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Louder
Louder
Entertainment
Mark Blake

“We had been on the road pretty heavily and we were burned”: How Bad Company karate chopped their way through burnout to make their great ‘lost’ album

Bad Company performing onstage in 1977.

In the summer of 1977, a journalist for US rock magazine Circus interviewed Paul Rodgers at Bad Company’s Palm Springs HQ. The group were touring their new album, Burnin’ Sky, and had rented houses in the California resort, from where they’d fly back and forth in a private jet.

When Circus’s writer arrived at Rodgers’ place, he found the singer waiting to have a karate lesson. In fact, Rodgers was photographed wearing his karate robe, known as a gi, on the cover of Burnin’ Sky. On Bad Company’s last tour the group had lived up to their outlaw reputation, but the singer insisted he was a changed man now. “I’m working at keeping fit,” he said, “because people can get very messed up on tour.”

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