After the release of Inside Information, Lou Gramm decided to follow his solo career, leaving FOREIGNER on ice for a while. So Mick Jones decided to recruit new vocalist Johnny Edwards to get the band into top gear again. Mark Crumpton finds out why their new album Unusual Heat is regarded by 'The Duke' as their best since 4.
DIRTY WHITE BOYS
What were the essential ingredients about Johnny Edward's voice that appealed to you?
"In a funny way, when I heard Johnny's voice I got the same shiver that I had when I heard Lou's voice way back. I really had to get to meet Johnny, and it wasn't an easy situation, because he was involved with another band at the time. But when you get that instinct inside, you know it's going to be worth going through all the shit, and whatever you have to go through, to get there. It was a stone I had to unturn. When I first met him, I knew he had an inner strength. I mean he can get pretty crazy, but he's, like, balanced. He takes being in foreigner very seriously and we've pulled a lot out of him and he's pulled a lot out of himself. Johnny is a strange personality. He really comes alive on stage, and that, for us, is new and exciting. He's got that raucous edge, but he's also got that incredible tone in the middle edge. That is the thing that originally turned me on to his voice."You didn't want to get a big name in or anything like that?
"No, I think that wouldn't have worked. This band has got too much off an identity to have somebody with another identity come in. It would be strange. I tend to draw from experiences that I've had. When I did the VAN HALEN album 5150 they had the same situation, and I didn't know what to expect there. When I look back on that, it gave me a bit more confidence, knowing that I had to find the right element to make it work and not just to settle for somebody that was going to be a passenger. This is a four-way band situation."
How long did it take until you found him as a replacement for Lou Gramm? It must have been wrenching when he left the band.
"It was wrenching really more a few years ago, when it started. We were delaying the inevitable, I think. I did try at one point to have a lot of patience with the situation, because, originally when we talked about doing things, I knew Lew wanted to do his solo thing and I wanted to write outside the band too. Originally, we thought we'd be able to work around that. What happened in the end was we were working more around Lou's solo career. It just wasn't working anymore, and I really started getting annoyed about it. Being in Foreigner is a serious thing. You've got to make commitments. The spirit of the band was really sinking low and everybody was getting very frustrated with the whole situation."
Did that show on your last album Inside Information?
"Yes, I think it did because Lou was just a passing visitor on that album. It all became very businesslike!"
Foreigner have always had a very wide-ranging audience. Is that because you put more of an emphasis on the way you actually approach writing the songs?
"I think that's the basis of it. Songs have always been very important to me. Songwriting is something I learn as I go along. It takes me in different directions. Basically, it comes from one underlying thing. It's really getting the soul and emotion across. You've got to get that 'something' in a song that moves people and that's really what this bands all about!"
What are the most inspiring songs you've actually written?
"From 'Hot Blooded' to 'Waiting for a Girl Like You,' from 'Jukebox Hero' to 'Urgent,' from 'Cold as Ice' to 'Feels Like the First Time,' which was the first song I wrote with the band, I've had incredible moments with all these songs and all those albums. I've discovered along the way that writing songs can sometimes really take a toll on you emotionally, because something from you has to go in there, but then you kind of get it back in the feeling that you've achieved at the end of it."
You are regarded as somewhat of a painstaking perfectionist who likes to spend a lot of time getting things right. When do you decide to stop. before losing the initial excitement of a song and how much material actually gets discarded in the recording process?
"With Unusual Heat we went through a lot of stuff, and we ended up with about 13 or 14 songs which were we gradually whittled down to 11. It's the first time we've ever had 11 songs on a Foreigner album, it's always been 10. When you hear the album several times, you hear different things. We do everything in stages to get the basic feel of a song. Then some parts we keep, some we improve on. There's a lot of dimensions on this album. Something that's always made Foreigner a little different, not one dimensional. We do experiment, we do go into different areas."
Seven albums (six of them with Lou), is the direction of the band going to change with the addition of Johnny in the vocal department?
"We're like a young new band. I think my aim with this is to regain the ground that I feel we may have lost a little bit. It's all been so frustrating. I've wanted to make an album like this for a long time, this to me is the strongest rock vibe we've had since the 4 album. We want to re-establish ourselves and gain our rightful place back again."
What aspirations, if any, do you have for the band in the 1990s? You sold something in the region of 30 million albums worldwide. Are there any musical goals you'd like to achieve?
"I've been lucky to be involved with a few different people. From working with the likes of Van Halen to the extreme of working with someone like BILLY JOEL. What interests me is that, first of all, I make new friends. What I like to do is keep learning, and I learn from all these things that I do outside of the band. Now I've rediscovered within the band a lot of things that I'd sought to put aside and forgotten. Johnny's arrival has helped to bring them out in me again. Now we're back with a bang and we're committed to one thing. Now we can jam again. We can, kind of, have fun doing it. I think now we have the opportunity to reach the height that I always saw this band reaching. Johnny's a great inspiration!"
Mark Crampton
Riff Raff
August 1991
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