Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The demonstration of intent when it comes releasing your debut album is bound by a kind of artistic law that states it must show the confidence that is full of gravitas and punch, that if it fails to deliver a groove or the belief of scope and majesty required, then what you have created is not worth the life you have spent honing and perfecting your words, not setting the tone to which honours the pain and joy that your existence has endured so far.
To have a debut album that draws the listener in, an album of depth, ferocity, feelings of seizing the zeitgeist and the drama at stake, is paramount, and it doesn’t matter the genre, it must have the belief that it could not have been finer.
In the vinyl re-release of an impressive and cool debut by Thunder, the feeling of buoyant resurgence of the Blues Rock dynamite drama was welcome and undeniable. British rock, despite having a decade where it hit new heights, was in danger of running out of steam as more direct, in your face fierce competition was felt to be approaching the shores from America, and inside our own music camps the tide was shifting slowly to a pattern of dance exposure was going to drag even the pop art crews to a different level.
Thunder’s timely introduction, produced by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor, shows the maturity and fierce combative nature of a group powering through every chord, stretching the sinews of every track, and as the reissue in double disc format amply expresses, it remains an album in which is resolute in its conquest and nature.
For Danny Bowes, Luke Morely, Ben Matthews, Gary (Harry) James, and the initial bassist Mark Luckhurst, Backstreet Symphony was an introduction, to the listener it was as if liquid gold had been pressed into the form of a new generation of musicians that could rival the old guard, the Whitesnakes of this world for example, and take British rock bounding towards the end of the century with wit, style, and brilliance of performance.
The reissue does not just feature the songs that originally filled every crevice and rise of the album, it has it beckon call the early live versions of She’s So Fine, Until My Dying Day, and Gimme Some Lovin’. This expansive setting of music fills the room with pride, and that back street symphony, that place is for the multitude, whereas the song professes, love walked in with a smile on its face and with a dream beating in its wild and industrious heart.
An album which set the pace for the group, a new generation, a new decade…and it kicked off in some exquisite style as the Back Street Symphony rang out, and remains, clear and a spectacle of joy.
Ian D. Hall