In 1993, as sidekick to former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, Francis Dunnery had what he now calls "the biggest guitar job in the world". He knew it wouldn't last forever, but three decades later the kid from Egremont in Cumbria still gets a kick from remembering that he played the guitar solo to Whole Lotta Love in stadiums across the world.
During the previous decade, Dunnery's band It Bites had been loved by fans and hated by the press over the course of three resolutely fascinating albums that to this day still stand up as masterpieces. Formed in 1982, It Bites enjoyed chart success in '86 with Calling All The Heroes but just a few years later, the guitarist and singer dismayed and puzzled his bandmates by opting to walk away for a solo career.
Defined by his unpredictability, the self-confessed "live wire" has been an independent artist and record label owner for many years, and he prefers it that way. Back in 2021 he released a 42-song, tripledisc solo album entitled The Big Purple Castle and his most recent release, the Blu-ray/CD set Live From The Black Country, sees him performing some of It Bites' bestloved material in Wolverhampton.
As well as fronting his own incarnation of It Bites, Francis Dunnery has a pure blues side band called Tombstone Dunnery. Away from music, he's a student of astrology and Jungian psychology.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/1330227033.jpg]
Your father was a musician and your brother Baz played guitar for the noted Cumbrian rock band Necromandus, so when did you first become aware of progressive music?
There was a lot of jazz fusion around: Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Isotope, Soft Machine and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, mixed in with the blues of Muddy Waters. In our house it was just as normal to listen to the Mahavishnu Orchestra as David Cassidy. My brother was heavily into Yes, so that would have been the first real progressive rock I knew.
You came from a household of binge-drinkers. Did your volatile home life influence the way your personality developed?
That situation taught me two sides of life: one being paradise – when sober, my parents were the most amazing, kind and gregarious people and the other being when the drink kicked in, and they just disappeared. They went from making apple pies to vanishing completely. That was depressing. I later spent 35 years studying Jungian psychology, which taught me that whenever anything is going well, it always comes to an end.
It Bites were such an interesting band because the four of you genuinely were schoolmates.
Bob Dalton [drums] was the very first person I met in junior school at five years old. I love all of those guys, I spent some of the best times of my life with them. All of them are decent human beings. We went from starving in London, stealing milk from people’s steps, all the way to playing huge venues.
How did the band end up signed to Virgin Records?
We were living in a squat in Peckham [south-east London], sending cassette tapes of us playing live to the labels, and Paul Morley [the former NME writer who became a part of ZTT Records] was the only one that replied, saying that we needed to make proper demo tapes. So we decided to go and see the labels but at Warner Bros the security wouldn’t let us in. There was a bit of a kerfuffle going on and this guy called Martyn Mayhead from Modern Media happened to see it all, gave me his card, and said to give him a ring. So we called him at three o’clock the following morning [Dunnery laughs] and he loved the tape. Martyn started to fund us, and that led to Virgin
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/2328712142.jpg]
Did the Top 10 success of the 1986 single Calling All The Heroes scupper hope of It Bites being viewed as a credible rock band?
Not really. If it wasn’t for that song nobody would have heard of us. We were doing progressive rock, which was the most unhip thing you could think of. But we weren’t a band trying to manipulate the public, we knew nothing about things like hit records. We just wanted to be like Yes, Genesis, Mahavishnu, UK and Focus. We had zero interest in being in the charts. I still think that if the person I am now could talk to It Bites back then, we could have had four hits from each of our albums.
With a few notable exceptions, the music critics of the era didn’t get It Bites and, frustrated by those perceptions, you often lambasted them from the stage.
I felt insulted by those idiots If someone punches me in the face, I’ll punch them back. I’m an old northern boy, still the same today, though having said that, I’m a very nice man. I’ll do anything for you, I just won’t be anybody’s bitch. I’m an alpha male. Come at me – I’ll knock you out. I don’t care, I’ll be dead in 30 years.
