As you can probably imagine without any real help THUNDERFUCK and the DEADLY ROMANTICS may not be to some people’s tastes. Some might even take offence at some of the things they might say, do or sing about. Thank God for Rock and Roll, is all I can’t say…
FOREPLAY
Mark: OK let’s get it out of the way, the name Thunderfuck, it’s a bit ‘Prince’ isn’t it? Surely you must have a last name?
TF: It’s that whole stage name thing. Everyone in the band has a stupid name and that’s probably because they want to disassociate themselves from the band. Aside from me, all the other guys have really boring names anyway. Some of the names have meanings behind them, for example, Gordie 5’s name is Gordon, and he’s the fifth drummer we’ve had, but you couldn’t be in a band like The Deadly Romantics with a name like Gordon, could you? In the end, names are unimportant. If we have to deal with some feminist bitches or PC tight asses, then we go with just “The Deadly Romantics” to somewhat appease them and it’s funny to watch them struggle with what to call me. Sometimes they call me Mr. Fuck, or “Thunder”, it’s much easier if they just don’t speak to me. I’m not the most social of butterflies.
Mark: Tell us a little about why the world needs a band like the Deadly Romantics?
TF: It doesn’t. But the world doesn’t need political correctness, AIDS or Justin Beiber, but we’re all here, aren’t we? What does the world need? I don’t fucking know, and I don’t really care. I hate dance clubs and shitty bands, so when I go out, I want some excitement, something interesting, and the best way to achieve that was to get the band going and take the party everywhere with us. Never forget that bands are about entertainment. No one really wants to hear Bono or that bloke from REM going on about how to save the world, no one gives a fuck and they certainly didn’t pay all that money to go and see U2 to hear Bono spout his political shit. When he starts one of his rants, you can see the look on the faces of the other guys in his own band going “oh fuck, here he goes again”.
Mark: Political correctness must be something very dear to your hearts?
TF: I fucking hate it! Hate, hate, hate! That and feminism, both of them can suck my dick! Look, I’m not racist, xenophobic, homophobic any of that shit. I’m really not. I don’t write about beating up black people, I don’t write about gay bashing or shit like that. I know blacks, browns, purples, reds, yellows, every fucking colour of the rainbow, I got them in my address book, and they all have one thing in common, they all have a great sense of humour. Feminists and PC Bitches have no sense of humour. Most girls are fucked up, but them guys, they’re a special type of crazy!
TF: Here’s a paragraph from a letter we got from a girl. Let me set the scene: “Do You Wanna Rock And Roll” ain’t lyrical genius; it’s got a pretty easy, sing a long chorus. It’s the song we open the set up with, and by the time the second chorus comes around, I hold the microphone out to the audience so they can yell “Do You Want To Rock And Roll” back at me. So this bitch sends in a letter, and bear in mind, this is only part of it!
TF: “The singer decided to sit at a table right next to the table that me and my friends were sitting. He proceeded to give the microphone to both me and my friend, as if he wanted us to say something. By that point, I was a bit annoyed so I said “Go away”, but I’m not sure if he heard me. He then went on to pretend to drink from my friend’s water bottle. I found this quite disrespectful as he showed no consideration for whether my friend would like his saliva on her water bottle.”
TF: Seriously??? WTF??? You are in a club where it is postered everywhere that “Thunderfuck and the Deadly Romantics” would be playing, what the fuck were you expecting, a needle work class? Now, before any of your readers get their tits in a twist, I use the term “bitches” to represent ALL uptight, humourless people, men or women. There’s a great line in “99 Problems” by Ice-T saying “I gotta bitch who’s a man because they’re bitches too.” Men bitches are worse than the women. But you don’t need my entire philosophy, wait for the book…
Mark: Your origins are shrouded in a sea of mystery fill us in on how you got to here?
