“Most guys are closet outlaws: we wish we could have done this, done that. “Only an Englishman would ask that,” he says. When the first Bad Company album came out, the song resonated with their audience, too, and was quickly established as a staple of the band’s live show.īut why would people respond so strongly to a song whose meaning was about 19th-century outlaws? After all, send a Bad Company crowd to the old West and it’s highly unlikely than many of them would have been wearing black and rolling revolvers around their index fingers. The song was both a lament and a celebration, a haunting hymn to the power of the imagination to transport four young Englishmen 100 years back in time, and several thousand miles westward. I still love playing it to this day, and I’ve played it about 675 times.”Į flat minor is not an easy key for a guitarist, and the group tried moving it to E minor, “but it didn’t have the same soul as in E flat. It was basically a spaghetti western set to music, and it’s been our theme song ever since. I pitched in a line here and there, and we helped each other with the middle eight. “I thought: ‘Wow.’ It’s not in C major, it’s not in G it’s not in those everyday chords. It might not have been much, but Kirke was smitten by what he heard. He had this piano phrase, and the lines ‘ Company, always on the run/Destiny is the rising sun/I was born with a six-gun in my hand/Behind the gun I’ll make my final stand.’ That’s all he had.” He was playing in E flat minor, which is quite a hypnotic scale. “He had this huge Yamaha grand piano which dominated the living room. One day, as Bad Company were working out what they were going to be, Kirke paid a visit to Rodgers’s cottage in Surrey. It was a very romantic image, and Paul was very much enamoured of that picture.” “We had this idea about being what they called long riders, who rode across the plains in their long coats, with Winchesters in holsters and tumbleweed blowing across the plain. “In late 1973 there was a Clint Eastwood western,” Kirke says, naming A Fistful Of Dollars, though he must mean High Plains Drifter, which came out in the second half of that year.
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