| Francis Dunnery | |
|---|---|
| Background information | |
| Born | 25 December 1962 |
| Origin | Egremont, Cumberland, England, UK |
| Genres | Rock, Soft Rock, Acoustic Rock, Progressive rock |
| Occupations | Musician, Record Producer |
| Instruments | vocals, guitar, drums, keyboards, tapboard |
| Years active | 1984–present |
| Labels | Aquarian Nation |
| Associated acts | It Bites, Robert Plant, The Syn, Ian Brown, Chris Difford, David Sancious, James Sonefeld |
| Website | Francis Dunnery's official webpage |
Francis Dunnery (born 25 December 1962[1]) is an English musician, singer-songwriter, record producer and record label owner. He is best known as a solo performer (since 1990), and for fronting the original lineup of the band It Bites between 1982 and 1990 (including co-writing and singing their #6 UK hit single, "Calling All the Heroes", in 1986).
Dunnery served as a sideman and musical contributor for artists as diverse as Robert Plant, Ian Brown, Lauryn Hill, Santana and Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. He has worked as producer and/or collaborator with David Sancious, Chris Difford (of Squeeze), James Sonefeld (Hootie and the Blowfish), Erin Moran (better known as A Girl Called Eddy), Steven Harris (ex-The Cult, Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction), and Ashley Reaks (Younger Younger 28s, among others. Dunnery was a candidate invited to audition as a lead singer and frontman for Genesis following Phil Collins’ departure in 1996 (although the position ultimately went to Ray Wilson) and was a member of the reformed 1960s beat/prog band The Syn between 2008 and mid-2009. Dunnery owns and runs his own Aquarian Nation record label.
"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)[3] and jazz-rock fusion musicians including John McLaughlin, Soft Machine, Focus, Return to Forever and Jeff Beck.[2]
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[2] 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.[4]
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.
A native of Egremont, Cumbria, England, Dunnery is the younger son of Charlie Dunnery (a former member of the Jimmy Shand band) and his wife, Kathleen.[5]
Francis Dunnery's elder brother was the late Barry "Baz" Dunnery, a highly-respected Cumbrian rock guitarist who would make a name for himself with heavy rock band Necromandus and subsequently Ozzy Osbourne's first post-Black Sabbath band (preceding the formation of the Randy Rhoads-led Blizzard of Oz band[6]) and the ELO-spinoff Violinski. Dunnery has claimed Baz was his biggest musical influence,[7] and that the brothers remained close until Baz's death in June 2008. Baz joined his brother on stage several times during Francis's solo career, and was credited by Francis with coming up with the riff for the song "Riding On The Back".
Dunnery's other sibling, his sister Faye, is married to music producer Dave McCracken (Ian Brown, Depeche Mode and others). McCracken has gone on record as saying that Dunnery taught him “everything I know” [8] and has collaborated with his brother-in-law, most notably on Dunnery's Man album, and on Ian Brown's Music of the Spheres. Dunnery's nephew, John Dunnery (son of Barry Dunnery, and currently half of the folk-rock duo John & Wayne), has contributed to his uncle's live concerts and recordings.
Francis Dunnery has three daughters. He married American singer Julie Daniels on December 8, 1990 in Las Vegas, Nevada,[9] when he was fronting the rock band Star 69. The marriage ended in divorce.
Dunnery's childhood was blighted by his parent’s alcoholism: he once described them as “binge drinkers, two weeks on and two months off.”[3] In later years, Dunnery would himself succumb to heavy drinking and eventual alcoholism. He overcame his addiction in the early 1990s, but many of his songs would reference his struggles with alcoholism and the behaviour that surrounded it.
“Once my Mam and Dad started drinking alcohol I never knew what was going to happen. Everything seems to happen fast. One minute it was paradise and the next minute it was sheer hell. It was horrific.... Anyone who has lived under this nervousness will know exactly what I mean. I lived under this constant threat all my life... There was no one I could rely on. Even at eleven years old I was living on a trailer park by myself for four days a week. Going to school through the day and playing drums at a cabaret club at night. I 'somehow' made sure that I had other places to live and spend my time (talk about the power of the human spirit) because I couldn't bear to be at home when my parents were drinking. I can still remember the smell of the house when my parents were drowning in hops. To this day the smell of Carlsberg Special Brew makes me want to vomit.”
