Foreigner

Guitarist and songwriter Mick Jones briefly became a footloose Englishman in New York City when The Leslie West Band imploded in 1976. Yet he used the setback to form a hot new group, the Anglo-American sextet Foreigner, with the band’s initial line-up also featuring vocalist Lou Gramm and ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald.

Jones’ self-belief soon paid dividends, and the group quickly perfected their brand of punchy yet melodic mainstream rock, with their self-titled 1977 debut album going multi-platinum on the back of some of the best Foreigner songs, among them Feels Like The First Time and Cold As Ice. Swift to capitalise, successive albums such as Double Vision and Head Games kept the band in touch with the upper echelons of the Billboard 200, while 1981’s classic 4 – featuring the signature ballad Waiting For A Girl Like You – turned Foreigner into fully-fledged international stars.

Remarkably, the subsequent, seven-million-selling hits collection Records again upped the ante, with the band finally approaching critical mass with 1984’s Agent Provocateur and its chart-topping power ballad, I Want To Know What Love Is. Foreigner have since gone on to rank among the world’s biggest-selling rock bands, with worldwide sales of a staggering 80 million albums under their belt, and they remain a stadium-sized proposition to this day.