Simon Kirke (Bad Company, Free) Interview

As the drummer for not one, but two ’70s hard rock juggernauts, there’s very little Simon Kirke hasn’t done over the course of his nearly 60 year career. One thing he hadn’t scratched off the bucket list until this past weekend? A visit to the Chicago edition of The Fest for Beatles Fans. In the ’90s, Kirke embarked on not one, not two, not three, but four tours alongside the legendary Ringo Starr, drumming alongside Liverpool’s own in his eponymous All Starr Band. Considering that I’ve attended every Chicago Beatlefest since 2004 (Yes, I was 5 that first year), and I’ve long wanted to pick Mr. Kirke’s brain regarding his “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy” come true, I figured this was the perfect opportunity to do exactly that…and it was. In this exclusive in-depth discussion, Kirke reflects upon the heavy rockin’ life and platinum selling times of Free and Bad Company.

Greetings Simon and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing tonight?

Simon Kirke: I’m good!

Right on! Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I’d like to start by congratulating you on Bad Company’s long overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When did you get the news and how do you and Paul (Rodgers) feel about the honor?

SK: We got the news about a month ago, maybe 6 weeks ago. No, actually it was a little more than that because we were asked to keep it under our hats. I have no idea why. They made the initial announcement, as you know, a couple of months ago. We’re very pleased! We’re very honored. Quite honestly, I think it’s about time *laughs*, but I don’t want to appear ungrateful. Bad Company, as you know, have been around 50 years. We influenced a couple of generations of bands, so it’s about time and we’re very happy. I’m also happy, Joe, because dear old Mick Ralphs, our guitarist who passed away a couple of months ago, learned that Bad Company was going to be inducted just a couple of weeks before he finally passed away. That made us very, very happy indeed.

Can we expect you and Paul to perform a song or two at the ceremony or is it too early to tell?

SK: I don’t know. I know that we’ve been approached to play a couple of songs. I’ve spoken with Paul. Paul’s health, as you know, is not good, but I think…I’m crossing my fingers that we will be able to play at least one song. I don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t even know who’s gonna be inducting us yet. I know they have a house band and they’re learning, I guess, a handful of Bad Company songs just in case. Cyndi Lauper’s gonna be inducted. There’s a whole bunch of other acts that are gonna perform. I think the odds of us performing are very good.

You’re in town this weekend for the Fest for Beatles Fans in Chicago. When did you first hear The Beatles, and do you have a favorite Beatles album?

SK: Wow. How long is a piece of string? It’s one of those questions. They came in 1962 in England. They actually hit America in ’64, but in late ’62, The Beatles had “Love Me Do”, early ’63, so they were only around for 7 or 8 years. You think of the musical impact that they had on the world. Here we are 60 years later and we’re still loving them. I can’t say there’s a favorite album. If I could lump two together, I would do Rubber Soul and Revolver.

Both excellent choices. Also, I appreciate your perspective on that last question, because here in the States, the story we hear all the time is about The Ed Sullivan Show, so you encountered them a year or two earlier.

SK: Yeah, Ringo wasn’t even the original drummer. It was Pete Best, and then he had a falling out. They went down to London to record for Parlophone. This is slightly off the beaten track, but Parlophone was a comedy label. I don’t know if you realize, but Parlophone was a branch of EMI, and they were a comedy label. They had The Goons and Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. It was not a choice that The Beatles ended up on Parlophone, but George Martin, the wonderful producer, heard them, but he didn’t like Ringo. He got in a guy called Andy White. So on “Love Me Do”, it was Andy White on drums. Poor old Ringo was reduced to playing a tambourine in the background, but as we know, when ’63 rolled around, they started to become The Beatles that we know and love.

They always wanted to go to America. We knew, the British people knew, that once they went to America, we’d lose them *laughs*. And we did! We did because the reception that they got when they landed in America for Ed Sullivan, they were good looking. They were young. They were great musicians, even in their early 20s. They had the lots. America just went crazy for them. Then, they started writing these songs that were like, what the fuck?! I think “A Hard Day’s Night” was the first inkling that Lennon and McCartney could write these incredible songs. Then, Rubber Soul came along, and the rest is history. I think you ask anyone of my age group who is above 60 and every musician will say that The Beatles will be in their top 3 or 4 influences, throughout the world, no question.

