Luke Morley

The Thunder guitarist on the band's future, his solo career and new album, playing with the Quireboys, songwriting...

- Philip Wilding

He might have officially reached retirement age and moved to the coast, but Luke Morley is far from done. While Thunder are on an enforced hiatus due to singer Danny Bowes recovering from a stroke, the guitarist has completed his third solo album, Walking On Water. Less Americana-like than his acclaimed previous release Tales From The Blue Room, it even includes one or two songs that wouldn’t sound out of place if they were played by his regular band. That’s if his Thunder gig becomes an option again. As well as being an accomplished songwriter and producer, he’s also proved himself as something of a singer on his latest album. Just don’t get him started on the silver suit he’s wearing on the cover, though.

I recall you feeling quite reticent to put your previous solo album out. How much did its success feed into the making of this one?

Quite a bit. The last one was really well received. More than I thought it would be, to be honest. I was expecting people to be saying: “You're a guitar player, should you really be singing?” I expected a lot more of that than I got.

Why Walking On Water? Has going solo given you a God complex?

Ha. It was a bit of the tail wagging the dog. The album photographer, Jason Joyce, said: “I’ve got this brilliant idea for a location for the next album. This platform on top of a mountain in Spain with this shallow body of water across it, and it casts this amazing reflection even though it’s only about five millimetres deep.” So I could walk across it and give the illusion that I was walking on water. I didn’t have a title for the record, either, so I thought: “I wonder if I can write a song called Walking On Water.”