The Damage Is Done – Thunder

How’s this for a confessional? I once quoted the lyrics to this song in a break up note to a girlfriend. OK it was a million years ago. I was still in school and Thunder had been a band we both liked. We’d been to see them dozens of times together and watched them go from back rooms in pubs to main stages at festivals.

Still quoting song lyrics in a letter to your ex… Might be the cringiest thing I ever did. Except for that time I got locked out of my hotel room naked. Or the job interview with all the spraying of blood. Or that time my trousers split while meeting a group of journalists… OK not the cringiest but one of them.

It’s a good solid rock ballad, organ (or more likely synth) lines lead an acoustic first verse into a power chord over load soufflé.

The Damage is Done was a B-Side that didn’t really trouble the live sets or make a case for appearing on the first two hit albums that the South London heirs to Whitesnake’s crown put out. There was a glorious period between ’90 and ’95 where home grown UK rock bands were firing up the venues and the charts with their own take on the classic rock sound.

Thunder were contemporaries of Little Angels, The Quireboys, The Almighty, The Wildhearts, Kiss of the Gypsy (yes that is a real band) and Gun. Thunder made a good fist of doing what Bad Company and UFO had done a generation before but with the major influence of the down to earthiness of Rod Stewart and The Faces.

The Damage is Done sounds like it should have been on a Robert Plant solo album in the era he was wearing suit jackets. Danny Bowes has one of the best voices working in rock in the last 30 years and his guitar foil Luke Morley is every inch the axe hero much bigger names are hailed to be. They were also really decent blokes who treated their fans like friends. They played a blinder every time I saw them and they covered so many classic tracks in their shows going to see them was like a rock and roll education.

The line I quoted? It’s a melodramatic metaphor so magnificent on record and so bloody pitiful on paper to a girl from school who went off with Scott from the rugby team. I cannot bring myself to write it down again a lifetime later. So I’ll let you listen to the record and see if you can guess…

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