Pete Kircher

Peter Kircher (born 21 January1945, Folkestone, Kent), is an English rock/pop drummer.

He played between 1981 and 1985 in the rock band Status Quo. Highlights of this period included playing at Live Aid and meeting HRH The Prince of Wales at a benefit gig for The Prince's Trust at the Birmingham NEC, an event preserved on the 1982 album "Live at the N.E.C".

Kircher's style is very rhythmic, and he has a very distinctive snare drum sound which could be considered his signature trait. He has also shown himself to be a talented vocalist, though his excursions into singing on record are few.

In the early 1960s he toured Germany doing club gigs as the drummer for The Burnettes, a band featuring Neil Landon as singer and Noel Redding playing guitar.

His earliest documented recordings are with Noel Redding, who later played bass with Jimi Hendrix. More session work followed, before Kircher was recruited in April 1967 to join Honeybus, who, although often written off as one-hit wonders, produced a fine body of work, which culminated in a critically-acclaimed 1970 album, "Story", released after the eventual dissolution of the band.

Less commercially successful work with Honeybus survives in the form of two albums, "March Hare" (credited to Colin Hare, rhythm guitarist with Honeybus) and "Into Your Ears", a solo album by Pete Dello, which were both released in 1971. Comparisons with Honeybus were inevitably drawn; the sessions bled into each other causing a reunion in all but name, and record company executives were so impressed by this new work that they commissioned an album, "Recital" to be released under the Honeybus name. Only test pressings of this exist, as a change in management at the label aborted the planned release.

The next excursion for Kircher's drumming was as a member of Shanghai, where he joined Mick Green from Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. The band produced two albums, released in 1974 and 1976, when the band ended up supporting Status Quo on the "Blue for You" tour. This, in turn, directly led to Kircher's induction into the group of session musicians for John Du Cann's "Nothing Better" album in 1977, which mixes an energetic, raw sound comparable with the Sex Pistols with the boogie sound of Quo. The sessions were, unsurprisingly, produced by Quo's guitarist Francis Rossi.

Following a stint in Liverpool Express, Kircher was invited in 1979 to join the Original Mirrors, a band featuring the Lightning Seeds' Ian Broudie on guitar. His time in this band took him up to 1981, taking in a session playing drums on Nolans Sisters single 'Who's Gonna Rock You' before being invited to join the Quo following the resignation of John Coghlan.

Aside from recording some tracks with Francis Rossi and Bernard Frost for their unreleased solo album "Flying Debris" in 1985, nothing much has been heard from Kircher, although Honeybus were briefly reunited for a Dutch TV show in 2003. Kircher stated during an interview in this programme that he is now working as a signwriter, a profession he first started as a school-leaver.