With his Maximum Chat tour set for June, Danny Bowes is throwing his soul open to the public for the first time since his troubles. MetalTalk found Danny looking very well. “I’ve been better,” he smiles, “but I’ve certainly been a lot worse, let’s put it that way.” In Part One of this interview, Danny looks back at the last three years.
In August 2022, there was a Thunder band party. “Several of us had reached their milestone age,” Danny Bowes told MetalTalk. “Originally, it was going to be in 2020, but COVID killed that. We tried to do it in ’21, and COVID killed it again. We finally got to do it in 2022. We had had a busy summer, but we were all really enjoying a bit of downtime, and looking forward to the party.
“We had all our friends and family there in a country club in Surrey. It was really, really, really good, from what I’m told anyway. I remember it was a really nice place.. But as the evening wore on, people thought that I was behaving very strangely. A bit like I was really drunk, slurring my words and staggering about a bit unsure on my feet.
“To be honest with you, I was at that point having a stroke.
“So nobody knew, they just assumed it was drink. It was a social evening. I was behaving a bit strangely. I forget what time it was; it was towards the end of the evening. I asked my wife if she would put me to bed because I didn’t feel very well.” 
Danny Bowes and his wife walked 5-6 minutes to the accommodation, with plenty of stairs to cover. “She got me back to the room, a lovely place. She says I got there really well. She was fiddling around with a door key to let us into the room. It was up two flights of stairs.
“She heard a noise and then looked round to see me falling backwards down the flight of stairs. I think it was fairly spectacular. I think my training as a stunt man obviously came in quite well, because I left the top step, and the first time my head hit the floor was on the bottom step. So that was like 12 stairs later, a concrete step. It was a bit of a horrible thud, she says.
“Basically, that was it. I caused myself a fairly horrendous head injury. They call it a traumatic brain injury. I recovered a bit and got up the stairs. My wife went for help, and then the next thing you know, we were very fortunate that two of our friends were at the party – one of them’s an ex-military policeman, trained in medical, and the other one was a nurse.
“Between the two of them, they kept me alive until the air ambulance arrived, who put me in a coma on the side of the road. They cut all my clothes off, and ruined my brand new shorts, and I’m fed up about that [smiles].
“The next thing you know, I was in Saint George’s in Tooting. They told my wife that she should say goodbye to me because they thought I was going to die. I proved them wrong, [laughs] I lived.
“That was the beginning of it. The next thing I knew, it was three weeks later. I woke up in a hospital, and I’d been moved. Then they told me what had gone on, and I had a long road ahead of me. The next thing you know, I fell out of bed ’cause I’ve got no balance. My balance was shot, gone completely as a result of what happened to me.
“They can’t tell me whether it was the stroke or the brain injury that has affected my balance, because unfortunately, the injury was directly behind where the stroke had occurred. So initially, they didn’t know I’d had a stroke. They just thought I was drunk and fell down the stairs. It was only afterwards that they discovered it.
“There begins a very long, boring, drawn-out tale of me trying to basically get back to health. It’s dull, but you know, it’s what it is. I can’t do anything about it.”
I remember talking to Ben Matthews after Thunder played Ramblin Man. He got past his cancer diagnosis, and the support through that experience was huge. Danny must have experienced exactly the same because of crowdfunding and everything else. The support of love that’s been poured out for him must have been quite overwhelming.
“I can’t tell you just how ridiculous it feels to be on the receiving end of that kind of outpouring of support,” Danny Bowes says. “It’s bizarre because when I was in hospital, the band and my wife said to me, you’re gonna need a lot of rehab. Perhaps we should do some kind of a crowdfunding thing.
“My initial reaction was to say no, because I’ve never really been very good at asking for help. I’ve always been very self-sufficient. Eventually, they persuaded me otherwise, and we basically announced something. Or they did, I’m too busy lying in bed, trying not to fall out.
“They estimated an amount of money they thought we would need, and the fans just went bonkers. I think within a day and a bit, they’d already exceeded that, and it ended up several times over. I have to say it’s been an absolute godsend because it enabled me to do things that I wouldn’t have got to do otherwise. It sped up my recovery, certainly in the early stages, many times over.
“It’s impossible to say how much and how grateful I am. I had been really, really careful about spending the money only in the ways that needed to be spent. I’ve always been really good with other people’s money, rubbish with mine, good with other peoples.
“I basically jumped all over this money, and I’d spent it in a really, really positive way. I came to the conclusion about 18 months afterwards that I needed to donate a really good chunk of money to the air ambulance. Because without them, I’d have died on the road.
