As conundrums go it was pretty hard to beat: a bunch of Italiano-Glaswegians notching up their biggest hit with a rocked-up remake of a song originally made famous by an American funk group with a codpiece-wearing frontman. You couldn’t have made it up. But don’t go running away with the notion that Gun’s unlikely version of Cameo’s 1986 Top 5 smash hit Word Up was a novelty launch pad for their own career. By the time the band recorded it as part of 1994’s appropriately titled album Swagger they already had two other albums (1989’s Taking On The World, and Gallus from 1992) to their name, plus no less than eight self-penned Top 75 singles. The idea of adding rock guitars to Word Up actually began as a bit of fun. “As much as Gun loved bands like AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and UFO, [vocalist] Mark Rankin and I also appreciated dance music,” begins guitarist Giuliano ‘Jools’ Gizzi. “Because it was such a big hit for Cameo it had been all over the radio. But in a dance club it just sounded unbelievable.” Just for kicks, the group – then completed by bassist Dante Gizzi and drummer Mark Kerr (brother of Simple Minds’ Jim) – worked up their own rehearsal room arrangement.