Come the ’90s, you’d drum alongside Ringo in his All Starr Band. What was that experience like for you, and what is the greatest lesson you learned from your time with Ringo?

SK: That was lovely. I got a call from him. I thought my daughter was playing a trick on me. When she came up to me and said, “Ringo Starr’s on the phone.” I thought, “Yeah, yeah.” Yeah, it was Ringo! He said, “Look, I know you’ve just come out of rehab.” It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble with alcohol and I spent some time in rehab. How he got to know about it, I have no idea, but he got my number and he called me. He said, “Would you like to come on the road with me.” I said, “I’d love to.” I didn’t even ask who was in the band. He said, “It’s Jack Bruce on bass.” “Fucking hell! Really?!” “Peter Frampton on guitar, Gary Brooker from Procol Harum on keyboards, and Mark Rivera from Billy Joel’s band, a wonderful sax player.” I said, “Count me in!”

We rehearsed in L.A. I walked into the rehearsal studio and there was the famous Ludwig drumkit with the star on the front. My little kit was next door to him. I sat down and started getting the feel of the new kit, and then he walked in. “Hello, how are you? Good to see you, Simon!” We just started playing together. From the get go, it was a very good match because he was a huge influence on me. My style is very simple and very solid, like his. The only rule that we had between us was when we came to do drum fills, he would go first. Then, I would take the next one, otherwise it would be a little bit lumpy and a bit of a trainwreck. That’s what we did. On and off, I did four tours with him. We never had a cross word. We never had any problems. It was just a joy to play with him and these wonderful musicians.

The story of your career truly begins with an outfit by the name of Black Cat Bones. Can you take us back to that moment when you first met Paul Kossoff? What was that six month stint with the band like?

SK: It’s actually a very good story. What happened was I was about 18. I’d just left school. My parents had given me 2 years to get this out of my system. I wanted to be a drummer, so I went down to London from the country and there was a musical paper called Melody Maker, a very famous paper. In the back of it were all the ads for the upcoming shows, a bit like Rolling Stone or Village Voice, that sort of thing. I saw this name, Black Cat Bones, and I thought, “Wow, what a great name!” The only trouble was that it was in a pub, but it was way across London. We’re talking probably a 40 minute subway ride. It was a long way for me. I was working and I was very tired, so I thought, “I’m either gonna go, or I’m gonna stay home and write a letter to my parents like a good son.” So I tossed a coin. It came down heads and I went to see this band Black Cat Bones at a pub called the Nag’s Head.

The band were OK. They weren’t really anything special, but this guitarist was unbelievable, a little guy. He was only 17, I found out. During the break, he came to the bar and I said, “Hey, can I buy you a drink?” He said, “Yeah!” “By the way mate, you’re such a good player, I have to tell you, but I don’t think your drummer’s very good.” *laughs* He said, “It’s funny you should say that because tonight’s his last night with us. Tomorrow, in this same pub, we’re having auditions. There’s a guy coming along. If you wanna come along, come along!” I went all the way back, and then the next morning, came all the way back again. There was another drummer and they were playing a couple of blues songs. I sat and played a couple of blues songs, and they had a little huddle. Paul Kossoff came up to me afterwards and said, “You’ve got the gig.” That’s how I met Paul.

For the next 6 months, we went all around London and the tri-county area, playing pretty good blues. After about 6 months, I was living with Koss. We got very, very close, very friendly. He said, “Listen, I’ve just jammed with this fantastic singer who’s in a band called Brown Sugar in North London. He wants to leave. I gotta tell you Simon, he’s amazing. He wants to meet in this house in North London and have a jam.” I said, “Yeah, let’s go!” This was Paul Rodgers. We met Paul. It was Paul Rodgers, Paul Kossoff, me, and a bass player who came along just for the ride. We jammed and we got on like a house on fire. That bass player was committed. He was only helping out, so we had to find another bass player. We found this guy Andy Fraser, who was only 15. We had our first rehearsal at the same pub that I’d met Paul Kossoff 6 months prior! That was the beginning of Free. That’s how Free was formed.

What memories stand out to you from the earliest days of Free, whether it be rehearsals, shows, or the recoding of Tons of Sobs?