During the making of the second It Bites album, Once Around The World, Virgin brought in Steve Hillage as a producer. Was it in a bid to steady the ship of what you once described to Prog as “four incredibly raw lunatics who were drunk and stoned 24 hours a day”?
That’s how we were back then. Although we thought we could, we didn’t have the capacity to produce ourselves. Steve made us realise that we needed to write some three-minute singles because one of the songs [the title track] was almost 16 minutes long. Steve was a gentle soul. He did a great job on our stuff. I really, really loved working with him.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/y_UfPQXvm1703853060170.jpg]
Was Hillage’s calming influence what the situation required?
Yeah. Midnight, Black December, Kiss Like Judas, Yellow Christian. Steve helped with the mechanics of those songs.
It Bites seemed to be turning things around by the late 1980s, but despite having headlined London’s Hammersmith Odeon, the band combusted in Los Angeles during the preparation of a fourth album. What happened?
There are a million different answers I could give you. We were under a lot of pressure to come up with huge success when nobody really knew what we should be doing. All we were being told was: “No, that’s not right,” or, “No, you can’t do that.” Towards the end of It Bites there was a lot of trying to make the sun shine when it was raining. It became obvious that we just didn’t fit into what was going on within the industry. Nobody wanted us. It was like being English in a Welsh bar.
How did it affect you?
The most profound thing was realising that it didn’t matter the kind of music we were making. The music side of things was the least important. That was the saddest thing. Walking away from all of that felt very liberating. I’ve got a brash personality and that didn’t help. I was still drinking and I didn’t have very good social skills. I was too much of a live wire and in that sense I contributed to my own downfall.
What was it like to sing backing vocals on the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album in 1989?
That happened because we [It Bites] were being managed by Brian Lane, who managed Yes. Some may disagree but I always thought of Brian as another great guy. I already knew Jon [Anderson] and the band, and later on I was in a band [The Syn] with Chris [Squire]. What a fantastic experience that was. Dude, I was 25 years old and on a Yes album!
How did you end up joining Robert Plant’s band?
It Bites had toured with Robert, and I have a good relationship with him because I think I’m as spunky and aggressive as he’d like to be. In the book about Robert [Robert Plant: A Life by Paul Rees], Chris Hughes [producer of Fate Of Nations] said, “There’s nobody that excites Robert Plant more as a guitarist than Francis Dunnery.” He likes the way I go at [the instrument], so we always get on well.
In those two or three years we spent together I got to do things I could never have done otherwise. Staying in big hotels, playing massive stadiums and flying first class, I went to the top of the hill. At that time it was the biggest guitar job in the world and for a while it was mine. It made me feel complete.
What did touring with Plant teach you?
It gave me an education in the blues: Robert knows everything about the blues. That’s where my blues band, Tombstone Dunnery, comes from. I love the name Tombstone Dunnery, it’s the best blues name in the world.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/4777277730.jpg]
What else did you learn from that time in your life?
I didn’t apply for that job, which made me realise that I’m not very effective at strategies. I see others making plans and going from A to B and it makes me think, “Wow!” In my life I tend to get blown around in the wind, I end up in the most. fantastic places that nobody could even imagine. I didn’t want the job with Robert, I wasn’t after it and there were 5,000 guys that were, but they called me up and that was it. When things come into your life embrace them, and when they leave let them go – simple.
You once told me the story: “I went out on the razz with Motörhead and awoke on Hollywood Boulevard wearing a black wedding dress. I think it was an album launch of theirs, but I was so wasted from booze and blow that I can’t be certain. And it wasn’t just the wedding dress, someone had a gun at my head. That was it. I had to get sober.”
[Roars with laughter.] Every word is true. I realised at that point that I was out of my league. I come from a place where you punch people in the face. With a gun in your face you think, “Aaah. That’s enough partying.”
So you cleaned up in 1991?
Oh, it’s 33 or 34 years [ago].
