It could be said that the story of Bad Company began with a bang – the neck-snapping sound of those titanic drums coming in on Can’t Get Enough signalling the start of a band that sprang, fully formed, like a greyhound out of a trap. In reality the band’s origins were far from simple. “Oh, that’s a good question,” Ralphs says now, speaking from his home in Henley in the run-up to Mott’s own recent reformation. “I was unhappy in Mott, but I don’t think I would have just left without something else to do, no.”
And what of vocalist Paul Rodgers? After his short-lived foray with Peace, Free reconvened. But Rodgers became wrung out by the experience of trying to hold the band together with a guitarist, Paul Kossoff, whose drug problems would lead to his death. In fact, Rodgers had been planning a solo album before Ralphs happened to play him a demo of a song called Can’t Get Enough that he’d written for Mott, but which vocalist Ian Hunter had rejected on the – understandable – grounds that he couldn’t sing it. Rodgers is still incredulous at the memory. “I said: ‘Well, you give it to me and I’ll do it’.” Even then, Ralphs says, “we weren’t really planning on having a band, we were just talking about recording some songs together. Then Simon [Kirke] turned up and started playing and that was it.”
Free drummer Kirke was another victim of the post-Kossoff fall-out. “It was a huge release when Free broke up,” he says now. With Kirke at one point even having to show Koss the chords to All Right Now before a gig at the Albert Hall because the guitarist was so damaged by downers he could no longer recall his own band’s greatest hit, Bad Company was “enough already. Let’s have some fun.”
Speaking from his home in Connecticut, Kirke recalls how “you couldn’t have been further away from Paul Kossoff than Mick Ralphs. I wasn’t interested in any more geniuses. Mick drank – of course he drank, he was from Hereford! – but he was great fun. And he brought Rodgers out of his shell. By the end of Free, Paul had his back to the audience, he didn’t want to know. Then Ralphs came along with his Max Wall impressions and the whole thing changed – and for the better. Paul really blossomed with Mick.”
Built on the ruins of Free, what Ralphs is less ready to admit today is that the beginning of Bad Company also spelled the end of Mott The Hoople. Ariel Bender and then Mick Ronson joined the band on guitar; ‘Ronno’ teamed up with Ian Hunter; the Hunterless band continued as plain ol’ Mott… it was never quite the same.
A surprisingly self-effacing chap in person, with a nicely lilting West Country accent, Ralphs insists: “I would never have dumped them in it.” He likens his early meetings with Rodgers as “like being married [to Mott] and having a bit on the side”. Not because it was a secret, he says, but because he couldn’t wait to leave Mott. “I told Paul: ‘We’ve got to finish off this album [Mott] and then we’ve got to do this American tour that was already planned’. Paul said: ‘That’s fair enough. I’ll wait for you to get back’.”
For Ralphs, the music of Mott, the incoming kings of glam rock, had become too stylised. “I wanted something more bluesy, more simplistic, more earthy” – phrases that would sum up Bad Company to a tee. The antidote to the glitter overkill that Mott – along with their mentor, David Bowie – now personified, Bad Company would be the defiantly unprogressive rockers who played it straight down the line, their music influenced more by blues and soul than by passing trends.
Other pieces of the jigsaw “just fell into place”. Beginning with the band’s name. “I already had the song Bad Company,” Rodgers explains, chatting down the line from his lakeside Canadian home. “And I thought it would be kind of a first for the band to have its own song theme.” When he phoned Ralphs and suggested Bad Company as the band’s name, “he dropped the phone! We both said: ‘That’s it!’. Names are so important. They’re really the war flag under which you fly.”
The title was inspired by the 1972 American Civil War movie Bad Company about two young men who escape the draft by becoming outlaws – an allegory for a generation of hippies then in fear of being drafted to Vietnam – which was billed as the first ‘acid western’.
“The record company felt it was a dangerous name – too over-the-top. I explained it wasn’t about being as evil as we can or anything of that nature. I meant it in terms of the early settlers; the real, gritty toughness of it… It was really the law of survival, and that’s the kind of essence of that song. But there was a tender side, too, an emotional side. Those people would look at the wonders of the land they were in, and be moved by it. So you could open out musically.”
Or they would once they had a bass player. Enter former The Boz People singer and, later, novice King Crimson bassist, Raymond ‘Boz’ Burrell. “He was playing a fretless bass, but I doubt if he’d been playing it more than a year,” Kirke chuckles. “Robert Fripp had just shown him the basics. But he came in and he looked great; good-looking guy, beard, fringe jacket. Mick said: ‘We’re gonna do Little Miss Fortune, it starts in G…’. Boz said: ‘Just give me the key, I’ll figure it out’. And he played it bloody well! We said: ‘Do you want the job?’ He said: ‘Yeah, all right’.”
Band name and musical direction sorted, next on their ‘to do’ list was get a manager and a record deal. As chance would have it they got both of those in one, over-large package called Peter Grant, the Led Zeppelin manager then overseeing the launch of Zeppelin’s own record label, Swan Song. Rodgers was encouraged to phone Grant by former Free tour manager Clive Coulson, who was now working for Zeppelin. Like Kirke, Rodgers does an amusingly accurate impersonation of Grant’s famously nasal voice.
“He said: ‘Yes, I know about you. I’m interested.’ I explained it wasn’t just me, it was a band, and he went: ‘Hmm, I see…’.” Grant agreed to go along to the Surrey village hall where they were rehearsing. Kirke tells the story of the band waiting all afternoon for him to show up. Then, just as they’d given up hope, he strolled in. “We were so pleased. We said: ‘Hello, Mr Grant. Welcome. We’ll run through the set’. He said: ‘Don’t bother, I’ve heard it’. He said: ‘I knew you’d probably be a bit nervous so I just stayed out of the way’. He’d been sitting in the Porsche, having a ciggie, listening through the wall. That was the first inkling we had that this guy was something special. Because he had quite a reputation, and we were nervous. He said: ‘I think you’re great. Would you like to be on Swan Song?’.”
The rest, as they say, is history – though not always as it’s been written over the years. As Kirke acknowledges, the received wisdom now is that “we had Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin behind us; we couldn’t fail”. Things are never that easy, though, as any of the other half-dozen acts signed to Swan Song over the next two years – not one of whom enjoyed the level of success Bad Company did – would doubtless testify. From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/bad-company-the-bad-old-days