TF: It’s been a long fuckin’ haul mate, I tell ya. The band was born in Hamilton, Ontario Canada in 2005. The players looked great, but were a bunch of fuckwits who couldn’t get it together enough to get into the studio and record. I moved to the UK in 2007 and found Fudd, and we hit it off immediately. Fudd has his own issues, but it has taken us this long to get a proper line up together. We have been through so many members we almost gave up. People joined the band and then wanted to change the sound or direction, or just didn’t get what we were about.
Mark: Just to prove your credentials can you give us your own personal definition of ‘Romance’?
If she admits to sleeping with me, it must be romance.
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ON THE RISE
Mark: You’ve a couple of EPs under your belts and have just released your first full-length I imagine the critical reception has been pretty wide ranging so far?
TF: Yeah, two of my favourties so far are one from melodicrock.com – “What a pile of steaming shit… It would give hope to deaf, talentless, drunk dope smokers around the world” And the other from rockunited.com – “”…their Def Leppard cover sucks more balls than a ball sucking machine.”
TF: As they say, any press is good press. Personally I don’t know why someone would take the time to review a CD they didn’t like. I can take any criticism so long as it has value. We got a great review from The Rock Pit where the guy said:”Thunderfuck doesn’t have the best voice in that way that Johnny Rotten didn’t have the best voice”
I can’t argue with that! I hate my voice, you should hear me try and sing properly, Christ, it’s awful, but I can’t stand the voices of Bob Dylan, Neil Young or Liam Gallagher, doesn’t mean they can’t front a band and release records. Jagger is shit, Bowie is shit. So what! We can’t all be Freddie Mercury! Take Donnie Vie from Enuff Z’Nuff, he doesn’t have a great voice, but if you like it, you love it!
TF: Of course, I love it when we get a great review; it gives some validation to what we are doing. I don’t see any of our songs being played at any weddings, but I can see someone at a party going “fuck, you gotta hear this band!” And if all you get is shit reviews, then no one is going to buy your CD, and people actually check out bands that are being reviewed in these magazines and on these websites. Each time we get a good review a few more CDs sell out of our website! I suppose the good thing about the reviews we have had is that there has been no middle ground!
Mark: Do you ever meet people who believe every word you sing?
TF: All the fucking time! I mean we haven’t had any skinheads or Nazi’s showing up at any of our gigs, but, yes, there are a lot of people out there who just don’t get it. Everyone in this band is a serious and talented player, and a lot of their peers don’t understand why they are playing in this band. We don’t have the level of success to be playing our own big gigs and therefore we tend to be put in the middle of a four band bill, and we play with all of these kid bands who still think they are going to make a living in the music industry and they hate us either because they think we are taking the piss out of them, or because we don’t take anything seriously.
TF: Back to what I said about entertainment: no one wants to come to a rock show and hear some no name band passionately sing their version of “More Than Words”, you know as well as me, as soon as some singer says that his band is going to slow things down a bit, that means “fag break”. Fuck no; people want to have their balls rocked off!
Mark: Have you ever been picketed by a religious or PC organisation and if not what are you doing to remedy that?
TF: We’ve got a song called “Down On Me” which has the line “I’m a fuck god honey and I don’t lie”, but in the studio, the song was recorded a little too fast, and I didn’t have the breath to sing the “I’m a”, so it just says “Fuck God. I don’t lie”, so, if we ever get a little more recognition than we have now, I’m pretty sure that is going to come back and bite me in the ass!
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STYLE
Mark: Define your style – we get vintage AC/DC meets punk meets Zodiac Mindwarp meets The Almighty meets Motorhead meets Steel Panther meets Circus of Power meets MC5 is that enough meets?
TF: I’d love to meet all of them! I think we rip off a lot of bands. I know it, you know it, it’s all been done before. “Do You Wanna RnR” sounds a bit like “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Down On Me” is a little Lenny Kravitz, “All Look The Same” is a bit Quireboys meets “Living After Midnight”. Nothing’s new. I’m a huge Zodiac Mindwarp fan, but I’m also a huge QUEEN fan, so who knows. Everyone brings their influences into the band, our first guitar player; Johnny Douchebag was a massive Ramones fan, so they’re in there. I don’t see the Steel Panther similarity, as they are waaay better players than us!