Dunnery grew up at 28 Queens Drive on the Gulley Flatts estate in Egremont and has expressed mixed memories of his childhood. He remembers his family home as having been like “a bustling cafe” full of musicians and family friends of all generations, and recalls “my Mam and Dad were the greatest. They were kind, funny and gracious in a working class way. They were giving people. They had a way about them that made everyone feel welcome in our home... My Mam and Dad would feed them great food, share cigarettes and partake in humorous and interesting conversation.”[3] Dunnery displayed an interest in music from an early age, showing promise as an embryonic drummer, with his mother later recalling that "he was always drumming with his hands. Asking him what he wanted for his tea, he'd be drumming on something the whole time."[10]
Forced to escape from his chaotic family life, Dunnery bolstered his independence and living expenses by work as a musician. Initially working as a self-taught drummer, Dunnery began his musical career at the age of 11 as half of a duo with organist and singer Peter Lockhart which played local venues including the Tarnside Caravan Club and various cabaret venues.
“The only thing that was ever permanent in my life was my Genesis collection. When things got weird at home and the alcohol cycle was in full rotation, I could return to that little piece of upper class England where Peter Gabriel and his boys were playing croquet on the lawn, eating cucumber sandwiches and deciding which one of their country cottages they would visit next. Still to this day, old Peter can soothe my anxiety faster than Eckhart Tolle... My Genesis albums were my security. In my ever changing world I could always rely on them being there, they were always the same, they never once let me down. In a car or on a cheap Alba stereo they always sounded the same. On a cassette or on vinyl they sounded the same, they were always there waiting for me.....they were my security. Those albums could sooth my troubles away and when times were hard they could nurture that young boy that I was and still am.”
Dunnery recalls that "we were the cute little duo that would open up for the main act... I would just bash along as Peter sang Elvis songs and played the organ.”[3][7] Adding guitar and singing to his musical skills, Dunnery moved on to other projects of varying levels of commitment - “ I played in a few local bands and with lots of different musicians, especially a group called Waving at Trains I was in with Don McKay, who is a fantastic musician. He wrote some really good songs, too.”[7]
Dunnery formed It Bites in 1982 (taking the role of lead singer and guitarist). The other members of the band were his Egremont schoolfriends Bob Dalton (drums, vocals) and Dick Nolan (bass, vocals) plus John Beck (keyboards, vocals) who came from Mirehouse; a suburb of Whitehaven. Following a career playing the pub and youth club circuit the band temporarily split, with Dunnery moving to London. The band reformed some time later and left Egremont entirely to relocate to London in 1984, eventually signing a record contract with Virgin Records.
Playing an unfashionable but energetic blend of progressive rock, hard rock and pure pop, It Bites released three studio albums, The Big Lad in the Windmill (1986), Once Around the World (1988) and the critically acclaimed Eat Me in St Louis (1989). It Bites' biggest hit single was "Calling All The Heroes" in 1986, which reached #6 in the UK Singles Chart. During their lifetime, It Bites became a successful band (able to fill the Hammersmith Odeon in London and undertaking tours with The Beach Boys and Jethro Tull).
It Bites split up in 1990 in Los Angeles on the eve of recording their fourth studio album. Various factors were cited in the break-up, which Dunnery recalls as being a case of the fact that "the band had come to the end. It was a natural process. We fell out over a few things, there wasn’t one big issue or problem, it was daft little things. We had just drifted apart. It wasn't anyone's fault, but we split.."[7]
Following Dunnery's departure, It Bites briefly continued with a new frontman (Lee Knott) and a succession of new names (Navajo Kiss, Sister Sarah) but split up after failing to sign a new recording deal. A post-breakup It Bites live album (drawn mainly from 1989 concerts and called Thank You and Goodnight) was released in 1991. In 2004, the original It Bites lineup briefly reunited on stage (playing two songs) as the finale to a Dunnery live concert at the Union Chapel, Islington, London on 30 August 2003. A full reunion was attempted, but eventually foundered in 2006 with no further recordings and concerts. Parting company with Dunnery again, the remaining members of It Bites retained the band name and continued with a new frontman, John Mitchell.
"The last night I drank I had a gun put to my head and I was smoking crack on Hollywood Boulevard, out of my brains on whiskey, crack and crystal meth. It scared the living shit out of me. That was the moment in my life where I went, 'Something's gotta change.' Up until then, I was so sick and didn't even know I was sick... I realized that the alcohol and the drugs were just a symptom. The symptom became a problem, absolutely, but it was still just a symptom. I had to get rid of the symptom to get to the real stuff, which is really a spiritual sickness. They call alcohol 'soul murder,' and that's what it is. I've learned some incredible things, and I've been walking forward ever since."
