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In the summer of 1977, a journalist for US rock magazine Circus interviewed Paul Rodgers at Bad Company’s Palm Springs HQ. The group were touring their new album, Burnin’ Sky, and had rented houses in the California resort, from where they’d fly back and forth in a private jet.
When Circus’s writer arrived at Rodgers’ place, he found the singer waiting to have a karate lesson. In fact, Rodgers was photographed wearing his karate robe, known as a gi, on the cover of Burnin’ Sky. On Bad Company’s last tour, the group had lived up to their outlaw reputation, but the singer insisted he was a changed man now. “I’m working at keeping fit,” he said, “because people can get very messed up on tour.”
The records that preceded it have always unfairly overshadowed Bad Company’s fourth album. In the band’s back catalogue, Burnin’ Sky is close to being a ‘great lost album’, if any US Top 20 gold-certified record could ever truly be described as ‘lost’.
Bad Company swept into the Château d’Hérouville studio in France’s Oise Valley in the summer of 1976, just as Iggy Pop and David Bowie swept out after recording Pop’s The Idiot. They weren’t in good shape.
“We had been on the road pretty heavily, and we were burned,” admitted Rodgers, who wrote the chords for the title track in his Paris hotel suite and then ad-libbed the lyrics in the studio the next day. It was a one-take affair, recorded by the Rolling Stones’ engineer Chris Kimsey, but it worked.
Burnin’ Sky’s throbbing groove sets the tempo for what follows. Boz Burrell and Simon Kirke maintain a snakecharming rhythm for 5.22 unbroken minutes, as treated vocals, Mick Ralphs’ wailing guitar, peals of thunder and pattering percussion whizz around the mix. It’s spare and economical – Bad Company at their best.
Once again, Rodgers handled the lion’s share of the writing, serving up the bump-and-grind rockers but also the more thoughtful Like Water, co-written with his then-wife, Machiko Shimizu. Ralphs delivers two of the album’s best riffs on Man Needs Woman and Too Bad – the last riff cheekily reconfigured by Whitesnake for their song Girl in 1981.
Elsewhere, there’s the jokey intro to Everything I Need, in which Bad Company sing a few lines from The Happy Wanderer (‘…with my knapsack on my back!’) and which evokes a 4am refreshment session, with empty bottles on the table and the unwelcome dawn light creeping through the curtains.
Burnin’ Sky ends as it began with another fine but often forgotten track. On Master Of Ceremony, Rodgers pleads for global harmony over a mesmerising groove. The whole song is fuzzy around the edges, suggesting either the last round in that 4am drinking session or the head-spinning after-effects of one of Rodgers’ karate chops.
Burnin’ Sky maintained Bad Company’s strike rate on the UK and US charts but without a big hit single to raise the profile, it’s since slipped between the cracks. More’s the pity. It’s high time to don the gi, head back to the château and get reacquainted