In 1996 you reportedly declined the chance to audition as lead singer for the role in Genesis that eventually went to Ray Wilson…
That&rs...
During the previous decade, Dunnery's band It Bites had been loved by fans and hated by the press over the course of three resolutely fascinating albums that to this day still stand up as masterpieces. Formed in 1982, It Bites enjoyed chart success in '86 with Calling All The Heroes but just a few years later, the guitarist and singer dismayed and puzzled his bandmates by opting to walk away for a solo career.
Defined by his unpredictability, the self-confessed "live wire" has been an independent artist and record label owner for many years, and he prefers it that way. Back in 2021 he released a 42-song, tripledisc solo album entitled The Big Purple Castle and his most recent release, the Blu-ray/CD set Live From The Black Country, sees him performing some of It Bites' bestloved material in Wolverhampton.
As well as fronting his own incarnation of It Bites, Francis Dunnery has a pure blues side band called Tombstone Dunnery. Away from music, he's a student of astrology and Jungian psychology.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/1330227033.jpg]
Your father was a musician and your brother Baz played guitar for the noted Cumbrian rock band Necromandus, so when did you first become aware of progressive music?
There was a lot of jazz fusion around: Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Isotope, Soft Machine and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, mixed in with the blues of Muddy Waters. In our house it was just as normal to listen to the Mahavishnu Orchestra as David Cassidy. My brother was heavily into Yes, so that would have been the first real progressive rock I knew.
You came from a household of binge-drinkers. Did your volatile home life influence the way your personality developed?
That situation taught me two sides of life: one being paradise – when sober, my parents were the most amazing, kind and gregarious people and the other being when the drink kicked in, and they just disappeared. They went from making apple pies to vanishing completely. That was depressing. I later spent 35 years studying Jungian psychology, which taught me that whenever anything is going well, it always comes to an end.
It Bites were such an interesting band because the four of you genuinely were schoolmates.
Bob Dalton [drums] was the very first person I met in junior school at five years old. I love all of those guys, I spent some of the best times of my life with them. All of them are decent human beings. We went from starving in London, stealing milk from people’s steps, all the way to playing huge venues.
How did the band end up signed to Virgin Records?
We were living in a squat in Peckham [south-east London], sending cassette tapes of us playing live to the labels, and Paul Morley [the former NME writer who became a part of ZTT Records] was the only one that replied, saying that we needed to make proper demo tapes. So we decided to go and see the labels but at Warner Bros the security wouldn’t let us in. There was a bit of a kerfuffle going on and this guy called Martyn Mayhead from Modern Media happened to see it all, gave me his card, and said to give him a ring. So we called him at three o’clock the following morning [Dunnery laughs] and he loved the tape. Martyn started to fund us, and that led to Virgin
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/2328712142.jpg]
Did the Top 10 success of the 1986 single Calling All The Heroes scupper hope of It Bites being viewed as a credible rock band?
Not really. If it wasn’t for that song nobody would have heard of us. We were doing progressive rock, which was the most unhip thing you could think of. But we weren’t a band trying to manipulate the public, we knew nothing about things like hit records. We just wanted to be like Yes, Genesis, Mahavishnu, UK and Focus. We had zero interest in being in the charts. I still think that if the person I am now could talk to It Bites back then, we could have had four hits from each of our albums.
With a few notable exceptions, the music critics of the era didn’t get It Bites and, frustrated by those perceptions, you often lambasted them from the stage.
I felt insulted by those idiots If someone punches me in the face, I’ll punch them back. I’m an old northern boy, still the same today, though having said that, I’m a very nice man. I’ll do anything for you, I just won’t be anybody’s bitch. I’m an alpha male. Come at me – I’ll knock you out. I don’t care, I’ll be dead in 30 years.
During the making of the second It Bites album, Once Around The World, Virgin brought in Steve Hillage as a producer. Was it in a bid to steady the ship of what you once described to Prog as “four incredibly raw lunatics who were drunk and stoned 24 hours a day”?