Following the 1990 breakup of It Bites, Dunnery settled in Los Angeles for what he has subsequently admitted was a disastrous period of sex, drugs, alcohol and the rock’n’roll lifestyle.[2][7][11]
During this period he recorded his first solo album, Welcome to the Wild Country, which was released on Virgin Records in 1991. Produced by David Hentschel (Genesis, Elton John) this was a much more rough-and-ready album than the heavily-engineered and technically fastidious It Bites records, consisting mostly of hard rock songs performed by a power trio (although the record did also contain an extended blues-jam song and a keyboard-heavy ballad called "Jackal in Your Mind"). The record enjoyed little success, being released only in Japan. (He regained the rights to it in 2001, re-issuing it on Aquarian Nation Records.[12]) He has since described Welcome to the Wild Country as “having been recorded at a time when I didn’t know who I was” although he disinterred the album and its songs for a tour over ten years later. Towards the end of his time in Los Angeles, Dunnery addressed his drugs and alcohol problems and cleaned up his lifestyle. He has subsequently been open about his problems with alcohol addiction and drug abuse during this period, and a number of his songs refer to the effects that these experiences have had on his life.
In 1993 Dunnery returned to the UK and took up the position of guitarist in former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant’s live band. He performed on several tracks on Plant’s 1993 album Fate of Nations and played on the accompanying world tour, acting as Plant’s main onstage foil. Plant made a guest appearance on Dunnery’s second solo album, Fearless, which was released on Atlantic Records in 1994. This performed considerably better than its predecessor, and showed a much broader range of styles. "American Life in the Summertime", the lead single from the album, received considerable airplay in the States.
Dunnery promoted Fearless with his first solo tour of the UK (an all-acoustic affair in small venues). The Glasgow date of the tour was recorded for a live album, One Night in Sauchiehall Street, which was released on the tiny Cottage Industry label in 1995. This album documented Dunnery's change to an acoustic approach, playing solo accompanied only by occasional second guitarist and harmony singer Ashley Reakes (later to briefly find success as the prime mover behind Younger Younger 28s). It was also the first evidence on record of Dunnery’s live approach as raconteur as well as musician (which incorporated a surprising degree of confessional story, philosophical musing and salty stand-up comedy).
By 1995, Dunnery had relocated yet again, this time to New York City. His third studio album - Tall Blonde Helicopter - was released on Atlantic that year, and abandoned the predominantly pop-oriented sound of Fearless in favor of an eclectic mixture of soft ballads and acoustic rockers. It also displayed a much greater confidence in songwriting.
"I try everything and the number of times I fail is unreal, but I never ever let it beat me and I try something else. People might look at me and say that I am successful, but that is just because I try so many different things. Someone once said to me that Americans are not Americans because they are born there, being an American is a state of mind. It is the need to expand and grow, to explore, basically a pioneering spirit... I think I have that, the American mindset.”
In 1996, Dunnery was approached to audition as lead singer for his old heroes Genesis, but ended up continuing with his existing solo career. Dissatisfied with Atlantic's promotion of his work (and beginning to suspect that he would need to take more responsibility for making things work in the future) Dunnery formed a power trio which played various dates in America. The sound of this band was captured on Dunnery's next album, 1998's Let's Go Do What Happens, which was released on Razor and Tie Records. The album featured rockier numbers and experimentation with more electronic sounds as well as a pronounced focus on more esoteric subjects including metaphysics and the Seth entity. Due to Razor and Tie’s limited resources, Let's Go Do What Happens was initially only released in the United States.
During this period, Dunnery played on Lauryn Hill’s acclaimed 1998 debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Carlos Santana’s 1999 comeback album Supernatural.
“I'm not an easy artist to like because I don't play the rock star role. People love their idols and I don't play that role, so it's a bit confusing for people to love my music and then find out I'm a horse trainer or whatever. It's a big mistake to limit yourself to one thing in life. I don't feel fulfilled by just doing music; I have other sides of my nature that I need to express. It's very damaging not to express yourself, so I like to keep my life full and diverse.”
Increasingly dissatisfied with the music industry, Dunnery went into semi-retirement as a musician later in 1998 and set up a new home in the Vermont mountains with his girlfriend.[14] He devoted the next few years to breeding and training horses (for which he studied under John Lyons, the notorious “horse whisperer”[7]) as well as carpentry, training as an astrologer and developing his interest in Jungian psychology (which he would later study to a Master’s degree level).[15] Dunnery’s second daughter, Ava, was born during this period.