Mark: When you play it relatively ‘straight’ like on ‘Ain’t too Old (to Rock ‘n’ Roll)’ and ‘It’s Gonna Be Great’ you sound like a band that’s got a real understanding of Rock tell us about that balance with the attention-grabbing tracks and the solid underbelly?
TF: It’s tough. We’ve written some stuff that is great, but just doesn’t fit into the mould of The Deadlies. We had a song called “Sex Sells (but I’d fuck you for free)” which was drifting off into prog rock territory, and we’ve written a song for the new record called “Jennie Don’t Play With Jamie” that I’m still a little unsure whether it’s for us or not. It’s a story song, and I don’t think it is what people would expect from us.
TF: Each guy in the band is not only a writer but a multi-instrumentalist as well. I play guitar, bass, keys and drums, Fudd wrote the “Starfucker” riff and even Hell Boy plays the bagpipes! We each have our own roles in the band, but any band, including us, is a creative force and I like to see the band as an Open Dictatorship where everyone can bring their ideas forward.
TF: I think that every song on the CD is based around a great riff; I don’t differentiate between “It’s Gonna Be Great” or “Starfucker”. Songs like “Ain’t Too Old” was written about me being too old to play in a rock band, simple! We’re not trying to be Shakespeare, if the song sounds a little more serious than the other, it was totally unintentional.
Mark: You chose ‘New York’ (I agree with the sentiment) as a video – what guided that choice?
TF: Necessity more than anything else. There’s a fair amount of amateur videos and shitty live clips of us on YouTube and we knew we needed something that represented the band and looked decent. There’s a great rap scene in Scotland and two of my favourite rappers out here at the moment are WERD and MOG, both have released videos by a guy called Tommy Slack, so I got in touch with him, and he had never done a rock video before, so we just wanted to band off a track to see how things worked out.
TF: There is a whole storyline behind New York City, and it’s a true story! My previous band toured there and it basically broke the band up! But at the end of the day, it’s a two and a half minute rocker that says what it is on the tin! Although we are writing for the next CD already, we have plans for at least another two videos off of Sexploitation.
THE ALBUM
Mark: You start off ‘Sexploitation’ with the title tracks from your previous EP’s but there’s a particular cover of Def Leppard on the ‘Starfucker’ EP that caused a bit of a stir did people just not get it?
TF: We signed a deal with a record company out of New York. One of these companies that keeps releasing these tribute CDs featuring so and so who once played with Dio, and that bass player from Rough Cutt etc.. They got in touch with us, saying that they were working on a Tribute to Def Leppard and would we be interested in participating on it.
TF: Back in the 80’s I was a bit of a fan of Def Leppard and I still love the Pyromania album, but by the time the 90’s had come around, and I’m not saying anything new here, they had gone shit! So I looked up their singles on Wikipedia and tried to pick the worst song of the lot of them. No matter how you look at it, “Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad” is a crap song! So why not cover that?
TF: This was 2007 and I had just moved to the UK, so Fudd and I went into the studio where he played guitar and bass, I sang and played the drums. Then we sent the track to New York and heard nothing. In maybe 2010 the record company put out a press release saying that they were finally releasing the album and, much to our horror, we were listed as one of the contributors! But we’re now in 2013, almost 2014, and still the record hasn’t seen the light of day.
TF: When we were ready to put out the “Starfucker” EP we just went ahead and stuck it on there. Def Leppard are certainly not an influence on the band, although I have met Joe Elliot and he is an awesome bloke, but I wanted to get it out there as, even though we were trying to polish a turd, I think we did a good job on it! We got the shit reviews on it because we sent it to prissy melodic rock websites, of course they were going to slag it off. We just pissed all over their Winger/White Lion/Nelson fire! Once again, fuck them if they can’t take a joke. There’s a lot worse covers out there than ours!