SK: Obviously, the big highlight was playing the Isle of Wight, which was England’s answer to Woodstock. 600,000 people with no monitors. We didn’t have monitors back in those days. That was pretty special. I think that’s the easy choice, but we were like a little army, the four of us. We drove all over England and parts of Europe in our little van. It was just the four of us. We had our gear in the back. We slept in the van, not overnight, we did stay in hotels and little guesthouses, but building the fanbase, which took a couple of years, and recording Tons of Sobs, which didn’t sell; it just didn’t sell. It wasn’t a big seller, but…the first two albums, for some reason, they just didn’t sell. Obviously, there was no social media back then, so it was all word of mouth. It wasn’t until we recorded “All Right Now” that the whole thing exploded and went into the stratosphere.

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the album that many consider to be Free’s magnum opus, Fire and Water. Looking back on it now, where was the band at that point in time and was there an overall goal in mind when crafting that record?

SK: Well I think you’re right. It was the culmination…a couple of things happened. I’ve said this many times. “All Right Now” was born out of a bad gig. Our musical style was not boppy and dancey. It was bluesy and rocky and you could nod your head to it and sway to it, but you couldn’t actually dance to it. We came off the stage at this university in North England to the sound of our own footsteps. The applause had died before we even left our instruments. We got back to the dressing room. We looked at each other and Paul Rodgers said, “You know guys, we need something a little more uptempo.” It was getting a bit of a drag, you know?

Andy Fraser was hit by this lightning bolt and started bopping around the dressing room singing, “All right now. Baby it’s alright now.” We were going, “Wow! OK!” With those three words, he and Paul Rodgers woodshedded for the next couple of weeks and wrote “All Right Now”. We played it at soundchecks and tentatively tried it at shows. It went down a storm. When we finally got to record Fire and Water, I believe “All Right Now” was the last track we recorded. We knew we had something special.

Here’s the weird thing, and I’ve never spoken about this before. Right about that time, ’69, ’70, we started recording Fire and Water in late ’69 into early ’70, The Band came along and knocked everyone out of their shoes. Clapton was raving about them. Van Morrison was raving about them. Paul Rodgers and Andy Fraser fell in love with The Band. Me and Koss, not quite so much. I now know that they were an amazing group and they changed American music for the better forever, but at that time, I was only 20, 21. I was still into blues. I was a bit of a purist. Me and Koss didn’t get it.

So when we came to do the follow up to Fire and Water, which was Highway, it became very Band-y. There were lots of harmonies. There weren’t so many hard rock songs. It was slightly limp wristed. It didn’t sell. It was a flop. You can’t follow “All Right Now”. There’s just no way. We were still very young, very impressionable. When Highway, which was the follow up to Fire and Water, and “The Stealer”, which was the follow up to “All Right Now”, when they flopped, Paul Rodgers and Andy Fraser said, “We’re gonna break the band up.” And we did. We broke the band up. It broke my heart.

You’d come back though for Heartbreaker.

SK: We came back. There were a couple of albums before Heartbreaker. What happened was during that 6 or 7 months when we broke the band up, Paul Kossoff developed a terrible drug habit. He missed Paul Rodgers terribly. He loved Paul. We missed the band! We broke up one of the best fucking bands in the world. Paul Kossoff never really got over it. He developed this drug habit, so we reformed about 7 or 8 months later. We recorded an album called Free at Last, which is pretty damn good, but once again, we toured behind it and Koss – I call Kossoff “Koss”, so not to confuse the two Pauls – still had a bad drug habit. We had to cancel a couple of American tours. British tours were a disaster. It was horrible.

The final album was Heartbreaker. It came after Free at Last. It was a nightmare to record. We had to get rid of Koss during the recording. We got someone else to finish the guitar due to his addiction. It just fell to pieces, but you know what? Even after 60 years, I still miss those guys. I miss the camaraderie of these four little guys *laughs* going around Europe and knocking people out. Bad Company was something else, but that’s a story for another term. Free was very close to my heart.

Despite that clash of influences internally, when history looks back on Free, they’re part of that rising crop of heavy blues acts, like Zeppelin and Sabbath, who’d largely shape what would come to be known as heavy metal. At the time, did Free feel they were a part of something larger, or did you notice the impact as time went on?