Dunnery continued to write songs as and when the inspiration took him. He has sometime commented that his songwriting is a periodic activity, stating in a 2009 interview with the PhillyBurbs online newspaper: "I cannot write songs on a nine-to-five basis. At the risk of sounding pretentious, my songs come from somewhere else and I have to wait for them, so it's not up to me when I receive them. When the songs start to come, they all come at the same time. I may get 20 songs in three to four days and then it all stops again."[16][17]
In 2000, inspired by watching a televised Shakti concert (featuring his old hero John McLaughlin), Dunnery had a change of heart. He later admitted that he had "realised there was still a musician in me, and that I had to be as true to that side of my character as I was being to the other sides."[7] Dunnery decided to re-engage with the music business, although this time he decided to do it entirely on his own terms and to take as much responsibility for the outcome as he could. His first step was to refresh himself by returning to the UK for the first time in five years to play a few concerts, and his second step was to set up his own internet-based record label, Aquarian Nation, with the intention of releasing his future albums on it (as well as albums by other artists).[15]
For the UK tour, Dunnery formed a new backing band called The Grass Virgins, featuring second guitarist Dave Colquhoun, bass guitarist Matt Pegg, and singer/keyboard player Erin Moran. Surprised and gratified that he remained a live draw popular enough to sell out venues, Dunnery returned soon afterwards for a much larger tour and support slots with Hootie and the Blowfish. The Grass Virgins continued as his back-up band over the next few years, despite changes in the lineup (John Dunnery would replace Dave Colquhoun, John Williams and Wayne Wilkinson joined on keyboards and laptop respectively, and Dorie Jackson replaced Erin Moran once the latter had gone on launch her solo project A Girl Called Eddy).
The first Aquarian Nation release was Dunnery’s comeback album Man, released in 2001. Recorded in Vermont and Oswestry, UK, the album’s music developed some of the electronic aspects of Let’s Go Do What Happens (via keyboards and programming by Dunnery and his brother-in-law Dave McCracken but featured much more acoustic instrumentation (guitars and cellos), a strong vocal interplay between Dunnery and Moran, and pared-down percussion (with almost no drums and with the rhythmic drive provided primarily by Matt Pegg’s bass guitar). Man was also Dunnery’s most personal and direct album to date, heavily influenced by autobiographical and spiritual matters (in particular parenthood , manhood and reflections on finding a sense of home as well as featuring a strong element of Jungian psychology).[15]
Dunnery has since commented "I was very depressed when I wrote the Man CD. It was a difficult birth. I was going through such turmoil in my life. My mother was dying, my relationship was ending, and in complete contrast, my daughter Ava was being born. [But] I think I'm at peace with that side of my life now."[16] Despite the weight of the subject matter, Man proved to be one of his most successful and popular albums.
Dunnery toured the UK to promote Man, accompanied by Matt Pegg on bass guitar (with occasional guest appearances by other musicians). A live album - Hometown 2001 - was recorded 14 June 2001 at the Whitehaven Civic Hall in Cumbria and released around Christmas time the same year: it featured the Dunnery/Pegg duo plus a guest appearance from John Dunnery and Wayne Wilkinson.
During 2002, Dunnery was involved in the making of several albums released on Aquarian Nation. In addition to releasing Dunnery’s own records the label had been set up to release records by other musicians, pursuing a cooperative approach with a degree of profit share and with all Aquarian Nation musicians contributing to each other’s recordings.[15] The label had a mission statement to "help support and promote artistic integrity" and went on to sign up to an ongoing partnership with Flying Spot Entertainment for the creation of original film/video programming.
"I could lie and say it was incredible to be playing on the same stage as great artists etcetera, but in reality it was pretty uneventful; sandwiches, driving and half an hour onstage being ignored by two-thirds of the audience. Elvis (Costello), Jools (Holland) and Chris (Rea) are all very cool people but I only spent five minutes a day with them, talking about football and dolphins’ vulvas."
