During a recent chat with Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk, Lou Gramm talked about Mick Jones sabotaging his supergroup.
The singer had a supergroup named Shadow King in the early ’90s. The band had members like Vivian Campbell and Bruce Turgon, but despite the excitement around their debut album, it sold poorly. Gramm believes the record label, Atlantic Records, failed to promote the band properly.
Gramm also suspects that Jones may have influenced the label to pull back support for Shadow King. He said, “I was told that, just before the album came out, Mick [Jones] had a talk with (label co-founder) Ahmet Ertegun, the chairman of WEA (Warner-Elektra-Atlantic) and whoever at the time was the president of Atlantic, and told them that if Shadow King achieved success, then Lou will never come back with Foreigner.”
The musician still saw Shadow King as a way to start the next phase of his career after Foreigner. “We were ready to go on the road for the long haul because we were so stoked about the material, attitude and imagery of the band,” he previously explained to UCR. “Atlantic [Records] did not do us right.”
He also recalled hearing about a meeting between Jones and the label soon after their album was released, “The crux of the meeting was that if Atlantic got behind Shadow King and promoted them and they had a long successful tour backing the first album, that Lou would never come back to Foreigner. Ever. And he’s right.”
The changing music scene and the rise of grunge probably affected their radio experience, but Lou also thinks other factors may have played a role. He shared, “We’d go to radio stations and talk about the band and the album. They’d say, ‘Can we play a cut?’ They’d pick a cut on the album and play about 35 or 40 seconds of it and they’d start fading it out.”
“We were like, ‘What the f*ck?’ It just wasn’t right. I think they were being told what to do by the powers that be. We had no gigs, no promotion and the next thing that happened was that Vivian was asked to join Def Leppard. He gave his notice,” Gramm added.
Shadow King broke up at the end of 1991 and never made another album. Gramm rejoined Foreigner the next year.