SK: I don’t think we felt part of anything at that time. We were very influenced by…for instance, Kossoff loved Clapton. I loved Ginger Baker at the time, so we loved Cream. Zeppelin were just on the horizon. I didn’t really take any notice of Zeppelin until around the second album. We were very closeted. We kept ourselves to ourselves. We listened to a lot of the blues, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Sonny Boy Williamson. We were very influenced by black music, and of course, The Beatles. The Beatles were above anything.

It wasn’t until…when Free did their first American tour, we supported Blind Faith, which was Eric Clapton’s band. We did about 15 shows with Blind Faith and the final show, Eric Clapton came into our dressing room. We were like, “Fucking hell! Wow!” He said, “I wanted to speak to Paul Kossoff.” He asked Paul Kossoff, “How did you do that slow vibrato?” *laughs* Koss says, “You’re kidding me, right?” “No, no! You’re a wonderful player man!” Koss was almost in tears because here was Eric. He was probably 25 years old. He looked like a god, he played like a god, and to many people in England, he was God. Here he was complimenting Paul Kossoff.

That was when we started getting an inkling we were pretty damn good, but we weren’t necessarily part of the heavy metal movement. We never aspired to be heavy metal. We were loud and we were powerful, so that’s about as far as it went. On a good night, Free were a damn powerful band, but I don’t think we were ever heavy metal.

You mention that tour with Blind Faith. What was your first impression of touring the States?

SK: The first tour of America? Wow, that was pretty amazing. We went around in a car and a U-Haul van for some of the gigs. When we toured with Blind Faith, they flew everywhere. We were grouped with Delaney & Bonnie, so we went all over the country in a Greyhound bus. It was wonderful, because we’d always aspired to tour America. We loved American music. To actually be in America and visiting some of the states in the south where Robert Johnson was from and Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters and going to Chicago, it was great!

It was hard work because not many Americans had heard of us. We were kind of starting at the bottom again. They’d heard of “All Right Now” because it was a minor hit in America, but we were really starting from scratch. The opening band is always hard work. Everyone wants to see Blind Faith. We did have our moments. In fact, we walked back from Madison Square Garden to our hotel because it was only a few blocks. As we left, the four of us with our roadie, there were a group of kids sitting outside and they said, “You guys were better than Blind Faith.”

Wow.

SK: That’s exactly what I said. We fucking floated home. We did actually have a pretty damn good gig. Blind Faith only played for 45 minutes because they didn’t have that much material, and 15 of those minutes was Ginger Baker’s drum solo *laughs*. I’ll never, ever forget that, those kids when they said that. “You were better than Blind Faith, man!” Wow, yeah!

At this point in the interview, Simon was called downstairs for a Fest for Beatles Fans staff meeting. He was grateful enough to call back an hour later to discuss all things Bad Company. The following is that portion of our conversation.

After Free, yourself and Paul Rodgers would team up with Mick Ralphs and Boz Burrell to form Bad Company. One thing that always struck me about the band was despite the background of the members coming from Free, Mott the Hoople, and King Crimson respectively, Bad Company managed to sound like its own entity, completely separate of those past acts. Was this an intentional move, or rather just how the music naturally evolved?

SK: As you said, we came from these three different bands. King Crimson wasn’t really on our musical radar at all. The only reason we chose Boz, who had only been in King Crimson for a few months, was he was at the bottom of the list. I know it sounds ironic, but we were set free from our three previous bands. Free just imploded after a long time of misery. It was horrible, really, the last year or so. Mick was disenchanted with Mott the Hoople. He teamed up with Paul because Paul was in this band called Peace. They went on tour all over England with Mott the Hoople, opening for them. It was during that time that Mick and Paul Rodgers formed this friendship.

Mick had a cassette of this song that Ian Hunter didn’t want to record. It was “Can’t Get Enough”. When Paul heard it, he said, “This is a hit, man! This is amazing!” Once that tour ended Mick and Paul became bosom buddies. I had come back from Brazil, I spent some time there, and I called Paul Rodgers saying, “What’s going on? How are things?” We’d always gotten along. He said, “I met this great guy. You remember him from Mott the Hoople. We’re writing songs together. You wanna come down?” He had a little cottage in the country.

