Here's what Mick Wall writes in the official biography concerning the change Thunderstick/Doug Sampson:
But then, the one gig they played with Moore – at the Bridgehouse, in November 1977 – turned out to be such a disaster that Steve ended up scrapping the entire band. On guitar that night, they had installed another old mate of Den's called Terry Wrapram, who until then had been plying his trade in a local outfit called Hooker, and on drums, stepping in as an eleventh-hour replacement for Ron Matthews – who had decided to rebel no more and jacked it in just days before the gig – was one Barry Purkis, who would later find temporary fame as Thunderstick, the ludicrously masked drummer in fellow early-'80s rockers Samson. "I can't really remember exactly what happened with Ron," confesses Steve Harris. "It was, like, one minute he was there, the next he was gone. It was all to do with commitment, I think. The band was taking up more and more time and we were doing more and more of our own songs, and I think he just couldn't keep up, you know?
"So we tried Thunderstick for one gig. He was great in rehearsals, but when we played the Bridgehouse, he was completely out of it. He said he'd had a row with his missus or something. That was his excuse afterwards, anyway. He'd dropped a couple of downers or something like that and he was just terrible, all over the fucking place, and he did a drum-solo thing, and it was that bad. There was people talking all the way through it at the bar, 'cause the bar was literally right in front of him, and he stopped in the middle of the drum solo and he yelled, 'Stop talking, you cunts, and listen to the maestro!' We were so embarrassed. It was just a nightmare! I used to say Thunderstick did two gigs in one for us that night: his first and his last."
As chance would have it, watching in the audience that night was Doug Sampson. Currently occupying the drum stool in what he now describes as "a sort of Latin pop band" called Janski, he'd heard about Steve's new band and decided "to have a gander, 'cause they were becoming quite well known, locally, by then. They'd been off the road for a while, putting a new line-up together, and I decided to check them out. I'd seen them play a few times before, with the old drummer, Ron Rebel, usually playing the Cart and Horses, and it was definitely more my cup of tea than what I was playing with Janski, put it that way. I went to this gig at the Bridgehouse, and it was packed. They always drew a good crowd, right from the beginning. One of my main memories of that night, actually, is the guv'nor of the Bridgehouse telling me they' d broken the record for the amount of people they'd had in there. It was amazing, if you think about it. I mean, they didn't have any records out, they were completely unknown outside the East End, probably, yet they always had a few hundred people down at their gigs. It was very impressive, compared to what you usually saw down in places like that.
"And I remember Thunderstick wore this very heavy make-up, sort of like the full-face Kiss make-up type thing. And I remember the guitarist had like a black band of make-up across his eyes, kind of like a mask painted on. Denny was the singer, and they had keyboards. I didn't know him, and I didn't think it really suited the band, but it still sounded like Iron Maiden. With or without keyboards, you could still always hear what they had." Spotting Doug in the crowd afterwards, Steve got chatting and asked him what he was up to. When Doug revealed that he had begun playing again, in Janski, the invitation to "come down and have a jam" was swiftly issued. Doug admits that he was "well chuffed. I remember talking to Steve afterwards and he was saying, like, he wasn't all that happy with the way the keyboards was working out, and he wasn't too happy with the drumming that night, either. I don't think he had a problem with the image as much as the playing. He was just into making sure the band played his music the best it could be played, and I don't think either of us thought Thunderstick could do that then, really. So, when he asked me if I fancied auditioning for the band, I said yes straight away. I mean, I really fancied it."
