Formed in 1982, the band comprised the punk pioneers Stiv Bators (The Dead Boys), Brian James (The Damned), Dave Tregunna (Sham 69) and Nick Turner (The Barracudas). Rat Scabies of The Damned drummed at the first concert of Lords of The New Church at Hammersmith Clarendon, before Nick Turner took over drumming duties. The band recorded three studio albums and one live album before Bators ended the band onstage after a concert on 2 May 1989, at the London Astoria. During this time, they underwent several line-up changes, with a second guitarist Alistair Ward joining and with Tregunna departing, to be briefly replaced by Grant Fleming, who had been road manager of Sham 69.
More melodic and slickly produced than most punk, their music both reached a broader audience than that of many bands in the genre and alienated hardcore punk fans. The band presented a stylized tribal identity around their appearance and their music that fans embraced: the writer Dave Thompson asserts this represented "the first time since the Sex Pistols' Bromley Contingent fanbase a band had succeeded in grafting its own identity onto its audience without first paying obeisance to the gods of highstreet fashion. Their stage antics became notorious early in their career, with Bators stunts on one occasion reportedly resulting in his clinical death for several minutes.
The band experienced moderate chart success, with their debut album peaking at #3 on the UK Indie Chart, 1984's Method to Our Madness hitting 156 in the US, and the 1985 Killer Lords compilation reaching #22 on the UK Indie Chart. Charting singles included "New Church" (#34 UK Indie), "Open Your Eyes" (#7 UK Indie; #27 Mainstream Rock) and a cover of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" (#22 UK Indie), but the success of "Dance With Me" - a song that according to Dave Thompson's Alternative Rock came "close to a hit" - was hampered when the video directed by Derek Jarman was pulled from MTV's rotation for concerns about child pornography. The song was later covered by Nouvelle Vague.
Bators died after being struck by a car in Paris in 1990.
The band was re-established in 2003 when vocalist Adam Becvare (The Lustkillers) joined original members James and Tregunna. This configuration of the band produced the album Hang On.
The Lords of the New Church were an English/American gothic rock supergroup with a line-up consisting of four musicians from 1970s punk bands. Launched in 1982, the band had moderate chart success prior to their dissolution in 1989.
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