The first of these releases was Chris Difford (ex-Squeeze)’s I Didn't Get Where I Am. In keeping with the Aquarian Nation method, Dunnery played on the record, and also produced and co-wrote the material with Difford. which Dunnery also toured as part of Difford’s band to promote the album, playing on a tour with Chris Rea and Elvis Costello. The next Aquarian Nation releases developed the label’s tone as a platform for songs of a more personal nature. The first of these was Nearly Killed Keith (the debut album by John & Wayne, aka John Dunnery and Wayne Wilkinson from The Grass Virgins), a collection of folk-tinged songs drawn from the duo’s day-jobs as jobbing carpenters in the building industry. This was followed by Songs From the Mission of Hope, the debut album by Stephen Harris, a former hard rock bass guitarist who had previously been known as “Kid Chaos” (while with Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction and The Cult)) and as “Haggis” (while fronting his own band The Four Horsemen). In contrast to his past work, Harris wrote a quiet, mediative and predominantly acoustic album dealing with his own chequered history as an adoptee. Once again, Dunnery produced and co-wrote both albums (and played various instruments on them including keyboards, guitars and drums).
Dunnery’s next major British concert (at the Union Chapel, London, 2003) was in part a showcase for Aquarian Nation, featuring performances by Dunnery, Stephen Harris, John & Wayne (with Dorie Jackson), plus a guest appearance by Chris Difford. The concert finale was a two-song It Bites reunion, with Dunnery playing "Hunting the Whale" as a duet with John Beck and the whole band playing "Still Too Young to Remember". The event was recorded and released on DVD as Live at the Union Chapel (credited to Francis Dunnery & Friends) in 2004, with a wider release the following year.
By this time, Dunnery was based in Pennsylvania, dividing his time between studying for a psychology degree at Goddard University, session and production work and developing Aquarian Nation as a company. In newsletters, he promised that his next three projects would be a solo album, Dorie Jackson's debut album and new recordings with the reunited It Bites.
In 2005, Dunnery released the first of these, a solo double album called The Gulley Flats Boys. This was a more sedate and acoustic album than its predecessor - featuring next to no drum or percussion parts and sparse use of electric guitar, it was recorded by Dunnery with piano/keyboard player David Sancious and Dorie Jackson on backing vocals. While the album included a number of mellower remakes of previously released songs (such as "Heartache Reborn" and "Good Life") most of the subject matter continued in the autobiographical vein of Man - this time drawing strongly from Dunnery’s childhood on the Gulley Flatts estate in Egremont (down to featuring cover art composed of present-day photos of his childhood friends and schoolmates) and casting light on Dunnery’s thoughts and subconscious as he headed into middle age. Dunnery readily admitted that the album was the product of a mid-life crisis, but embraced the fact.
"(The house concerts) give the incredible feeling of being heard. I didn’t really understand the importance of that until I started doing them. For an artist — in fact, for every human being — it's an incredible and fabulous feeling to sense that someone really heard what you said or played... During the house concerts there's the intimacy of one man with an acoustic guitar, talking to people about philosophical things. You can’t really get into people’s souls like that if they’ve had a pint of beer and are standing screaming at a rock god. So what I do instead is simply play good music. I’m 46 years old and I can’t really get into the concept anymore of wanting people to like me. You have a good gig if your energy successfully pours off the stage and the energy of the audience pours back onto the stage, and you have that oneness in the room, with there being an exchange. But if the audience just sits there and they are not going to come on board and they are not going to contribute to the energy of the evening, there is nothing that I can do.”
In 2005, Dunnery embarked on a "house concert" world tour, suggesting to fans that they book him to perform in their own homes for a paying audience, in a drug and alcohol-free environment. The concept proved to be very popular, not least with Dunnery himself, who has described them as "phenomenally successful". Dunnery continues to perform house concerts to this day and describes a typical performance as "(showing up) as a friend — you can’t show up as a rock dude or something — and it’s just me and my acoustic guitar, no amplification, singing my songs and holding a 90-minute lecture on the human condition. I sing songs and tell stories of my life. It’s not a party; it’s more like going to church, but church with swearing!... (There is) an exchange of energy that I call a 'jacuzzi'. At the end of 90 minutes, everybody has dropped their ego. They don’t even realise that has happened, but they have gradually taken off their clothes and gone into that energetic jacuzzi together. Something like that is a lot harder to achieve in a rock music arena."[2]
In 2006, it was confirmed that the reunion of the original It Bites lineup had foundered and that Dunnery had been replaced by singer and guitarist John Mitchell (Frost*, Kino). In October 2007 Dunnery released a free download of a song called "Feels Like Summertime", which had initially been written for It Bites shortly before the band's original split in 1990 and was reworked as part of the unsuccessful 2003 reunion. Dunnery had rearranged and reworked the song for a third time (with new players), and made it available to promote a full-band "electric" tour which - although based mostly around his 1991 solo album Welcome To The Wild Country - featured several It Bites songs.
