Pete Kircher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Kircher (born 21 January 1945, Folkestone, Kent), is an English rock/pop drummer.
He played between 1981 and 1985 in the rock band Status Quo. Highlights of this period included playing at Live Aid and meeting HRH The Prince of Wales at a benefit gig for The Prince's Trust at the Birmingham NEC, an event preserved on the 1982 album Live at the N.E.C.
Kircher's style is very rhythmic, and he has a very distinctive snare drum sound which could be considered his signature trait. He was also a talented vocalist, though his excursions into singing on record are few.
In the early 1960s he toured Germany doing club gigs as the drummer for The Burnettes, a band featuring Neil Landon as singer and Noel Redding playing guitar.
His earliest documented recordings are with Noel Redding, who later played bass with Jimi Hendrix. More session work followed, before Kircher was recruited in 1967 to join Honeybus, who, although often written off as one-hit wonders, produced a fine body of work, which culminated in a critically-acclaimed 1970 album, Story, released after the eventual dissolution of the band.
Less commercially successful work with Honeybus survives in the form of two albums, March Hare (credited to Colin Hare, bassist with Honeybus) and Into Your Ears, a solo album by Pete Dello, which were both released in 1971. Comparisons with Honeybus were inevitably drawn - the sessions bled into each other causing a reunion in all but name, and record company executives were so impressed by this new work that they commissioned an album, Recital. Only test pressings exist, as a change in management at the label aborted the planned release.
The next excursion for Kircher's drumming was as a member of Shanghai, where he joined Mick Green from Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. The band produced two albums, released in 1974 and 1976, when the band ended up supporting Status Quo on the Blue for You tour. This directly led to Kircher's induction into the group of session musicians for John Du Cann's Nothing Better album in 1977, which mixes the attitude of the Sex Pistols with the boogie sound of Quo. The sessions were, unsurprisingly, produced by Francis Rossi.
Following a stint in Liverpool Express, Kircher was invited in 1979 to join the Original Mirrors, a band featuring the Lightning Seeds' Ian Broudie on guitar. His time in this band took him up to 1981, when there was just enough time to contribute some drums to a Nolans Sisters single before the call came to join the Quo.
Aside from recording some tracks with Francis Rossi and Bernard Frost for their (unreleased) solo album Flying Debris in 1985, nothing much has been heard from Kircher, although Honeybus were briefly reunited for a Dutch TV show in 2003.
