Brian Howe

July 22, 1953 – May 6, 2020

Former Bad Company and Ted Nugent band frontman Brian Howe has died of a cardiac arrest. He was 66. Born in Portsmouth, the singer’s first band was called Shy (not to be confused by the Midlands-based group of the same name). He then replaced Bruce Ruff in the NWOBHM act White Spirit, before hooking up with Nugent for the 1984 album Penetrator.

Howe was recommended to Mick Ralphs and Simon Kirke by Mick Jones of Foreigner the following year, when the pair reactivated the Bad Company name. Against the odds, four Bad Co studio albums with Howe returned the band to platinum-selling form.

“Almost without exception, everybody that I knew in the business told me: ‘Brian… taking over from Paul Rodgers, you’ve just fucked yourself. Why would you even consider doing that?’” he told Classic Rock in 2014. “I just wouldn’t let them be right, which provided a focus and caused me to work a lot harder.”

Howe was a plain-speaker with a colourful, irreverent sense of humour. Even decades after his exit from Bad Co, he resented the belief that from a compositional sense he had carried Ralphs and Kirke in in the band – 1990’s Holy Water was pieced together by the singer and producer Terry Thomas, with minimal input from the guitarist and drummer – and continued to be frustrated by being erased from the group’s history by Paul Rodgers.

“Am I proud of helping to keep the Bad Company name alive during the 1990s?” Howe mused when asked whether the good times with them outweigh the bad. “Of course I am. We worked our way back up to arena-headlining status… That’s one hell of achievement.”

Nugent, Richard Marx and Jeff Scott Soto were among those to pay tribute to Howe following the news of his pasing.