Gunfire Dance - Archway Of Thorns

Gunfire Dance - Archway Of Thorns

A batch of copies have just come up on eBay for a more than reasonable £4.99 (I've seen it on Amazon for 10 times that; probably didn't sell at that price though).

Click here for details.

Previous posts on Gunfire Dance:
Gunfire Dance
Suicide Blonde and the Birmingham scene

Gunfire Dance - new shows

Short notice as they're tomorrow (12 Bar, London) and Saturday (Actress & Bishop, Birmingham)!

Both are tribute shows to their friend Rebbecca Robbins. For more info click here.

Buy Archway of Thorns on eBay (only £3.99!)



Previous posts:
Gunfire Dance
Interview with Ozzie from Gunfire Dance
Suicide Blonde and the Birmingham scene
Gunfire Dance - Continental Bar NYC 1994

Gunfire Dance demo

One for completists (having the Archway Of Thorns CD myself I'm going to pass on this), someone's put up an early Gunfire Dance demo for sale on eBay.

Quite a sweet listing:

'I think this is either late 80s or early 90s, not quite sure but remember i was around 19! Sound a bit like The Dogs D Amour but (i think) better!'

I haven't seen one of these come up for sale for a while so guess it may be of interest! And if nothing else it's an excuse to post about Gunfire Dance for the nth time ...

Previous posts:
Gunfire Dance
Interview with Ozzie from Gunfire Dance
Suicide Blonde and the Birmingham scene
Gunfire Dance - Continental Bar NYC 1994

Gunfire Dance - Suit And Tie

Previous posts:


Gunfire Dance
Interview with Ozzie from Gunfire Dance
Suicide Blonde and the Birmingham scene 

GUNFIRE DANCE - Continental Bar NYC 1994

My love for Gunfire Dance is hardly a secret (I bang on about them often enough), so here we go for anyone that missed (or misses) them ....

Suicide Blonde and the Birmingham scene

Suicide Blonde popped into my head today - not the INXS song, but a Birmingham band from the late 80s/early 90s. As is clear from the cartoon drawing on their MySpace page, Suicide Blonde emerged on the (velvet) coat tails of the Dogs D'Amour and despite some good press only managed to release one 12" single ('Nobody Tells Me Anything', a tune we used to busk occasionally).

I got to see them once at the Borderline on Charing Cross Road on my birthday (to say which one would give far too much away!). Openers were the then perennial support act White Trash; I must have seen them about half-a-dozen times, all unintentionally. Their one redeeming feature was that they covered 'Another Girl, Another Planet', and on this particular evening were joined for their rendition by one Steve von Saint. Bless him, he looked most crestfallen when he went to play the opening solo but was beaten to it by White Trash's own guitarist, then trying to pull some shapes only to lean back too far and fall over! I dare say he claimed to have been drunk ...

Suicide Blonde's performance led to a Kerrang review that stated that 'the best band in London is actually from Birmingham'. And it's fair to say that England's second city (Mancunians will debate that one!) was arguably producing the better bands - along with Suicide Blonde there was Gunfire Dance, who never got close to the success they deserved, Dave Kusworth and Nikki Sudden (in both their solo guises, Kusworth's Bounty Hunters and together as the Jacobites).

I also stumbled across some great You Tube links from this era, including the band that spawned Suicide Blonde (Hollywood Refugees) and also the Subterranaen Hawks (an early Kusworth outfit along with Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy and performing 'Big Store', later re-recorded by the Jacobites on Robespierre's Velvet Basement). Each clip also has some notes on the bands - well worth checking out.

Previous posts:
Jacobites - Robespierre's Velvet Basement
Suddenly Dead - Nikki Sudden movie
Gunfire Dance
Interview with Ozzie from Gunfire Dance 

Interview with Ozzie from Gunfire Dance

Just picked up this interview from Sugarbuzz. To be honest it's not the most insightful of interviews but Gunfire Dance features are so few and far between that anything is noteworthy!

From a quick trawl of the Sugarbuzz site I've also found a piece on old friends and ex-bandmates of mine , the 2 Sick Monkeys. Go on, have a read ....

The top 10 pages on Glamrock Aftershock

A check on the Google Analytics stats for this site over the last three months threw up some notable trends. Naturally I'd expect the homepage to be at the top, and it's not a massive surprise to see bands with the stature of the New York Dolls and the Manic Street Preachers taking positions 2 & 3. I'd like to say that The Rockit Dolls are at number 4 on merit but I know full well that the majority of that page's hits came via a posting on the Swindon Music Forum. Still, I'll take a number 4 placing any day.

Numbers 5 to 8 however are what really caught my eye. None of Gunfire Dance, The Last Of The Teenage Idols, Soho Roses or Uncle Sam are household names. In their time they managed five albums between them (three by Uncle Sam, one each by the Last of the Teenage Idols and Soho Roses) and four singles/EPs (two each by Gunfire Dance and Soho Roses), all of which were on small labels and/or self-financed and all long-deleted.

Over the last couple of years the collected recordings of Soho Roses and Gunfire Dance have been reissued and MySpace has also helped bring their music back into the public arena.

Their high positions will have been helped by the comparatively small pool of sites available to anyone searching for them; but it's heartening to see that people ARE searching. I suspect most of these readers are of a certain age (i.e. roughly the same as me), have warm, possibly rose-tinted, memories of these bands (ditto) and probably feel that their equivalents today don't come close to matching them (double ditto).

Gunfire Dance

In some ways I don't think Gunfire Dance did themselves any favours. I first saw them in the Shrapnel pages of Kerrang!, with tousled black hair and polka dot shirts; shortly after a live review in the same magazine referred to one of their early songs, 'Give Me Back My Heart' as 'sounding like Tyla had sold them it for a packet of fags'.

In truth Gunfire Dance didn't wholly belong on that scene. They were coming from the Iggy/Lords angle (and yes, soooooo many Shrapnel ads used to say that but most of these bands, to steal Paul Blitz's quote about bands claiming to be 'punk', tended to just be bad metal), with a touch of the US 60's psychedelic scene thrown in for good measure.

Gunfire Dance had talent in abundance. Every member of the band could genuinely play (or in Ant's case, sing). They didn't need a pointy pink guitar to get themselves noticed, but things just didn't go their way. They had a publishing deal with Island in the early 90s. Brian James and Rat Scabies took production duties on a cracking 5-track demo in 1992. Jeff Dahl then released a single from that demo on his Ultra label. But a full deal never materialised, they lost their guitarist and continued for a while as Steppin' Razors but eventually knocked it on the head.

Archway Of Thorns is a collection of their studio recordings and its release was in the pipeline when, after a couple of storming reunion shows in 2005, Ant took his own life.

If I could have been in any band in the 90s it would have been Gunfire Dance. That said, they would have laughed me out of the room (I'm not the most talented of guitarists ....).

NB: multiple copies on eBay at the moment for just £3.99: click - Archway Of Thorns.