Gun were one of the UK’s top rock acts coming off the back of their 1994 album Swagger.

The album had cracked the Top 10, and handed them their biggest hit single to date (a cover of Word Up which peaked at #4 in the singles chart), so to say things were going rather well would be an understatement.

The band were reaping the rewards for years of hard work, having established their place at rock’s top table with two prior albums (1989’s Taking On The World, and 1992’s Gallus), which led to them touring the world in support of Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, and they famously received a glowing review from Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, who proudly wore their merchandise and told the rock press they’re his favourite band.

So fast-forward to 1997, and the release of 0141 632 6326…

Seriously, what the fuck happened?

In what has gone down as one of the biggest mis-steps in rock history, 0141 632 6326 (yes, that’s really the title!) ditches the traditional hard rock sound of Gun’s previous three LPs and batters the confused listener over the head with track-after-track of (gulp!) pop music.

Fans rejected the new sound outright, and Gun split just six months later.

The story of how it all unfolded has never been told… until now.

Speaking shortly before the album’s release in May 1997, singer Mark Rankin told The List:

Mark: “When you’ve made a rock record pretty much three times in a row, you get a little bit restricted in how you can do things.”

The frontman was hoping that a change of musical direction would expand their sound and enable them to pick up more fans along the way:

Mark: “Our music has always been fairly accessible, but the heaviness restricted us.

Although we’ve been successful as a Scottish rock band, looking at the full picture I’d say we’re not really household names yet. There’s still a fair number of people out there who have never heard a G.U.N. song and couldn’t tell you the name of a G.U.N. record.”

You’ll notice he refers to the band as G.U.N. This slight name change was made in order to distance the band from the 1996 Dunblane school shooting tragedy, and Rankin also believed it could be a useful way for the band to differentiate between their hard rock past and their pop future.

And what brought on this sudden need to update their sound?

Bass player Dante Gizzi, who was amazingly still only 23 at the time of their fourth LP, says music industry trends forced their hand:

Dante: “When bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam ushered in the grunge era it became difficult for groups with a more traditional rock sound to stay alive. It happened in America first, a couple of years before we released Swagger, and then it slowly began to trickle over to the UK.

I can use the Bon Jovi album Keep The Faith as an example; sure, they’re an absolutely massive band with an army of fans, but if you look at how this record performed during the grunge wave of 1992 and 1993 it shows how much of a tough time it was for rock music in general. The whole culture had shifted. There wasn’t a single band who managed to get through that time without having adapted their sound.”

So what direction did they want to go in?

Well, they originally wanted to drill deeper into the heavy funk rock which they explored on their smash hit single Word Up, as lead guitarist Giuliano Gizzi explains:

Jools: “If you listen to Word Up, that’s the sound we wanted to pursue on the next album. It’s still heavy rock, which we love, but it has pop elements to it. It’s like a rock song which you can dance to, because it’s got this great beat to it, and we wanted to see if we could create a whole album in that style.”

This could be seen as a sensible decision.

Gun had previously flirted with the idea of “rock music you can dance to” on a few of their earlier tracks from 1989’s Taking On The World (Shame On You, Money, Dance), and 1992’s Gallus (Money To Burn), and it was something they were pretty good at.

And one of the tracks on Swagger (Something Worthwhile) even plays with a similar formula to that of Word Up, so when they landed such a monstrous hit it made sense to pursue that.

The band decided that if they were to make a whole album of this big, bombastic sound then they’d need to hire an experienced producer to help them perfect it, and that man turned out to be Andrew Farris. The record company (A&M Records) viewed this as a match made in heaven, considering that Farriss is best-known for his work with INXS, who weren’t a million miles away from the direction in which G.U.N. wanted to go.

Dante: “Yeah, we wanted to create an album that sounded something like (classic INXS albums) Kick or Listen Like Thieves, therefore having Andrew with us seemed like a great idea.”

Obviously, we now know that it didn’t go to plan.

Dante explains that things didn’t get off to a great start with Farriss due to his unenthusiastic reaction to hearing their ideas for the album, expressing his desire to explore a new musical direction and encouraging the band to do the same.

And to the surprise of his bandmates, frontman Mark Rankin, reportedly awestruck at having one of his idols in the producers chair, agreed that a drastic change of direction was necessary – even though what Gun had been doing so far had clearly been working for them.

Dante: “Maybe if Andrew Farriss hadn’t been such a difficult man to work with… (laughs).

Honestly, we hired him to produce our new album because he had prior experience doing the type of thing we wanted to make. Unfortunately, even though he’d written most of the songs on Kick, he didn’t want to produce anything with a similar feel because he didn’t want to recreate anything like what he’d done before.

This led to some difficult times. We’d take him songs which we felt were some of the best we’d ever written, and he just wanted to pull it apart and change everything about it. It didn’t feel right to us.”

As the band’s rhythm section grew tired of trying to keep their high profile producer fully engaged in the project, the band found themselves being steered away from their original concept for 0141 632 6326, eventually leading to a power play by Farris and Rankin.

As Jools explains, that’s when the cracks really started to show.

Jools: “I remember standing outside of our recording studio and telling the guys that I wasn’t enjoying this process. It didn’t feel like Gun at all, and I wanted us to go back to making a rock record. Tensions were very high, but both Mark and Andrew were so convinced about this new direction, that I backed down and persevered.”

Dante: “Yeah, it was a tough time. It was very challenging working with Andrew, and dare I say even Mark. When you add the pressure from the management and record label to produce another album as which could be as big as the last one, we had a lot on our minds to try and work through.”

So why did the band continue to push on when they felt it wasn’t working?

