Francis Dunnery - Musical Style

Musical Style

"When I heard John McLaughlin on fire, I wanted to be on fire like that. When I heard Allan Holdsworth, I could hear a different approach and wanted to know what he was doing. I once saw Shakti on a TV show in the ‘70s, and these guys played themselves into a fucking frenzy and the molecules were jumping around. It was always that kind of stuff that excited me about music... Later in It Bites, we were criticised for being virtuosos, but I was silly enough to think that I could change people’s opinions about musicianship. I thought I could get everyone to listen to Soft Machine, Yes, Focus and Pink Floyd. And I badmouthed bands like The Smiths, saying that they couldn’t play!"

Dunnery’s musical approach is diverse. While with It Bites, his songs mixed an outright love of varied pop music with a solid grounding in progressive rock and hard rock. His solo work has continued to express these influences but added further elements including soul, disco, folk music, blues, hip-hop beats, chamber pop and electronica. Most of his tours have been solo and acoustic-based, and this has increasingly influenced the sound of his albums.

His early musical influences were progressive rock (with Genesis being a particular inspiration) and jazz-rock fusion musicians including John McLaughlin, Soft Machine, Focus, Return to Forever and Jeff Beck.

During the late 1980s Dunnery acquired a reputation as an up-and-coming British guitar hero based on his aggressive and dramatic playing style (which merged diverse hard rock, pop and funk stylings with a fluid, spiralling hammer-on lead-guitar technique inspired by Allan Holdsworth). He has since criticised his lead guitar approach at that time as having been immature and has sometimes affectionately parodied it, most notably on his live album Hometown 2001. (He does, however, still occasionally use the style at various points on his later recordings.)

He has also mastered numerous other styles - including jazz, classical and country fingerpicking - to serve the arrangements for his songs.

As well as singing and playing guitar, Dunnery also plays drums, bass guitar, organ, various keyboards, percussion and the Tapboard (a guitar-related instrument which he co-invented in the late 1980s). He plays the majority of the instrumental parts on his records.