Barry Purkis a.k.a. Thunderstick is known as skinsman for Samson and Iron Maiden. Purkis:

"when I was nine I was collecting for a garage sale for my uncle and somebody threw out a pair of military drumsticks. In school I'd always been interested in music rather than football. So when people had gone out and played football, I was always listening to music and it was always kind of weird stuff, which my parents hated, which was great. The more they hated it, the more I thought "I'm on the right track". So anyway, the drumsticks got thrown out from this guy who said "yes, you can have it for the garage sale" but I kept hold of them and started to destroy all my parents furniture. So they bought me a drumkit. I couldn't stand still; I just kept on doing it all the time. So at the age of nine I got my first drumkit."

His main influences were Pierre Moerlen from Gong who went to Strasbourg to study drums, Guy Evans from Van der Graaf Generator, Ian Paice to a certain extent and also Prairie Prince from the Tubes.



The first band Barry Purkis had was Phalanx. They would play at schools and colleges and stuff like that, nothing big at all.



When Barry Purkis was 17, he left home and went to Sicily and moved in with a band that had been going since the 60s, a band called "The Primitives". It was a band that had done really well in the 60s and had huge hits in Italy and throughout Italy, Sardinia, Greece and all the Mediterranean area. Purkis:

"I think that that's when I really did learn because I went out as a boy with a lot of young ideas with drums and played with some serious musicians."

Next Barry Purkis auditioned for Iron Maiden, and was recruited. He stayed in the band for about eight months.



It didn't work out because Maiden, at that stage, were going through a transient stage trying to find themselves, they couldn't find the formula.

Steve Harris had a set of songs that he was promoting and playing ready for the first album, but he'd lost track. Purkis:

"People were coming and going like crazy and the last time around that era that I spoke to Steve [Harris], before it all kind of fell apart and I left, he was gonna go back to college because he was going to be a technical drawer. But he didn't."

Purkis continued playing with Samsoon, while Clive Burr - who was Samson's original drummer - joined Iron Maiden and replaced Barry Purkis.