In 2008, Dunnery continued to perform numerous solo performances and house concerts, this time centered around material from Tall Blonde Helicopter. His summer and fall schedule included a full-band tour, culminating in a performance in Seattle which was recorded by Flying Spot, Inc. for subsequent release as a special edition concert/documentary DVD. (Originally scheduled for a 2009 release and titled Louder Than Usual, this was finally released in September 2010 as a DVD with accompanying CD) Earlier in the year, Dunnery released an "official video bootleg" DVD from the 2001 Man tour, titled In The Garden Of Mystic Lovers. That same year, Dunnery produced and played on Snowman Melting, the first solo album by James Sonefeld of Hootie and the Blowfish (another Aquarian Nation release).
In the same year, Dunnery joined singer Steve Nardelli’s revived 1960s progressive rock/beat band The Syn as guitarist, playing alongside Nardelli, keyboard player Tom Brislin and bass player Jamie Bishop as well as two members of American progressive rock band Echolyn (guitarist Brett Kull and drummer Paul Ramsey). Dunnery also brought in his backing vocal foil Dorie Jackson. He was musical director for the band’s 2009 album Big Sky. This line-up of The Syn began an American tour in April 2009 but broke up after six dates.
Dunnery announced the formation of his "New Progressives" project,[3] which had two stated aims - the first being to reclaim and rework the songs Dunnery had written with It Bites, and the second being to develop a new approach to progressive rock. The project was to feature a core band centred on Dunnery plus the involvement of various collaborators from various[19] periods of progressive rock history. The core band featured Dunnery on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards and tapboard and drew on the same lineup he had assembled for The Syn the previous year, minus Nardelli (Tom Brislin, Jamie Bishop, Dorie Jackson, Brett Kull and Paul Ramsey).
Dunnery's next album - There's A Whole New World Out There, released on 3 October 2009 - was centred around the New Progressives (plus guests) and featured a succession of reworking of old It Bites songs, plus a variety of similarly rearranged cover versions. The New Progressives toured the UK, American and Australia to promote the record, with guest appearances from other musicians where possible.
"You aren’t supposed to have all the answers when you’re 15 – that’s not what life is like. Life, to me, is about growth, it’s about where we begin and who we become, and to that end I think my music is very true to me, and to the mood that I am in when I am writing it. I’m not the most popular artist in the world, but I sing about real things, about issues that people, quite understandably, don’t want to deal with. People want to sing “We Are the Champions” or “I’m the Leader of the Gang I Am” – I certainly did when I was younger. But I think that is why I keep my fans without doing lots of publicity and promotion, because I sing about things that, if you get it, make a connection. People draw meaning from what I sing about, and that is powerful. It is a reflection of my soul, which I know isn’t to everyone’s taste but those that like it really like it.” (Francis Dunnery)[7]
In 2009, Jem Godfrey (Frost*) announced on the Frost* Forum that he and Dunnery had both contributed solos to the title track of Big Big Train's upcoming album, The Underfall Yard.[20]
In early 2010 it was announced that Dunnery would play guest guitar on one track on the forthcoming album by Bordeaux progressive rock band XII Alfonso, alongside other contributors including Mickey Simmonds (Fish, Camel, Mike Oldfield, Paul Young), John Hackett (Brother & Steve Hackett Band), John Helliwell (Supertramp), Ronnie Caryl & Amy Keys (Phil Collins Band), Raphael Ravenscroft (Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, ABBA, Gerry Rafferty) and Ian Bairnson & David Paton (Alan Parsons Project).
On August 12 2011, Dunnery announced the release of a new album called Made in Space and an accompanying "Astrology Theater Show " tour of the UK, which would feature himself and Dorie Jackson. He also announced that he would be recorded a cover version of Peter Gabriel's The Rhythm of the Heat as part of Sonic Elements, a new "fantasy rock" band put together by Dave Kerzner of Sonic Reality.
In 2002, Dunnery founded the Charlie and Kathleen Dunnery Children's Fund, a volunteer-run fundraising charity based in his hometown of Egremont, and named in honour of his late parents. Explaining his reasons for setting up the charity, Dunnery has said "My mother was a wonderful woman... so this is my way of honouring her and my dad. A line in one of my songs is that the only thing you get to keep is what you give away – I like that idea. I think that by the time you are 40 if you aren’t doing something to help others then you probably should be. People take all the time and I think it is nice to put something back."[7]
The fund raises money for projects and activities supporting the health, wellness and educational needs of children and young people in the Egremont area.[21] He continues to support the charity via regular concerts in Egremont as well as participation in and publicity for various sponsored events.[22][23]