![]() ![]() The following year the group released another single featuring Peter Hook, a version of the Man Utd anthem We’ll Never Die, which must have had Ian Curtis, a City fan, spinning in his grave. Despite the slant of that article, Hanky Park’s LWTUA failed to trouble any charts. But we have put our own stamp on it, with a bit more guitar and less keyboard." “But, of course, we have used it… Hooky has given us his blessing to do it. "I just asked him to put his part down on the recording and said we wouldn't use it,” Davenport told the Manchester Evening News when the track was released. He’s also a mate of Peter Hook’s, hence the odd New Order support slot and Hooky’s appearance on this faithful runthrough of LWTUA. Lead singer James “Shinny” Davenport had been a rugby player, turning out for the Leeds Rhinos and Salford Reds, and professional boxer before turning to music. Hanky Park were a noughties indie group named after an area of Salford. This is from the Factory compilation album, 10 From 10, which featured ten covers by Manchester groups of songs originally made famous by other, better-known Manchester groups. The spidery guitar solos in the middle and end of the track are by John Mitchell, who’d replaced Dunnery in a reformed It Bites a couple of years earlier and remains a member of the group. Dunnery sings at the top of his register, disappearing into falsetto during the second verse. It’s a leisurely stroll through the song that possibly lingers unnecessarily on the choruses. ![]() There’s a Whole New World Out There features a handful of covers alongside reworkings of old solo/It Bites songs (although not The Hit) and a backing band tellingly named The New Progressives. LWTUA comes from his third album after returning to the fray in the 2000s. ![]() He moved to Vermont where he studied horse whispering, carpentry, astrology and Jungian psychology (so the old scattergun thing hadn’t entirely gone away). By the end of that decade, however, he’d tired of the music business. He pops up on 90s albums from Santana and Robert Plant as well as The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and almost became the lead singer of Genesis in 1996. ![]() Singer and guitarist Dunnery remained in the US where he pursued the classic post-group career, putting out sporadic unsuccessful solo albums, drinking too much, and making impressively eclectic guest appearances on other artists’ records. The scattergun approach couldn’t hold musical differences duly came knocking and the group split following a fractious US tour in 1990. A third album, with the winning title Eat Me in St Louis, housed ten hard rock numbers in a Roger Dean cover and sank without trace. An abridged version of that 14-minute epic, Once Around the World, didn’t bother the top 100. After their second single, Calling All the Heroes, crashed the Top Ten in the summer of 1986, subsequent releases only reached nos 54, 72 and 76 respectively. Too clever by half for the pop kids, too pretty and blonde for the musos, they found themselves marooned. It Bites arrived out of nowhere, looking like Duran Duran, with a hit song that could have been written by Big Country if it had a few more banks of guitars on it, and then released a second album with a 14-minute title track. It Bites were always a curious proposition: a prog band with catchy choruses, or a pop group with a weakness for tricky time signatures? Marillion, their closest contemporaries, managed to pull this trick off, Genesis sort of pulled it off in their mid-80s incarnation, even Yes had a crack at it (around the time they got the Buggles in) but those groups all had long-standing prog pedigree and mature, forgiving fan bases. ![]()
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