Bad Company – If You Needed Somebody

Bad Company’s biggest pop hit in eleven years was written before breakfast by two men who were not in the original band.

Terry Thomas woke up before his host did. He was staying at Brian Howe’s house while the two of them wrote songs for the next Bad Company album, and he kept a guitar in the bedroom. That morning he started picking at it and found the acoustic figure that opens If You Needed Somebody. When Howe got up, Thomas played it for him. Howe began singing over it more or less at once, and by Thomas’s recollection they took it to the studio and finished the song that same day.

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Neither man had anything to do with the Bad Company most people mean by the name. Paul Rodgers had left after 1982. When guitarist Mick Ralphs and drummer Simon Kirke regrouped in the mid-eighties they wanted to use a different name, and Atlantic Records would not hear of it. Howe was hired as the singer for Fame and Fortune in 1986, and it was Howe who brought in Thomas to produce the follow-up. That record, Dangerous Age, was made cheaply to settle a contract and sold close to a million copies. Suddenly the label wanted another one.

Success did not improve the mood. Howe later said he had tried to quit and that Atlantic talked him into staying to write the songs. “It wasn’t a happy band,” he recalled. He and Thomas wrote nearly all of Holy Water between them, working on the assumption that Ralphs and Kirke would not bring in enough material. Howe’s explanation was that the founders did not want to work. The founders’ view, as the label’s Derek Shulman described it, was that they did not much care for the new singer’s ego. Manager Bud Prager kept the two camps in the same room.

The Ballad Does the Selling

Atco released the album on June 12, 1990, and its title track went to No.1 on rock radio that summer. The label followed it in November with the ballad. Howe had written the lyric about wanting someone who has no interest in return, something he said had happened to him more than once, and it reached people the harder songs had not. Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart ranked it at No.2. More surprisingly, the Hot 100 carried it to No.16 in early 1991, the band’s first Top 40 single since Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy in 1979. The RIAA certified Holy Water platinum. The video, directed by Jim Hershleder, cuts between the band performing and a storyline about a young couple, with schoolroom scenes and an American flag flying outdoors.

The hit arrived just as the band came apart in public. Shortly after the album came out, Ralphs took a leave of absence and declined to tour. Howe’s version was that the guitarist resented having so little on the record. The label sent the band out anyway, with Geoff Whitehorn standing in on guitar for video shoots and for most of a long tour. So the group promoted its biggest pop single in over a decade without the one founder who had played on it besides the drummer.

They lasted one more studio album. Howe quit in 1994, Rodgers returned in 1998, and the reunited band has generally acted as if this period never took place. Howe, who died in 2020, remained proud of it for exactly the reason the others preferred to forget it: the record was made with half the band pulling the other way. That is the fair way to hear the song. It carries a famous name, and it was a real hit, written in a morning by a hired singer and a producer who were doing the job the name required. Calling it something other than Bad Company would have been more honest, and it would not have changed how good the chorus is.