I went down and I met Mick. I’d known him slightly because Mott the Hoople and Free were on Island Records. We sort of met each other in passing. Anyways, we all got on like a house on fire. From “Can’t Get Enough”, we had “Movin’ On”, “Rock Steady”. It was just something about the chemistry that we were liberated from our three previous groups. It was not a conscious effort to write something specific. We were just having a ball. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: From ’74 for the next 5 years were the happiest of my musical career. Bad Company achieved everything that I’d gotten into the business for. We had great management. We had ties with Led Zeppelin. It was a perfect storm.

Expanding upon the last question, one thing that’s always struck me about the ’70s rock scene was this sort of “anything goes” mentality, in which there was total creative freedom in this post-Beatles world, allowing bands like Free and Bad Company to do as they please. Would you agree with this assessment?

SK: I would say that Bad Company, it was quite a musical landscape for sure, but at that time, around 1971, there was what I would call the glitter era. It started primarily with David, a good friend of mine, David Bowie, but it started to get a little…you had Sweet, you had T. Rex, you had Gary Glitter. It all got a little airy fairy for us. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, because the whole musical world is like a pendulum. It’s like politics: It’ll swing one way, then after 4 or 5 years, it’ll swing another. That’s what was happening in the very early ’70s. It was all getting a little airy fairy and peace and love.

Bad Company was kind of an antithesis to that. You had emerging bands like Deep Purple, who were great in the early days. Of course, Zeppelin. I was never a big fan of Black Sabbath. It just wasn’t on my musical radar, but England did have this dozen or so emerging bands that were really…Jethro Tull. Who thought a guy standing on one leg playing the flute would sell out Madison Square Garden? Jesus! It was a whole array of different musical styles. Bad Company forged our own path, helped enormously by Peter Grant, the manager, and our alliance with Led Zeppelin.

You see, we came along at the perfect time. We were young. We were only in our early 20s. We’d come from three bands that were well loved, particularly in England. We were just rearing to go. We wanted to put the past in the past, behind us. That first album, we’d been playing those songs for months. It took us four days to record and three days to mix that first album. That doesn’t really answer your question. I went off on a tangent, but you gotta remember that in the late ’60s and early ’70s, there were so many different bands, different musical styles. You just don’t have that anymore. It’s a shame.

Upon Mick’s passing, I revisited the first Bad Company album for the first time in quite a while. Even after all these years, the songs and the energy still blow my mind. It’s pure lightning in a bottle. Was that the vibe the band got while recording the album?

SK: No question. I’ll tell you what happened. As I said, we’d been rehearsing these songs. There were about 10 or 11 songs, from which we took 8. We’d been rehearsing and playing and playing, as we auditioned bass players. We knew these songs inside and out, and we were just dying to record them. Peter Grant called Paul Rodgers one day and said, “John Paul Jones has got the flu. Zeppelin have had to suspend.” They were all down at Headley Grange at this wonderful English manor house. They were recording I believe Led Zeppelin IV, but they had to take a break because John Paul had the flu. He said, “You wanna go down to record? Go!”

We were like four werehounds let out of the trap. We raced down there. Boz had only been with the band maybe a couple of months. He was a great musician. He picked it up. We went into Headley Grange. We saw all of Zeppelin’s gear, Bonzo’s drums in the hall. We did the whole thing. It was lightning in a bottle. We were finally doing something that we really, really loved. That was not the case with our prior bands, especially towards the end. Free were collapsing in heat, Mick just wanted to leave Mott the Hoople, and Boz got fired from King Crimson. Suddenly, here we all were playing songs that we knew and we loved. It was just a wonderful feeling.

You mention Boz joined the fold a bit later. Were there any other prolific bassist you’d auditioned beforehand?

SK: *laughs* Yeah, there was! Rodger Hodgson from Supertramp!

No kidding!

SK: *laughs* Yeah, we had a list of 16 bass players and Rodger was one of them. He didn’t make it. He’s a nice guy. I think he thanked us in the end because Supertramp went onto be Supertramp. Bob Daisley, who went onto play with many heavy metal bands, Dio, a very good bass player, but didn’t quite fit for us. The other dozen or so, I don’t really remember them.

I didn’t know that about Bob. He was also with Ozzy!

SK: Yeah, Ozzy too!

You mentioned that Mick had the idea for “Can’t Get Enough” in Mott the Hoople, but Ian wasn’t digging it. Were there any other songs besides “Ready for Love” and “Can’t Get Enough” that had origins with your past bands?