“So I said to my wife and the band, has anybody got any objection to this? I think we’ve got more than enough money for me to do what I need to do going forwards. So why don’t we give some money to the air ambulance people, because they run on donations? They don’t get funded in any way, shape or form. It’s just ridiculous how brilliant a job they do.
“So that’s what we did. We didn’t want to make a big fuss. We just rang them up and sent them the money. Then they invited us down there last summer, and we made a film about that. We showed it on socials to show people that we had been. It was just eye-watering what brilliant work these people do, you know. It makes you feel very, very humble just to spend time in their company because they are unbelievable. So fantastic. So dedicated.”
It shows how you can start out as this little band, and you never know quite what’s gonna happen. But the amount of love for Thunder is incredible.
“I find it really difficult to comprehend,” Danny says. “We’ve always tried really hard to make good records. To make great live shows. Never taking the fans for granted. We’ve always worked on the assumption they’ve got loads of other things they could be spending their money on, so if they want to spend it on us, not only are we very grateful, we just want to make sure we’re worthy of it.
“So we’ve always done that, and those are the bits we take very, very seriously. The bits that we don’t take seriously are ourselves because we spend most of our time just laughing at each other, taking the mick. We are relentless in the way that we are as human beings.
“I think because we’re so normal, we’ve always done after-show meet and greets, we’ve met fans, we always wanna know what they think, good or bad. And fans always tell you, good or bad. It’s very sobering, and it keeps you grounded.
“I think that, plus the fact that we’ve always been very mindful of the fact that there’s a lot of competition out there, I think, has stood us in very good stead. If that means that we have earned a bunch of loyalty as a result of that, you know, good. That’s all I can say. I’m so grateful.”
With the recovery time, there must have been quite a lot of reflection on all the things Danny Bowes has done with Thunder and Terraplane [More on those soon]. Was there a sense of, if I don’t do anything more, I’ve got a hell of a lot of memories?
“I’ll be honest with you, those thoughts have gone through my mind,” Danny says. “Nobody can tell you how long it takes to recover from a brain injury. In fact, one of the consultants I spoke to said, well you can’t hurry a brain injury, can you? And he was right, you know.
“I thought at the beginning, I’m not having this. Mind over matter. It’s how I’ve lived my life. I will just work harder and everything will be OK. I was fully prepared to do that. I soon learned that it doesn’t matter with a brain injury, how much you want to do something, or how hard you try.
“Some days you can do it, some days you can’t. Some days, you can’t do it today, but you can do it tomorrow, and then the day after that, you can’t do it again. It’s not linear. It’s very frustrating. But it is what it is.
“I’m resigned to the fact that I’ve got to do everything I can do, and I will because I’m a bloody-minded soul, there’s no doubt about that. People have said it to me more than once over the last few years, and they’re absolutely right.
“Faced with a choice of giving in or fighting, I would always fight. So, I don’t know how long it’s gonna take. Doesn’t mean I have not had dark moments, cos I’ve had loads of them. But like you say, we’ve had a long career. No one expected it to last that long, and I’m gonna do my absolute level best to make sure that this isn’t the end of it.”
Danny Bowes brings his Maximum Chat Tour to eight shows in June 2025. A one-man show, Danny will share stories of his life both before and since he joined a band. There will be a Q&A section too. The tour starts in Cambridge.
It is sure to be an interesting evening. You imagine stories all the way from the toilet tours, through the shenanigans at the Marquee, through to headlining Wembley?
Danny Bowes says he will not disclose the plan for the shows.
“I’m not gonna tell you,” he says. “The reason I’m not gonna tell you is because I don’t know. I’m not joking, I don’t know. People keep asking me what’s the plan? What’s the skeleton? What’s the framework?
“I keep saying, I don’t know, I haven’t got one. I really have not thought about it beyond the need to do it. I said to the promoter at the beginning, I want to do this because I feel like I’ve spent all my adult life on stage.
“It’s pretty much where I come alive. The rest of the day might be rubbish, but if I can get a couple of hours where I’m shining brightly, and I can do that for a couple of weeks, I’ll take it.
“So what do you think? He said, What are you gonna do? I said, well, I’ll tell some stories. I had a very interesting childhood. Lots of stuff I’ve never spoken about, lots of things happened to me. What I’ve said so far is I wanna try and put as many of them in as I can.
“But I need to leave a lot of the blood out because I don’t wanna make anybody sick. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to do that and I’m going to tell stories about being in a band. Before and after, and you know, I’ll touch a little bit on my situation. But I don’t really want to talk about that. To be honest, I live it every day. I don’t wanna bore anybody else with it.”
In Part Two, Danny Bowes talks about the duo tours with Luke and Ben, Terraplane, Hammersmith, Donington and much more.
Tickets for Danny Bowes Maximum Chat are available from here.