That’s how we were back then. Although we thought we could, we didn’t have the capacity to produce ourselves. Steve made us realise that we needed to write some three-minute singles because one of the songs [the title track] was almost 16 minutes long. Steve was a gentle soul. He did a great job on our stuff. I really, really loved working with him.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/y_UfPQXvm1703853060170.jpg]
Was Hillage’s calming influence what the situation required?
Yeah. Midnight, Black December, Kiss Like Judas, Yellow Christian. Steve helped with the mechanics of those songs.
It Bites seemed to be turning things around by the late 1980s, but despite having headlined London’s Hammersmith Odeon, the band combusted in Los Angeles during the preparation of a fourth album. What happened?
There are a million different answers I could give you. We were under a lot of pressure to come up with huge success when nobody really knew what we should be doing. All we were being told was: “No, that’s not right,” or, “No, you can’t do that.” Towards the end of It Bites there was a lot of trying to make the sun shine when it was raining. It became obvious that we just didn’t fit into what was going on within the industry. Nobody wanted us. It was like being English in a Welsh bar.
How did it affect you?
The most profound thing was realising that it didn’t matter the kind of music we were making. The music side of things was the least important. That was the saddest thing. Walking away from all of that felt very liberating. I’ve got a brash personality and that didn’t help. I was still drinking and I didn’t have very good social skills. I was too much of a live wire and in that sense I contributed to my own downfall.
What was it like to sing backing vocals on the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe album in 1989?
That happened because we [It Bites] were being managed by Brian Lane, who managed Yes. Some may disagree but I always thought of Brian as another great guy. I already knew Jon [Anderson] and the band, and later on I was in a band [The Syn] with Chris [Squire]. What a fantastic experience that was. Dude, I was 25 years old and on a Yes album!
How did you end up joining Robert Plant’s band?
It Bites had toured with Robert, and I have a good relationship with him because I think I’m as spunky and aggressive as he’d like to be. In the book about Robert [Robert Plant: A Life by Paul Rees], Chris Hughes [producer of Fate Of Nations] said, “There’s nobody that excites Robert Plant more as a guitarist than Francis Dunnery.” He likes the way I go at [the instrument], so we always get on well.
In those two or three years we spent together I got to do things I could never have done otherwise. Staying in big hotels, playing massive stadiums and flying first class, I went to the top of the hill. At that time it was the biggest guitar job in the world and for a while it was mine. It made me feel complete.
What did touring with Plant teach you?
It gave me an education in the blues: Robert knows everything about the blues. That’s where my blues band, Tombstone Dunnery, comes from. I love the name Tombstone Dunnery, it’s the best blues name in the world.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/eUbSMF4ms1703852684074/4777277730.jpg]
What else did you learn from that time in your life?
I didn’t apply for that job, which made me realise that I’m not very effective at strategies. I see others making plans and going from A to B and it makes me think, “Wow!” In my life I tend to get blown around in the wind, I end up in the most. fantastic places that nobody could even imagine. I didn’t want the job with Robert, I wasn’t after it and there were 5,000 guys that were, but they called me up and that was it. When things come into your life embrace them, and when they leave let them go – simple.
You once told me the story: “I went out on the razz with Motörhead and awoke on Hollywood Boulevard wearing a black wedding dress. I think it was an album launch of theirs, but I was so wasted from booze and blow that I can’t be certain. And it wasn’t just the wedding dress, someone had a gun at my head. That was it. I had to get sober.”
[Roars with laughter.] Every word is true. I realised at that point that I was out of my league. I come from a place where you punch people in the face. With a gun in your face you think, “Aaah. That’s enough partying.”
So you cleaned up in 1991?
Oh, it’s 33 or 34 years [ago].
In 1996 you reportedly declined the chance to audition as lead singer for the role in Genesis that eventually went to Ray Wilson…
That&rs...
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Prog (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 146