Mark: You demonstrate remarkable subtlety at times like on the anti-ballad ‘Obligatory Love Song’ is there a soft centre to the Deadly Romantics, or just a deep vein of cynicism about the whole eighties power ballad equates radio play equation?
TF: “Obligatory Love Song” is basically just what it says. The second song on side two of every record from every hard rock act was always a ballad. As I have said before, we are all writers in this band, and I have released several records under my own name, and they were full of sloppy Michael Bolton meets Richard Marx shit. The original intro to “Do You Wanna Rock And Roll” was a Meatloaf type duet thing between me and a great Canadian Blues singer named Ginger St. James, but I knew, at the end of the day, we would never get away with opening the record with it.
TF: The lyric idea basically came from “Song For Whoever” by The Beautiful South but adding more of “This Thunderfuck bloke is a total wanker” to the mix. I fucking love 80’s power ballads, if I could actually sing, I would start a cover band doing nothing but. But as my vocals “suck more balls than a ball sucking machine”, “Obligatory Love Song” was the best I could do.
Mark: The juxtaposition with the song ‘Porn Star’ is inspired and you tackle some of the real issues of that particular job – it must have taken some dedicated research?
TF: I know a couple of chicks who are in that game and I’ve been on a couple of sets with them, although thankfully I was never an actor, but the whole porn game is a fucking jaded industry. For the chicks it is all about who can gag on the biggest cock and whose asshole can gape the widest, and for the guys it’s all about cumming on command! It ain’t fucking pretty. If you are looking for fortune and fame, there are better ways to get it!
Mark: ‘Scream My Name’ is the song that reminds me most of Zodiac Mindwarp, are they a particular influence?
TF: I am a massive fan of Zodiac. We have opened up for them a couple of times. The first time I met Zed he was a bit of a dick, but after that he was pretty cool. Cobalt is a really cool guy and an awesome guitar player; I don’t think he ever gets the credit he deserves. They were always seen as a bit of a joke band, but Tattooed Beat Messiah has to be one of the best rock albums of the 80s. I saw them open the Zodiac Mindwarp/ Guns’n’Roses/ Iron Maiden show in Toronto in 1989 and the whole vibe was awesome! The first EP “High Priest of Love” and the first two albums are great! They went a little downhill after that, “Fucked By Rock” is a solid record, but they have suffered like so many bands from shitty management, shitty record companies and shitty distribution. I don’t think anyone else in the band would call them an influence, but lyrically, I would be a dick to say that they weren’t.
Mark: The swing version of ‘Fucked by Rock and Roll’ is fun have you been approached by the ghost of Dean Martin about covering that one?
TF: Next
Mark: And the question I have to ask with both “Rock and Roll” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll” in your song titles there’s surely a real danger of confusion there, especially for the younger fans?
TF: What are you, the fucking Grammar Nazi?
Mark: Which tracks from the album go down best live?
TF: The sing-a-long ones. Do You Wanna Rock and Roll, Fucked By Rock and Roll, Scream My Name, those sort of ones. As I have said, we’re about entertainment, and it’s always good to get the crowd singing, and who doesn’t want to yell out “Fuck” every now and again? I keep wanting to drop Pornstar from the set as it’s a bitch to sing, but the band love playing it and won’t let me. The audience seems to have a good headbang to shit like that on, Starfucker and New York City.
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TOURING & LIVE
Mark: You’re playing shows with Tigertailz in November our mate Rob plays bass with them at the moment can you promise not to lead him astray?
TF: Rob has been around for years and we have probably known about each other since the early nineties, but we have never met. He plays with everyone doesn’t he? I bet he’s played every venue in the UK but never with the same band. Tigertailz has always been one of my guilty pleasures, it’s a pity about whatever went on with Kim Hooker as I thought he was amazing, the new guy seems to be able to hold a tune though. The new material is good, or at least a lot better than the shit they released a few years ago. Tigertailz have been around the block a few times so I don’t know if they still party it up like they did in their heyday, most bands like that want to chill out backstage with a cup of tea and their slippers. They’re all the same age as me, but I’m going through my third or fourth mid-life crisis, so Rob is welcome to jump on the train if he wants to come along.
