, split, came back, split again, and came back again. Laughing on Judgement Day hit number 2 in Britain in 1992. The nucleus of Bowes, Morley, and James never really let go of the thing they started on that New Year's Day.

If you want the band's own shelf, the place that still lists "Gimme Some Lovin'" on the Backstreet Symphony track list is the official Thunder website. Their verified page is on Facebook, the official photos and notes live on Instagram, and the feed that carries the reissues, including the expanded Backstreet Symphony sets, is on X. That is the crew. The rest of us are just spinning the record and letting Danny ask for a little of that lovin' one more time.