Terrorvision: 'We didn’t aim to be commercial therefore we didn’t really follow the rules'

Wright says his only ambitions when he formed the band, first known at Spoilt Bratz, with guitarist Mark Yates, bassist Leigh Marklew and drummer David Shuttleworth in 1987, were to “go and play and enjoy life”.

“As any young fella or young lass who plays music, you think ‘one day we might get a record deal’, but we never thought it was a thing that would happen until we got a bit of interest in a demo from Chrysalis Records,” he says. “Shutty, the drummer, used to pretend he was called Dave Scott and he was Spoilt Bratz’s manager, he used to answer his phone at home in a cockney accent so people would take him seriously.”

A commitment to steadfastly doing their “own thing” made them stand out from an early stage, but it also made them hard to pigeonhole.

Wright recalls: “When we got signed we made an album called Formaldehyde and I really love it, it’s heavy and it’s raw, and then we worked with Gil Norton on How To Make Friends and we were excited because it was our second album, we recorded it in New York at Tom Verlaine’s studio and we were living at the Chelsea Hotel – for four lads from Bradford it was exciting.

“That record went on to do really well but it was always like a sanitised version because they got Gil to make something that was radio-friendly, and then we did Regular Urban Survivors with him as well, which was pretty much a run-on from that album. But three albums in, if you’ve had a few gold discs and stuff like that, we were at a point where we could experiment a bit more and take it out of the comfort zone which we did with Shaving Peaches. It was a bit disjointed but it had that excitement because it was different.”

Although a Mint Royale remix of Tequila gifted them their biggest UK hit in 1999, reaching number two, Terrorvision “fell out” with EMI soon afterwards. “A company is a company, it’s the people inside it that make the difference,” Wright says. “Our A&R guy left. We had pretty much independent press anyway (on their Total Vegas imprint). When EMI signed us, they asked us what we wanted and we said we didn’t want to be on EMI. If you looked at the rock bands that they had at the time, it felt a bit old hat, a bit regurgitated, a bit older and a bit uglier. If you’re going to do someone else’s tunes you’ve got to be younger and a bit better looking. These rock bands were an embarrassment… We didn’t aim to be commercial therefore we didn’t really follow the rules.”

They tried the independent route with their fifth album, Good To Go, but exhausted after 15 years on the road, they split up in 2001. A decade later, they surprised fans by reuniting for a sixth album, Super Deluxe, and have toured occasionally since.

Wright explains: “We started rehearsing to do some touring in about 2010 and leading up to that we realised we hadn’t done owt for years and then you start rehearing and it’s like muscle memory, you actually remember the majority of what you do...and the people would go, ‘Actually, I’ve got a bit of a riff that I’ve been working on’ and someone else would say, ‘I’ve got a melody that might fit that’ and we ended up writing an album.”

Twelve years on from Super Deluxe, they’re working on a new record, to be released in 2024. “We started rehearsing for the Greatest Hits tour and we just started putting (songs) together, it was something to do in rehearsals and they sounded all right so (we though) ‘let’s demo some of them’. Before you know it, we’re recording an album. It’s just being mixed at the moment. In 2024 we’ll do a bigger tour and put out a new record, and it’s because we had songs, not because someone told us we needed to put a record out.”

Terrorvision play at St George’s Hall on Friday November 3. https://www.facebook.com/terrorvisionofficial