Mark: Give us a shameless plug of any other live shows you have coming up?
TF: We’re getting ready for a mini tour of the UK with a band called Cadaver Club, who are a bit like Green Day meets the Ramones after having sex with The Misfits! Matty James is their drummer who I know from all the gigs I do with The Dogs D’Amour and he’s a really cool guy. His own solo stuff is great and he is really starting to get a good following. Anyway, we’re playing Manchester Retro bar on Nov 8th, Hope and Anchor in Islington on the 9th, Rigger Rock in Stoke on 10th, back Bannermans in Edinburgh for the 11th, and the Glasgow’s Pivo Pivo on the 13th. Check out one of the earlier shows as I’m going to be fucked by the end of that!
Mark: There’s a crisis in Rock and Roll and most bands turn into Zombies overnight (shit this is a good scenario I’ll have to use it again) which newly undead bands would you have playing a festival with you?
TF: Fuck, I don’t know. They used to say that DJ’s were killing live music, fuck that, too many shit bands are killing live music. There really is only a handful of bands that I would put in the same league as us!!! Hahaha. Estrella, who are opening the Tigertailz show are a great little band. The guys all look about 12 but sound like fucking Van Halen! States of Panic out of Edinburgh are another band I’d love to play with. Johnny Gunn, the lead singer, is a mate of mine, he’s a really cool guy when his head isn’t up his own ass, but they all rock like motherfuckers. I think they are working on their third CD, and they’ve really got their own sound and style together, although I really loved their first CD when they were ripping off Motley Crue! So Estrella and States of Panic, how many bands are on this imaginary festival? I’d have Attica Rage, but they’ve been around a few years. My favourite new-ish bands at the moment are Royal Republic out of Sweden, or Norway or somewhere up there and Charm City Devils who have the best fucking power ballad Poison never wrote. “Best of the Worst” is a fucking classic! So there, that’s 6 bands including us, in this day and age that should pull 20 or so people to a gig!!
AND FOR PUDDING… (DESERT IF YOU’RE POSH)
Mark: What’s the grand plan for the Deadly Romantics for the rest of the year and beyond?
TF: Fuck knows, how many songs can you write about dicks and pussies? I got no fucking illusions about where I am in life. The past couple of EPs and the full length, the tour, the hotels, the band van, it’s all self-financed, no one is sinking money into rock and roll anymore, so we’ll keep doing it, slugging out at the day jobs until the money runs out or it’s not fun anymore. A lot of venues, promoters and other bands are scared of us so there is a limit to what we can do. So long as my liver holds out I’ll keep on keeping on, but as the old Forgotten Rebels song says, “Rock and Rolls a Hard Life”.
Mark: If you could have been a ‘Fly on the wall’ for the creation of any album in the history of rock and Roll just to see how the magic happened what would it have been for you and why?
TF: What magic? Fuck I love questions like these. Have you ever been in a studio? It’s the most boring fucking thing on the planet for me. (Yes I have and yes it is – interviewer thinks to himself) There’s a lot of fucking great albums out there, but could you imagine being in the studio while “A Night At The Opera” was being recorded? I would go fucking nuts! Half the time the full band is never in the same room together and songwriting has to be the most tedious task known to man. However, if you are being fuckwit (yes possibly I was – interviewer thinks to himself) and are actually asking me what are my favourite records, then that is easy:
Queen – Queen 1
Zodiac Mindwarp – Tattooed Beat Messiah
Enuff Z’Nuff – Strength
Dogs D’Amour – Dynamite Jet Saloon
The Quireboys – A Bit Of What You Fancy
There, that’s five for ya!
Mark: What is the Meaning of Life?
TF: Doesn’t matter mate, they all look the same with a dick in their ass!
Mark: …and on that thought-provoking existential contemplation we leave it there… for now…
