Thunder

Thunder guitarist Luke Morley takes us through the title track of the band’s renaissance record.

Guitarist Luke Morley takes us through a track from the band’s renaissance record.

53 WONDER DAYS

Thunder From: Wonder Days, 2015

This was an interesting song to write, because it started off with what you hear – the basic guitar riff. And it’s kind of reminiscent of She’s So Fine from our first album. But not too similar, hopefully. So that kind of appealed to me. I thought: ‘We’ve not made an album in what, six and a half years or whatever it is. This could be the start of the album.’ But, as is often the case when you’re writing, songs can develop in strange ways. The whole middle section of the song, with its Brian Wilson-esque harmonies, I’m not sure where that came from… Well actually I do. I’m a massive Beach Boys fan, but I never thought that would surface in a Thunder song. It’s got that kind of blues vocal ‘singer sings, band answer’ sort of thing which has been used so many times over the years – Black Dog, Still Of The Night… that kind of rootsy, Robert Johnson thing. But it’s interesting because it touches on the bluesy end of what Thunder do.

“The middle section is odd for us; we don’t normally do that kind of multi-layered vocal harmony thing. But it is something that we can do, so it was kind of interesting to do that, and take it somewhere else. And it came out as a fiveminute epic. It was meant to be a threeminute, very straightforward thing, but it turned into something completely different. That’s the joy of songwriting, it can take you places you never expected to go.

“I think a function of getting older is you tend to look back more. But yeah, it was written about being a teenager in the seventies, all the various scrapes, smoking by gym at school, getting interested in girls, and then joining a band, and realising that because you’re in a band you get more girls… or would have done in those days. It’s a trip down that rose-tinted look back at being a teenager. You tend to edit out the bad pages. It was a great time to be a teenager just in terms of what was happening in music at that time. Though obviously when you look back at what was actually happening in the seventies it was fairly unpleasant: strikes, rubbish piling up in the streets… I kinda remember that, but not as much as I remember Houses Of The Holy coming out. So I suppose this song is a reflection.”