Fact #165831

In 1986, with prog-rock as dead as the dodo, terminally unfashionable Cumbrian quartet It Bites rejoiced to see their second single, Calling All The Heroes, soar to No6 in the UK singles chart. The attendant debut album, The Big Lad In The Windmill, also did good business, but the seeds of the band’s inevitable demise were there from the start.

Robert Dalton (drums, It Bites) : Three of us - Richard, Frank and myself - had known each other since we were about five, at St Benedict’s Primary, in Egremont. Frank really started the band, about the age of fourteen, but from the beginning I remember Richard saying, “It’s not a case of whether Frank will leave, it’s a case of when.” He was volatile from the very first gigs we did.

Francis Dunnery (vocals/guitar/songwriting) : I was always very intelligent at school, always high up in class. But at fifteen I just thought, ‘Fuck this! I don’t wanna know about hills. I don’t wanna know about science. I just wanna play my guitar.’

John Beck (keyboards) : I was the last to join the band, but we all knew each other as teenagers. I remember us all being very surprised that we got compared to Yes and Genesis, because what we listened to was mostly punk bands. Maybe it was just that our level of playing was very high.

Francis Dunnery : We got blamed for this Genesis thing, which is rightly so, really, for the first two albums. I’m not a fool. I totally understand why people say It Bites are like Genesis or Yes. It’s obvious, blatantly obvious. But you gotta understand about that first album, I was a nineteen year old kid. Why can’t people just look at it and say,’He done well for a nineteen year old.’

Robert Dalton : But we were a real band, real friends, we all lived together and everything. Although Frank would come in with the songs, it was John who did the musical arrangements, and Richard had loads of ideas as well, so it was the combination of everybody that made it work.

Francis Dunnery : The second album … it went over the top, and we got into this thing of wanting to show everyone we could play, man, which I’m not particularly interested in now. It was just a phase. We go through phases.

John Beck : In about 1988, Frank devised a tapboard guitar which enabled you to play very fast runs, and he used it on some of our tracks, including Rose-marie on the second album, Once Around The World. There was a lot of interest in it at the time, but I don’t think it ever went into production.

Francis Dunnery : It’s a very rhythmic instrument. And you can always see exactly what you’re doing, you can work the patterns out. The things you do are totally different from what you can do on a guitar. You can hit two notes together at either end of the fretboard, you can stagger notes, like you’re playing a piano, and play ‘impossible’ scales.

Robert Dalton : As time went on, though, Frank wanted more and more control, and he particularly couldn’t work with John. He’d try and upstage him during the live shows. In fact, he gradually turned the acoustic section of our shows into his own solo spot, by eliminating us one by one.

Sometimes John used a portable hand-held keyboard on stage, which was difficult to hold, so it was difficult to play, but it looked good. Frank would deliberately play very fast guitar lines so that when John’s turn to play came, he would look stupid, as if he really couldn’t play very well at all. John mentioned it to him, but Frank would just play faster.

Richard Nolan : Then Frank met a girl, and he moved out to Los Angeles to live with her.

Robert Dalton : At the end of 1990, we flew out to LA to make the fourth album, and the day we arrived he told me he wanted to get John out of the group. I told him to sleep on it, and I thought we could work it out.

The next day I drove over to where he was staying with this girl, and he was demanding total control. He wanted to tell us exactly what to play, or he would leave.

John Beck : I think Frank wanted to go some kind of Dave Lee Roth route, which didn’t suit the rest of us. It has to be said though, that Frank wasn’t the only problem. We were very young, honest and naïve, and we got ripped off by some pretty ruthless managers. We went through several managers, in fact.

We stayed on for a while and auditioned some singers in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Richard Nolan : One of the guys who was flown out to LA to audition was David Banks from Mummy Calls. The strange thing was that, although David’s style didn’t work musically with us at the time, we became very good friends and kept in touch.

Robert Dalton : After the split, we all agreed not to use the name It Bites, so we got another singer, Lee Knott, and went on as Sister Sarah. I was actually offered the drum stool in Jethro Tull, but I turned it down to stay with the band. Lee didn’t really work out, so we continued as a three piece, called Violet Divine for a while.

John Beck : I switched to guitar for Violet Divine, which was a bit like a Radiohead kind of thing, lots of time changes, but we were also doing session work wherever we could to supplement the income.

Robert Dalton : In 1995, John and I toured the Far East with John Wetton. These days (Apr 2000), I live in New Malden, Surrey, and play gigs or sessions when they come up, but mostly I teach drums at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford. My son Joseph’s already playing drums.

Richard Nolan : I’m living in Clerkenwell now (Apr 2000) with John, and we have a band called Unicorn Jones, with David Banks on vocals. He hadn’t worked out with us when we auditioned him in Los Angeles at the end of It Bites, but now probably because we’ve evolved over the years, we work really well together.

In 1998, before we got Unicorn Jones together, John and I worked on album with a band called Monkey, which got lost in the shuffle when Island Records was taken over by Polygram.

John Beck : We’ve been lucky enough to get some regular sessions which pay the bills while we’re working on Unicorn Jones. Richard and I go out for six months of the year with the Alan Parsons Project, which gives us the rest of the year to work on our own thing. I’m back on keyboards again, but also doing loops and samples. It’s very different from It Bites. Dark pop. Music you can shag to, or so I’m told.

We’re managed by the same guy who manages Clannad, so we were able to record our first album out in Dublin, using their studios.
(Feature by Johnny Black, first published in Q magazine)