It Bites (‘Calling All The Heroes’ And ‘Cartoon Graveyard’)

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A collection of seven T-shirts featuring various motifs from their artwork over the years.

Will fit Teen, Young Adult and Adults.

All items are recolourable, but the logos aren’t.

Please also find a collection of eight poster pictures and six murals available as pictures for your Sims 3 game.

The poster pictures use a mesh with many thanks by Yarona at Sims Modeli and the wall sized murals use a mesh which comes once again with many thanks from Helen-Sims, so you do not need any stuff packs for this to work – it’s all base game friendly.

Download

To use, download, unzip, and drop the contained folder into your The Sims 3\mods\packages folder and they should show up.

Enjoy!

It Bites are one of the odder stories of pop music history, but what else could anyone expect from a band formed in Egremont, Cumbria: famous for the Crab Fair where the world ‘gurning’ championships are held for whoever can pull the ugliest face.

The band consisted of a hippy, a punk, a progressive rock fan and pretty boy guitar maestro Francis Dunnery who wanted to be mainstream pop stars. Despite their second single ‘Calling All The Heroes’ being a major hit in June 1986, they didn’t have strong enough follow up songs, and their punky-prog (or ‘pronk’) with 80s funk soup was too much for many to take.

Further singles like ‘Kiss Like Judas’ saw the band creep in a more hard rock direction, until by 1989’s album ‘Eat Me In St Louis’ they were the darlings of not only Kerrang! magazine but the rock section of ITV’s The Chart Show, the most important UK music show at that time.

The band also gained attention because of a musical instrument Francis Dunnery had invented called a Tapboard, made from strapping two stringed guitar necks together and ‘tapping’ the strings, producing a novel staccato medieval sound. The instrument was later adopted by some in the jazz-fusion enthusiast community.

But despite being a popular support act and the singles ‘Still Too Young To Remember’ and ‘Sister Sarah’ receiving heavy play on MTV, nowhere did these translate into record sales. The machismo element of the hard rock and prog rock fan world never ‘forgave’ them for ‘Calling All The Heroes’ – a ‘girls’ song, even though Dunnery was much in demand as a session musician for rock icons Yes and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin (Dunnery was later offered the post of replacing the departing Phil Collins in Genesis, only for Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks to change their minds).

Frustration at their inability to be accepted, in-fighting led to Dunnery going solo as well as becoming a farmer in the USA, and the band dissolved.

In 2003, the band tried to reform, but with Dunnery based in the USA and the others in Cumbria, it was little more than a hobby band. After three years of going nowhere, the others sacked Dunnery (much to their remaining fans dismay) and replaced him with John Mitchell – not only a diehard It Bites fan since childhood, but a multi-instrumentalist, record producer and sound engineer. This proved crucial in giving the band’s music a more solid structure.

(There was also some amusement at Mitchell’s similarity in looks to Jean Jacques Burnel, sparking mischievous music festival rumours it was the Stranglers lead singer under a pseudonym!)

The predictions that any lingering chance the band had of success vanished with sacking Dunnery were refuted in staggering fashion, as their new album ‘The Tall Ships’ (2010) made them the new toast of the prog-rock world that had disowned them two decades previously. The follow up ‘Map Of The Past’ (2012) became the first It Bites record to mainstream chart in the UK for 21 years and was pipped only by Rush’s ‘Clockwork Angels’ for Classic Rock‘s Prog Album Of The Year.

The single ‘Cartoon Graveyard’ from ‘Map Of The Past’ will be released on 9th December 2012.