Thrashing Doves

Thrashing Doves
Background information
Origin	London, UK
Genre	Alternative rock
Labels	A&M, Elektra Records
Years active	1984-1992
Past members	Ken Foreman Brian Foreman Ian Button Kevin Sargent Gail Ann Dorsey Hari Sajjan
Musicians

Thrashing Doves were a British London-based rock band. Their line-up consisted of Ken Foreman (vocals/guitar) with Brian Foreman (keyboards), Ian Button (guitar) and Kevin Sargent (drums). The original bass player was Hari Sajjan. Subsequent bass players were James Eller, Claire Kenny and Gail Ann Dorsey.

The band were a support act for Duran Duran in 1989.

Background information

Ken Foreman and his younger brother Brian had been playing in a variety of groups together since their early teens in the leafy South-East London suburb of Orpington, Kent. With locals Ian Button (bass) and Allan Fielder (drums) they toured the UK, opening shows for Pretenders and Boomtown Rats.

In the summer of 1984, with Richard Newman on drums and Hari Sajjan on bass, Ken and Brian began to pool their songwriting efforts. Ian switched to an amplified twelve-string guitar, Brian concentrating on the increasingly prominent synthesisers and sequencers. From a Kerouac poem with the image of captive birds in the back of a chinese grocery, Thrashing Doves were born.

In the absence of demos to play any potential producer, the band went into Rockfield Studios in Monmouth for two weeks in November 1985 to record songs with their live-sound engineer and tour manager Gary Walder. These were sufficient to attract the attention of producers Chris Thomas and Jimmy Iovine.

Thrashing Doves first single "Matchstick Flotilla" was released in 1986.

A coast-to-coast tour of the US and Canada started in Portland, Maine in Spring 1987 and gained the band both acclaim and notoriety.

The band released three albums, Bedrock Vice (1987), Trouble in the Home (1989) and Affinity (as The Doves 1991).