It Bites
English musical group; rock band
It Bites were an English progressive rock and pop fusion band, formed in Egremont, Cumbria, in 1982 and best known for their 1986 single "Calling All the Heroes", which gained them a Top 10 UK Singles Chart hit.
Initially fronted by Francis Dunnery, the band recorded three studio albums before splitting in 1990. The band eventually reformed in 2006 with new frontman John Mitchell replacing Dunnery, recording two further studio albums before eventually going into hiatus in 2014 and quietly dissolving a decade later. Dunnery currently leads an intermittently active alternative version of the band called "It Bites FD" (featuring himself leading a varied set of other musicians).
Musical style
The band have been described as having "a strong art-rock tendency" by AllMusic, while website Über Rock has stated, "It Bites have always been one of the more curious cases of the progressive rock world. Their first impression on us back in the 1980s was that of a pop band. But a pop band doing what no pop band had the right to do – successfully mix catchy tunes with complex musicianship and, god forbid, distorted guitars."
Paul Stump, in his History of Progressive Rock, said that "It Bites, of all the 1980s progressive revivalists, truly understood - if perhaps only instinctively - the contemporaneous impossibility of 'progressing' in the mainstream of rock, and the possibilities that opened up. ... While the likes of IQ and Pendragon attempted to achieve novelty with rock voicings coined ten years previously, It Bites subtly (and unsubtly) stole and reused 1980s devices for some of the best-balanced combinations of virtuosity and gut excitement British rock has heard. ...
The public source identifies “It Bites” as english musical group; rock band. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bites, English and musical.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1675003. VIAF identifies the subject as 249645165. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1986, 1990 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “It Bites” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.