Dante: “At that time we’d already spent a lot of money in the studio and on working with Andrew, so we didn’t feel like we could just back out. I remember standing in The Manor, which is this big residential studio down in London, and Jools and I decided we’d had enough. We wanted to go back to Glasgow. When we expressed our concerns, the management team, the record label and Mark all wanted to stay with the project, so we carried on.”

His elder brother disagrees.

Jools: “There were concerns that we’d spent too much money to back out, but I don’t think we had. If I could change one thing about that whole experience, I’d go back and convince us to just pull out and make a proper Gun album.”

When the album came out it was met with a proverbial shitstorm from fans and critics alike.

Popular UK rock magazine Kerrang! declared, “It’s sad to hear this great rock band on their knees, alienating the fanbase who have supported them on their three previous efforts, begging for acceptance from a pop audience who couldn’t care less”, while Melodic Rock fumed, “The result of all this studio tinkering is a group of undoubtedly talented musicians who are being pulled in four or five different directions, none of which suit them.” You can read our scathing 1-star review here.

Crazy You was selected as the lead single. With its incredibly catchy hook, it represents the absolute best of what 0141 has to offer, but it peaked at #21 in the singles chart. That’s by no means a terrible placing, of course, but it shattered Farriss and Rankin’s belief that a radical change of sound was going to catapult the band to headier heights than they’ve ever seen before.

Fans were essentially voting with their feet, and when second single My Sweet Jane only scraped in at #51, the band knew it was all over.

Dante: “I feel like there were exceptions to the hate. I’m happy with Crazy You, for example.”

Jools: “And the final, it’s called Always Friends. When we went into the studio it was a bit heavier, and the album version is stripped to the bones but it’s the same chord structure. When the record first came out I hated this version of it, but over the years it’s grown on me, it’s a good song.”

Dante: “Apart from that, though, it just wasn’t up to the standard of what Jools and I wanted a Gun album to be. We were striving for this big bombastic rock record, and we honestly felt like Andrew was the best guy to help us make it because he was such a big part of the INXS writing team, but no, it didn’t work out.”

Dante goes on to explain how the commercial failure of 0141, coupled with the intra-band tension the process had created, ultimately led to the demise of Gun:

Dante: “Honestly, Jools and I just hated the record, and to make matters worse the fans also hated it. We kinda fell out with Mark over it, too, because Mark was… not siding with Andrew, but maybe sitting on the fence a wee bit when he was changing everything, and we felt a bit betrayed by that.”

Jools: “For me, I had a feeling that that album was going to be the end of the original line-up of Gun. It killed it. I hated making it, and I didn’t want to be involved in that whole campaign. It felt like we’d changed our style completely from black to white, and I don’t know why we did, because we were coming off the back of a really heavy record which was successful.”

The lead guitarist makes a good point here.

Sure, the ever-changing rock landscape had forced many bands to change their style in order to survive (e.g. the emergence of grunge), but that was never really the case with Gun. Having burst onto the scene in the late 1980s in the midst of the hair metal craze, their unique brand of grounded hard rock was never really in style to begin with – yet they thrived due to the reputation they had carved out as a great live act, and the quality of their first three studio albums.

So maybe, just maybe, they didn’t need to change a damn thing.

It’s something which Gizzi is convinced about. He states that the original demo versions of 0141 632 6326 were much heavier, in keeping with the sound they displayed on previous album Swagger (1994), but most of this was ripped apart when they got into the studio.

Jools: “Yeah, the original demo versions for 0141 632 6326 had us sounding as we did on the Swagger album. They were rocking. Changing our sound was a big mistake as far as I was concerned, and I felt that way all the way through making it. It was no surprise to me that fans felt that way when they heard the finished product.”

Unfortunately, nobody outside of the band has heard the heavier takes from the demo sessions, so it’s impossible to say whether it would’ve resulted in a superior album. There are several moments throughout 0141 where it just seems the source material isn’t as strong as their previous efforts.

Granted, this was likely down to the stress they were under when challenged to change everything about their sound yet still deliver another hit.

Gizzi states that the demos are locked away on a hard drive somewhere at the record label, so unless they are able to somehow unearth them, or maybe even re-record the album the way they intended it to sound (something which Jools has indicated he’d like to do) then I guess it’s something which we’ll never know.

But perhaps the real legacy of 0141 632 6326 isn’t about whether the original format would’ve sounded better, but that it played a huge role in getting us new Gun music.

Dante: “Yes, one of the reasons we decided to come back is because we never got to opportunity produce the sound we wanted on that fourth album.

We really didn’t want to leave it the way things were, with that album being the last thing we ever made – we hated it, Jools and I couldn’t stand it.

So when we made the first new album (2012’s Break The Silence) we did it our way. We kept full control of the material, and we were adamant to not allow anything bad to happen during the recording process again!

We were absolutely thrilled when the fans liked it, because we feel we’ve still got a lot to offer and their love for that album was like confirmation that we were right to put 0141 behind us and give it another go.

So I guess, sure 0141 was a bad experience for us, but it has led us to this point right now, so I’m still grateful for it. I mean, we’ve got another chance to make new music again because of it. This time around I feel more aware, more confident, and more comfortable in the business, and I’m so, so proud of the albums which we have put out since deciding to get back together.”

And rightly so.

Since bouncing back in 2012 (with ex-bassist Dante Gizzi replacing Rankin on vocals) Gun (no longer called G.U.N., thank fuck) have managed to go from strength-to-strength, racking up a string of top quality albums which can stand proudly alongside anything from those first three LPs (Break The Silence, Frantic, Favourite Pleasures, The Calton Songs, and Hombres).

So there you have it, that’s the true story behind 0141 632 6326; the album which took a band at the height of their fame, broke them up, but also prepared them for their long-term future.