“The record company threw the CD and said, ‘Not only are there no singles on this record, there’s no album tracks’”: Gavin Rossdale recalls record labels not believing in what was to become Bush’s most well-known album

Gavin Rossdale of Bush performs onstage at the 2024 iHeartRadio ALTer EGO Presented by Capital One at the Honda Center on January 13, 2024 in Anaheim, California.

Sixteen Stone can comfortably be regarded as Bush’s most popular album, with three tracks – Comedown, Machinehead, and Glycerine – entering the US Billboard Hot 100 and clinching the number 8 spot on GW's 2014 list of 50 iconic albums that defined 1994. Yet, as Gavin Rossdale reveals in an interview with Billy Corgan on his The Magnificent Others podcast, label executives at Disney’s Hollywood Records did not seem to believe in the album’s potential.

“What happened is, we delivered the record that was Sixteen Stone to them. The story is, according to the guy from our label, Rob Kahane, that at the record company, they threw the CD and said, ‘Not only are there no singles on this record, there’s no album tracks.’