ANDY TAYLOR "Thunder" (1987)
by Dana Brittingham

Booklet: 3 Unions Of The Snake out of 10
It isn’t too much, but this came out at a time when compact discs were a relatively new fad and record companies weren’t putting all that much effort into packaging. Except for the longbox… CDs came enclosed in a “longbox” type of packaging that usually tore when you opened it to get the CD out, and ended up throwing the remnants of the longbox away. People were pretty wasteful back then, but it was the 80s, so it was OK to not be environmentally conscious.

Songs: 3 Girls On Film out of 10
“I Might Lie,” the album’s opener, is a decent rock tune, even if the guitar riff is a little reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” But from track two onward, the songs take a definite nosedive and never quite come back up. A song called “Bringin’ Me Down” isn’t too bad, but the rest of these songs are basically crap. Andy’s got an OK-singing voice, and his rhythm guitar work isn’t bad at all, but he doesn’t really show any prowess when it comes to playing flashy leads: he’s a little heavy on the whammy bar and his solos aren’t very technical. Definitely is a letdown from what you’d expect if you just heard the opening track (or if, like me, you saw the video for it and were expecting a killer rock album).

Comments: You’re probably sitting there going, “Wh-wh-what? Isn’t Andy Taylor one of those pretty boy Brit pop guys from Duran Duran?” Why, yes he is. “Why the fuck is Sludge reviewing a Duran Duran CD?” Well, it’s not a Duran Duran CD. It’s the first solo CD by Duran Duran’s guitarist Andy Taylor, who split the band in 1985 to form the Power Station with D2 cohort John Taylor, along with singer Robert Palmer and some other guy. The Power Station had much more of a ‘rock’ vibe than anything Duran Duran had done, covering the T-Rex hard rock classic “Bang A Gong” and releasing a few of their own tunes as singles to both commercial and critical fanfare. After the Power Station threw in the towel and Robert Palmer rejuvenated his solo career around ‘87, Andy Taylor set forth to further shred his ‘pretty boy’ image and did his best to become a true rocker. He enlisted the help of Sex Pistols guitar slinger Steve Jones and proceeded to dive headfirst into recording a ‘real’ rock album. Sporting leather and long, permed heavy metal hair, he had the look down, but not necessarily the right musical direction to fit in with the late 80s rock scene. Thunder pretty much went right down the drain and into the cut-out bins. He has since recorded more solo work, most notably 1990’s Dangerous - an album of Montrose, Bad Company, and other cover versions of 70s rock classics. Of course, he’s now back on tour with the reunited Duran Duran, playing shit like “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Notorious,” “Rio” and the other songs that first made him famous. So while Andy Taylor’s experimentation with hard rock is mostly forgettable, his other contributions to the hard rock world are many: after dabbling with a solo career, he turned his sights to production, working with such melodic metal acts from the UK like Thunder, The Almighty, and the American hard rock band Skin & Bones. See? Andy Taylor’s got a little bit of metal in him after all.