To them he’d added a lyric that seemed to fit: ‘Baby, when I think about you/I think about love…’ (Well, he had been in the city of peace and love at the time…) It was a simple idea with some gentle, acoustic opening chords. He thought back to a song he’d begun writing when he was with Free when they’d been gigging in San Francisco. Rodgers looked back into his bag of tricks. Instead, they had to pull together a worthy follow-up at little more than the drop of a hat. Bad Company had no time to plan and write and absorb the lessons of their journey so far. Grant had given the boys gold discs at the end of that first tour, but the truth was that sales were already kicking up towards platinum and everyone from record company execs to humble fans in out-of-the-way towns were anxious to know whether the band could do it all again.Īdd to that ‘second album syndrome’, a relatively unexplored phenomenon at the time, but one with principles that held true. They were already bigger than any of the bands that had spawned their constituent parts, and adding to the heavyweight reputation was their manager Peter Grant, who, when he wasn’t crowbarring Led Zeppelin into the financial stratosphere, was offering Bad Company the benefits of his brutal genius. Yet it brought with it certain expectations that were compounded by the out-of-the-box success of their debut. Only Rodgers truly fit the mould: tight jeans, hairy chest and that louche, long-haired charisma at the mic stand. It was a fashionable catch-all, but not a label that particularly suited the band, who were defiantly un-starry. The press had been quick to label Bad Company a ‘supergroup’, even though Free were yet to acquire the sheen of legend, Mott were in the grip of a glam-rock identity crisis and King Crimson were essentially a vehicle for the offbeat brilliance of Robert Fripp. There was already a sense of pressure, both artistic and commercial. They began by going through their bag of ideas, some pre-dating the formation of the band, others worked up on the long stretches of road they’d covered in the months since their debut’s release. With their body clocks set to ‘tour’, Bad Company began working through the nights and sleeping away the days. Its terraced gardens sat in the peace of the forest, a contrast to the thick walls of the dank dungeons that had inspired Tony Iommi. And had Mick Ralphs not left Mott The Hoople for Bad Company, he would have pitched up in the Forest of Dean just a few months later as Ian Hunter and co hired the Castle for some writing sessions. Led Zeppelin visited Sabbath, and would return in 1978 to rehearse parts of In Through The Out Door. Fractious and under pressure, Tony Iommi retreated to the castle dungeons and almost immediately came up with what would be described as “the riff that saved Black Sabbath” – the main section of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Black Sabbath arrived at the Castle still in the grip of the coke habits that had produced Vol 4 out in California, but which then led to a fruitless and destructive attempt to write another record at a house in Bel Air. Deep Purple wrote Burn, their first post-Ian Gillan record, there in 1973, before recording it in Montreux. The little studio had really kicked into gear a couple of years before Bad Company arrived. Set deep in the Forest of Dean, its imposing twin towers are lined with battlements its entrance lies beneath a forbidding portcullis. In place of Headley Grange, the Hampshire haunted house that imbued their debut with such strange magic, came Clearwell Castle, a Gothic pile built for Thomas Wyndham in 1728 and restored in the 1950s by a Blackpool baker and his family. (Image credit: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)īack in the UK, they were ready to repeat the trick. But imagine how it must have been to walk into a record shop and, almost by the week, go home with records like these… Sure, records were shorter and the touring cycle occupied months rather than years, and the musical areas into which these bands were expanding were virgin, unexplored. Queen managed Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack and A Night At The Opera between March 1974 and the end of the following year. Jethro Tull were gunning out eight albums in eight years, culminating in 1975’s Minstrel In The Gallery. Genesis put out Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway between 1970 and ’74. Black Sabbath offered their first five between 19 Deep Purple released In Rock in 1970, Fireball in ’71, Machine Head in ’72, Who Do We Think We Are in ’73, and Burn and Stormbringer in 1974. In 1975, the year of Straight Shooter, Led Zeppelin released Physical Graffiti, their sixth album in as many years (and those six were half-decent, weren’t they?). Bad Company weren’t unique in their speed or their greatness either.
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