SK: I don’t think so. “Movin’ On” was this sort of brother to “Can’t Get Enough”, and this gets a little technical. “Movin’ On”, I think was written in open C tuning, which for guitarists is an unusual tuning, but when Mick wrote “Can’t Get Enough”, apparently he wrote “Movin’ On” within that same timeframe. Whether or not he put it forward to Mott the Hoople, I don’t know. I know “Rock Steady” came out of a riff that Paul Rodgers wrote. Rodgers was a very good bass player. He used to play bass in his old band up in Middlesbrough. He was a bass player. He was just noodling around and he came up with this great riff and wrote it on the spot. All the other songs were written during the week we were down at Headley Grange, or just prior to that, so they weren’t taken from any previous projects, no.

Speaking of “Rock Steady”, that is my favorite song on the album. How fun was it to lay down that groove?

SK: Yeah, it just happened. It’s just one of those things. Once again, getting a little technical, it’s not a normal drumbeat. You’re playing quarter notes on a high hat instead of eights. Drumheads will probably know what I mean. I don’t know. Look, they asked Charlie Watts from The Stones once, God rest his soul, “Charlie, how did you come up with that drumbeat on “Honkey Tonk Woman”?” He said, “I don’t know. I just fucking play the drums.” That would be the short, if not rather rude, answer. I just picked it up, ran with it, and was very, very happy with it.

I’d like to send my condolences to both you and Paul on the passing of Mick Ralphs. When looking back on Bad Company’s catalog, are there any riffs, solos, or performances of his that particularly move you?

SK: Oh yeah. The first thing that comes to my mind is the solo on “Feel Like Makin’ Love”, as he wails away at the end. By the way, that song went on for at least another two minutes. We just couldn’t stop him. We just had to fade it. His solo on that, at the end, not the little jazzy solo in the middle of the song, but he wails away at the end. And “Bad Company”…”Bad Company” was written in E flat minor, which is not an easy key for a guitar player. If you play guitar, you know E is great. A is great. C, G major, all those, but E flat minor? Oh my God. To his credit, all the hundreds of times we played that song, he never once asked if he could have a guitar tuned down to E flat. He played a beautiful solo on “Bad Company”.

Mick was not a genius. I’ve worked with geniuses and they’re a pain in the ass. Paul Kossoff, rest his soul, was a genius guitarist, but he was so troubled and so insecure. You couldn’t rely on him. BB King said a great thing years ago in an interview. He said, “If you like a person, if you respect and like a fellow musician, I will take that over any genius in the band.” You can combine your soul. You can combine your likes and dislikes with each other. You can become as one. You look forward to playing with them rather than, “Oh my God. What musician is gonna walk through the dressing room door today?” You never knew with dear old Koss because one minute he’d be lucid and great, the next minute he’d be a wreck.

I’ve worked with other people who, I won’t name names, but they were a pain in the ass. You want to have fun when you play with people. Mick, I never once in all the 50 years, and I’m getting quite emotional because I gotta give a eulogy for him soon, but I never once had a cross word with Mick. When he had the stroke, we knew that would be it because his whole left side was impaired. He couldn’t talk properly. We just knew if he couldn’t play guitar, his life was pretty much over. I’m amazed he lingered as long as he did. “Shooting Star”, oh my God, his solo in “Shooting Star”. I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is he was admired and respected by his peers. He wasn’t in the Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page caliber, but he was a bloody good guitarist. I’m gonna miss him for a long, long time.

So you mean to tell me that the guitars in “Bad Company” were recorded in standard tuning?

SK: Yeah! *laughs* We recorded it in E flat minor because it was written by me and Paul on the piano. It was all the black notes! It was easy, dead easy to play on a piano, but a nightmare for a guitarist. Mick never once wavered. He always played it in E flat and never put a note wrong.

Something that should be noted about those classic ’70s Bad Company albums is that they were all self-produced by the band. What was that process like, and how important was it for the band to have full control over the final product?

