Dead End Drive-In: Now Showing – ‘Bad Company: The Band. The Music. The Story’
Written by Johnny H
Sunday, 06 April 2014 03:20
‘Bad Company: The Band, The Music, The Story’ (Team Rock)
I’d actually been looking forward to picking up a copy of this film for a good few weeks as part of the Classic Rock Presents: Bad Company’ Special Edition magazine, but I’ll be damned if I could find anywhere near me that was stocking it. Looking online then to try and source a copy and the cover price of £14.99 hardly enthused me to press the ‘Buy Now’ button, and with no official trailers for the ‘Bad Company: The Band, The Music, The Story’ available either I was starting to get a bit dubious if the thing actually existed or not. So it wasn’t until a review copy popped up at Uber HQ like Ferdy on a Bank Holiday weekend (courtesy of Valeria at Duff Press) that I can answer that query in the affirmative, and finally sit down with a fine glass of red (a cheeky Merlot just in case you’re wondering) to spend 83 minutes reliving the career of one of the UK’s finest hard rock supergroups, the one and only Bad Company.
I have referenced Quadrophenia in this piece due to the fact that my one and only live encounter with the band happened back in April 2010 at Brighton Centre, the night turning out to be a master class in classic hard rock music, and this film (I guess) is designed to give those who were maybe not as lucky as I was a chance to actually see the band live in all their naked glory.
Or so you’d think, especially with the credits rolling out over a cool looking montage of four decades of Bad Company live on stages all around the world set to the soundtrack of their self titled signature tune. All indeed does initially look to the affirmative regarding archive live footage, but as the documentary unfolds, I must admit that anyone looking to pick this up solely for some form of extended long lost footage of Bad Company in action will be sorely disappointed.
Likewise the overall feel of the production has an air of something Sky Arts might have cobbled together at short notice, and I certainly wasn’t expecting that after Director Jon Brewer’s excellent BB King Documentary ‘Life Of Riley’. However I’m game enough to stick with the talking heads ensemble piece and as Paul Rodgers, Simon Kirke and Mick Ralphs all start to tell their stories regarding what first got them into music and how Free and Mott The Hoople all fatefully intertwined to make Bad Company, and I must admit I’m quite enthralled by it all. There’s nothing here that will shock long term fans of any of these bands, but to hear Kirke admit he’d told his parents “he’d give it two years” before looking to find a proper job before going on to form Free with Paul Kossoff has a genuine naive charm about it, something that sadly not many of today’s more popular rock musicians would ever have the ability to possess.
The pivotal roles of both Bad Company’s record label Swan Song, and in particular their manager Peter Grant (the pioneer of the 90/10 deal for rock musicians) is also explored, but this is done in nowhere as near as much depth as you might like it to be, and it is once again left to Kirke to reveal perhaps the most candid moment within the whole documentary when he lets slip the fact that he once (perhaps foolishly) challenged Grant regarding his alleged links to London mobsters. Something he now laughs about but in hindsight his bare faced cheek was something that Grant also respected.
From here on in as the story unfolds via a slightly wider selection of talking heads including musicians, crew members, industry figures and family members, all appearing to tell their story about Bad Company far better than I ever could, but again here you get the sense it is all kept perhaps a little bit too safe. One thing that does come across quite strongly within the film though is the love Mick Ralphs still has for the band’s sadly departed bass guitarist Boz Burrell, and the stories of how Boz joined the band, retraining himself as a bassist, are again glimpses of a more determined age long since lost in mainstream rock music.
As the career of Bad Company develops from their legendary self titled debut album, so does the pace of the documentary and here we do get to see some of those all too brief glimpses of the band live, albeit perhaps the sight of Paul Rodgers decked out in a skin tight sequined top, flares and platform shoes might not be to everybody’s taste. The music though is simply imperious. The story then develops through album number two ‘Straight Shooter’, straight into the tax exile record that was ‘Run With The Pack’. A record that the band’s crew lovingly refer to as “the two villa album” (you’ll need to watch it to find out why), before we get reacquainted with the slightly lacklustre ‘Burnin’ Sky’, (complete with some Brian Howe era concert bills strangely overlaid oops), as Ralphs and Rodgers explain how the constant tour/album/tour/album schedule started to take its strain on the band.
By the time we get to ‘Desolation Angels’ Paul Rodgers is starting to talk about synth guitars and beginning to look more and more like Neil Diamond, and as the Swan Song empire starts to fall like a deck of cards following the death of John Bonham you can just tell the band are on their last legs going into what would be the classic Bad Company line up’s final studio record ‘Rough Diamonds’.
It is at this point that ‘Bad Company: The Band. The Music, The Story’ commits perhaps its second biggest faux pas by completely overlooking the Paul Rodger-less years of the band (other than those previously mentioned misplaced concert bills which do reference it). I personally thought the ‘Fame And Fortune’ album was an excellent attempt at keeping the band’s spirit and legacy alive and the fact that both Ralphs and Kirke went on to produce platinum albums under the Bad Company is glossed over with footage from Paul Rodgers solo years, music that sold a fraction of what ‘Holy Water’ did . And this along with the fact that Kirke also fails to name check his time in Wildlife (who later became FM) really does stick in the throat. So whilst I’m not a huge fan of the Robert Hart era that followed the ‘Here Comes Trouble’ album, I still think both eras of the band post Rodgers deserved the credit they were due, even if they weren’t the most celebrated.
As such the inferred “protection of the trademark” reason for getting the three original members back together in 2008 actually smacks of Rodgers trying to once again take control of a band he’d long since distanced himself from as his solo career at that time really was going nowhere other than him perhaps taking up a side line as a Paul Daniels lookalike. The brief segment of live footage from that era and then the subsequent 2010 tour though does show the live chemistry the guys still have and once again they were all seemingly enjoying themselves having a ball in the process,. However whatever the politics that went on behind the scenes it would have been nice to have seen the members pushed to explain just what the hell was going on.
One thing that does remain throughout this film though, however limited it might be in answering some all important questions, like will the band ever record a new studio album? It does provide an interesting visual accompaniment to a fine glass of red wine, and a damn decent 132 magazine that also includes all new exclusive interviews with Kirke, Rodgers and Ralphs, a memorial to Boz Burrell, and inside feature on Peter Grant plus hundreds of rare and previously unseen pictures from the bands 1970’s heyday.
Question is though will you return to this documentary time and again like you did to those classic Bad Company albums? The answer to that I think you can all probably guess.