Guitarist Mick Ralphs, who died June 23, 2025, epitomized the no-nonsense sound of Bad Company. During their mid-’70s heyday, the members of the band defined the notion of an English hard-rock supergroup. Paul Rodgers, an aggressive powerhouse frontman, inflected his smooth vocals with soul, and drummer Simon Kirke and bassist Boz Burrell comprised a thumping rhythm section. But Ralphs provided the transcendence, turning in rock-steady power chording and sparse, tight riffs.
All four players were experienced by the time Bad Company took form in 1973. Ralphs had been with Mott the Hoople—that band had secured David Bowie as producer and scored big with “All the Young Dudes”—but the glam direction wasn’t to Ralphs’ liking. With the band Free, Rodgers and Kirke had racked up a hit with the enduring “All Right Now,” only to dismantle the group when guitarist Paul Kossoff got swept up into the drug scene. Burrell had been a member of King Crimson. Bad Company allied with Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant and signed with Swan Song, the Zep’s then-new label, achieving instant recognition as a top attraction in America with some of the finest hard-rock hits ever— the straight-ahead, swaggering macho-rock standards “Bad Company,” “Can’t Get Enough,” “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” “Ready for Love” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy.”
“The original Bad Company was big, and everything that goes with success was there,” Ralphs later said. But despite its pedigree, the popular British band eventually fell prey to recording and heavy touring burnout after six albums. Rodgers went his own way in 1982 and, though the move was never formally announced, the band fell apart. Ralphs kept a relatively low profile—forming and disbanding his own group, producing an album for an obscure young act, surfacing to play with David Gilmour on the Pink Floyd guitarist’s solo tour in 1984. Then Ralphs and Kirke found their second wind and soldiered on as Bad Company.
“Bad Company was a very tight, insulated unit, and I really didn’t know anybody else after the band finished,” the affable Ralphs explained prior to a concert at Denver’s McNichols Arena in 1986. “So, when I finally got back into writing, I found myself gravitating toward Simon and Boz. But we had no name at that point. Someone said, ‘Why don’t you just call it Bad Company and be done with it?’ I was still hearing us on American radio a lot, and Simon and I had worked for that name as much as anybody, so it was okay by us. We didn’t want it to seem like a cheap scam, so we approached Boz to tour with us.”
Brian Howe served as lead singer from 1986-1994, but the public’s insatiable demand for the reuniting of classic rock supergroups prompted the original Bad Company members to reunite in 1999, 16 years after their demise, to relive their rock ’n’ roll fantasy. Propelled by Ralphs’ full-sounding block-chord structures, the act included a tour stop at Denver’s Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre. “We’re a bit more grown-up now, and it’s a more realistic scene,” Ralphs said. “We’re just doing what we do, hoping people will tell us what they think.”
Configurations of Bad Company continued to perform intermittently during the 21st century, although Burrell suffered a fatal heart attack in 2006. Ralphs suffered a stroke days after his final performance with the group in October 2015 and remained bedridden until his death nearly a decade later.