SK: Oh, it was essential. I’ve never really fully understood the role of a producer. I understand a producer if you’re a new band. If you need someone who knows the ropes, who can coordinate the band with the engineer, the tape op. The albums that Bad Company produced were were produced literally by us. We had the final say as to what went on and what didn’t go on. We had the final say as to how a song was arranged and performed. I understand when Free was a little fledging band and we didn’t know the ropes, we had a guy, Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, produced our first couple of records. He was there at the helm to say, “Hey guys.”, a bit like a school principal in a way. “Hey guys, it’s not working. Have a break.”, or whatever.

He’d give you words of encouragement, but he’d never suggest a key change. He’d never suggest anything that was out of our comfort zone. The only thing Chris Blackwell ever did, much to his credit, was to make an edit on “All Right Now”. That was back in the days when you used a razorblade and you literally cut the 2 inch tape and you’d splice it together. Now, of course, with Pro Tools, you can do all that without anything, but he said, “It’s too long. “All Right Now” is about 6 minutes. It’s too long. There’s no way it’s gonna get on BBC. We’re gonna have to cut out some of the guitar solo.” Poor old Kossoff went, “No, no, no! Don’t do that!” He said, “We gotta do it. It’s gotta come in at under 3 minutes.”

He overruled us and he sent us out of the studio because it was a pretty horrible thing to listen to. Back in those days, you had to get the sound on the tape exactly where you wanted to cut it and where you wanted it to come back in. It took him about a half an hour, and then he called us. He said, “Alright, come back and listen to it.” It wasn’t a very good edit, but it got the job done and we got on Top of the Pops, which was the English version of The Dick Clark Show. Within three weeks, it was #2. It never got to #1, but it got to #2. We’ve always produced our own albums because we were the ones playing them. We were the ones writing the songs.

Bad Company embodied the concept of the ’70s arena rock band, selling out venues all over the globe. Off the top of your head, what were some of your favorite Bad Company gigs to play?

SK: I’ve always said Red Rocks was a lovely gig, out in Boulder, Colorado, because it’s such a magical place, perfect acoustics. Cleveland *laughs* the home of rock n’ roll! We had our very first show at a club called the Agora in Cleveland. I remember we did a gig there with Joe Walsh back in…several years ago now. Joe was from that area, so Bad Company and Joe Walsh, that was a lovely…that was about 20,000 people there, all on the grass. We always had a ball in Florida. Miami, Chicago, the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, we played there. It’s hard to say. New York was always tough. They’re quite a discerning audience in New York because every week some big name comes through there. New York audiences were a little tough, but if you got in the right part, you had a ball. Boston was very good. We loved playing in Boston. Memphis, Atlanta, another good gig. It’s hard to pick one that really stands out, but for sheer magical vibes, Red Rocks is pretty amazing.

Jumping forward, you’re still very active today, recording new music and making live appearances. Are there any projects in the future that fans should keep their eyes and ears out for?

SK: I’m in recovery and I’ve cowritten a rock opera about addiction. It’s in the works. It’s called Rock Bottom. We’re having a fundraiser in Boston in a couple of months time. We’re getting investors onboard. Theatre is a different world. It’s a very slow process, but that is something I’ve been working on now with my cowriters for a couple years. I’m gonna do another solo album, probably next year. I’ve got three solo albums out. I don’t tour because, I don’t know. Been there, done that. I’m not like Sting who just loves, loves to tour *laughs*. I’m quite friendly with Sting and I said, “Where are you gonna be in October?” He said, “I think I’m gonna be in Bangkok. Right now I’m in Helsinki, Finland.” I said, “Man, you’re the hardest working guy in show business. It’s just amazing!” I’ve been there, done that, and it’s time to settle down, literally settle down. I love playing and I do solo shows. I still love to do solo shows, but my days of playing in a group are pretty much in the rearview mirror.

Speaking of groups, anything new happening with Lonerider?

SK: Oh, wow! I wish *laughs*! That is a side project. We’ve done three albums and I think they’re amazing, but for some reason…Steve Overland, the singer, is in FM. He’s got his own band. Steve Morris is the most incredible guitar player. Chris Childs, the bass player, is a session guy. I’d love to tour with them! I’ve said I’m around, but it’s been six years since we’ve done the first album. We’ve done three now. We’ll just have to wait and see. I would love to tour with them. I think the albums are really, really good. if anyone is out there who hasn’t heard of Lonerider, just check ’em out. They’re very, very good.

For more information on Simon Kirke, click here. For more information on Bad Company, click here. For more information on Free, click here.