Bad Company – Holy Water

The comeback that kept Bad Company’s name alive was written by the singer and his producer, and the band has spent the decades since leaving it out of the story.

In the summer of 1990, the song at the top of Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart carried Bad Company’s name, and neither of the two founders still in the band had written it. Holy Water came from Brian Howe, the Portsmouth singer hired in 1986 to replace Paul Rodgers, and Terry Thomas, the producer Howe had recruited two years later. It arrived from a version of the band that fans had shrugged at only four years earlier. And the guitarist playing the riff in its video was not the man credited on the album.

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The name itself had been a negotiation. Rodgers walked away after 1982’s Rough Diamonds, and when Mick Ralphs and Simon Kirke regrouped in 1986 they wanted to start over under a new name. Atlantic Records wanted Bad Company, and Atlantic won. The first record with Howe, Fame and Fortune, leaned on keyboards and softer songs, and buyers stayed away. Howe then brought in Thomas, who later said the label treated the follow-up, Dangerous Age, as a cheap contractual obligation. It sold close to a million copies anyway, and Billboard’s rock chart placed its single No Smoke Without a Fire at No.4.

Success did not make the band any happier. Howe tried to quit as the next album took shape, and Atlantic talked him out of it with a promise to look after him if he stayed and wrote the songs. He and Thomas assumed Ralphs and Kirke would not bring enough material, so they set out to write a full album between them, working every day and scrapping ideas until the songs held. The title track began as a correction. Howe said he loved the feel of No Smoke Without a Fire but thought they had never quite landed it, and Holy Water was his second attempt. The founders’ writing credits were few, and the album closes on a Ralphs and Thomas co-write and a short Kirke song.

The man in the rain was not the man on the record

Atco, the Atlantic imprint Derek Shulman had taken over in 1988, released Holy Water on June 12, 1990, and the title track went to radio first. Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart took it to No.1 that summer. The pop chart was cooler, and the Hot 100 ranked the single no higher than No.89. The crossover came with the follow-up, If You Needed Somebody, which the Hot 100 placed at No.16, Bad Company’s biggest Top 40 hit since Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy in 1979. The Billboard 200 ranked the album as high as No.35, and the RIAA certified it platinum in 1991.

By then the band on screen was already not the band on the album. Director Mark Rezyka, a fixture of the era’s hard-rock video circuit, filmed Holy Water at Newhall Ranch, California, on June 1 and 2, 1990. It was a night shoot on an open-air stage, back-lit by sweeping spotlights, with rain machines soaking everyone on it. The lead guitarist getting drenched is Geoff Whitehorn, formerly of Crawler, standing in for Ralphs. Accounts of why Ralphs stepped away differ. Howe said he was sore about the songwriting; other accounts put it down to personal and family matters. Whitehorn played most of the long tour that followed, Dave Colwell joined on second guitar, and Ralphs rejoined later in the run.

The arrangement held for one more album. Here Comes Trouble gave the Howe lineup another rock-radio No.1 in 1992 with How About That, and Howe left in 1994. When Rodgers returned in 1998, the band’s own telling of its history began skipping the Howe years, and Kirke has said publicly that the change of singer damaged the name. Howe kept the song. He recut Holy Water in a reworked arrangement for his solo album Circus Bar, and he died on May 6, 2020, at 66. Ralphs died on June 23, 2025, the same year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Bad Company.

Shulman’s verdict, years later, was that Holy Water was not a quintessential Bad Company record but a big success all the same. Both halves are true, and the title track is the reason. A name Atlantic had insisted on, carried by a singer the founders never warmed to and a producer they did not hire, kept Bad Company on American rock radio into the 1990s. Howe called it a record “made against all of the odds.” The reunion that later set his era aside had a working band to come back to because of it.