Bad Company was one of the biggest rock bands of the 1970s. The English rock group was formed in 1973 by singer Paul Rodgers, guitarist Mick Ralphs, bass player Boz Burrell, and drummer Simon Kirke.
Bad Company’s self-titled 1974 debut album introduced the world to them with a song of the same name. Yes, Bad Company had a theme song, but it didn’t start out that way.
Ahead of the band’s 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Rodgers, 75, appeared on Eddie Trunk’s Sirius XM show Trunk Nationto reveal it was Ralphs who came up with the idea to call the band Bad Company—but he got the name after Rodgers told him that was the name of a song he was writing.
Rodgers revealed that Ralphs dropped the phone when he told him about the song “Bad Company” he was working on. He claimed Ralphs said, “Yes, that's it! That's what we gotta call the band!’”
“And I said, ‘No, it's actually a song, you know, I'm just working on,’” Rodgers recalled. “And he said, ‘No, no, we've gotta call the band Bad Company. That's it!’
“He was just elated. It was great,” he added of his bandmate, who died in June 2025 at age 81.
In a video posted to Bad Company’s Facebook page, Rodgers said the band had struggled to come up with a name before deciding on Bad Company. “I had written the song and had called Mick up because we were looking for a name for the band,” he said. “And we would say things like The 4 Million Air Bubbles…or The Fury or something like that. Like all these names were rejected.”
Rodgers, who wrote the song “Bad Company” with Kirke, also told Trunk that the vocals for the iconic opening were recorded in a field under a full moon.
In a 2021 interview with Classic Rock, Rodgers and Kirke revealed that the “Bad Company” song was inspired by a movie about 19th-century outlaws.
“In late 1973, there was a Clint Eastwood western,” Kirke said in the interview. “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. It was a very romantic image, and Paul was very much enamored of that picture.”
“I pitched in a line here and there, and we helped each other with the middle eight,” he added of the songwriting process. “I think it was done in about an hour. It was basically a spaghetti western set to music, and it’s been our theme song ever since. I still love playing it to this day, and I’ve played it about 675 times.”
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