Success is often a matter of timing – and many of music’s most essential voices nearly vanished before they ever found their audience.
While we tend to view the rise of legendary bands as an inevitable march toward greatness, the reality is usually far more fragile. Most of the groups featured here faced a specific '"'crossroads' moment – marked by financial ruin, creative exhaustion, or a total lack of industry support – where calling it quits seemed like the only logical option.
However, through a mix of stubbornness and singular strokes of luck, these artists stayed the course just long enough to reach their breakthrough. Here, we examine the bands that almost didn't make it and the crucial turning points that saved their careers and secured their place in history.
Eleven bands that turned failure into success
1. Fleetwood Mac
Originally a British blues band, Fleetwood Mac found themselves depleted at the end of 1974, without a guitarist and male singer – a natural moment, perhaps, for the group to disband. They were left only with Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie and John McVie. While Fleetwood was scouting studios in Los Angeles, he heard a track by the American folk rock duo Buckingham Nicks – guitarist and singer Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks – and invited them to join the band.
The introduction of Buckingham Nicks to the band gave it a more pop rock sound, and created the unique meld of influences Fleetwood Mac became known for. In 1975, Fleetwood Mac released a self-titled album and then in 1977 Rumours took the world by storm.
With breakdowns in romantic relationships between Buckingham/Nicks and the McVies (with Mick Fleetwood going through his own divorce as well), the subsequent years brought turmoil of their own, but the band continued to make music together.
2. Rush
Intended to be their breakthrough album, Rush’s 1975 release Caress of Steel was a commercial flop, with a tour of smaller venues and poor sales. They then faced pressure from their record label to become more commercially friendly to become accessible for more audiences, but they ignored these requests.
Their next album 2112 featured a 20-minute title track divided into seven sections – a commercial nightmare, in theory, but it was an unexpectedly enormous hit, saving them from forced retirement.
3. AC/DC
Seven months after the 1979 release of Highway to Hell (the band’s sixth studio album), AC/DC frontman Bon Scott died of alcohol poisoning. Members briefly considered quitting after this tragedy, but Scott’s parents persuaded them to continue, saying he would have wanted them to keep on making music together.
The Australian rock band then recruited English singer Brian Johnson and recorded Back in Black, which quickly became the second best-selling album of all time – an unadulterated success. Mr and Mrs Scott, the rock world salutes you.
4. Queen
Before Sheer Heart Attack made them stars at the tail end of 1974, Queen was a band on the brink of bankruptcy. During the making of their first two albums, Queen (1973) and 1974's Queen II, Freddie Mercury and co. were living on a pittance, and their management company refused to give them the money they needed for basic equipment.
Following a disastrous tour supporting Mott the Hoople where Brian May contracted hepatitis and nearly lost his arm to gangrene, the band seriously considered calling it quits. It was only the 'make or break' success of the October 1974 single 'Killer Queen' that convinced them they had a future.
5. The Police
The Police were a 'fake' punk band formed by veteran musicians (Sting and Andy Summers) who were struggling to find a place in the 1977 London scene. Their early singles flopped, and they were so poor they famously shot a chewing gum commercial just to pay the rent. (It was for that advert, incidentally, that the trio adopted their iconic blond highlights).
The band were on the verge of splitting until drummer Stewart Copeland's brother Miles heard a demo of 'Roxanne', a song Sting had penned after observing the prostitutes outside the seedy Paris hotel were the band were billeted. Copeland took the song to A&M Records, secured a deal, and the band’s trajectory changed overnight.
6. Joy Division
Before they became the poster-boy icons for the gloomier end of post-punk, Joy Division were a loud, somewhat directionless punk band called Warsaw. They recorded an entire debut album for RCA that they ended up hating so much they blocked its release. Frustrated by the 'sanitized' sound the label gave them and feeling like they were failing to capture their live intensity, they were close to dissolving. It was only their meeting with Tony Wilson and producer Martin Hannett – who helped them find their signature 'cold' sound for 1979's Unknown Pleasures – that saved the band.
Have a listen to 'Warsaw', a song from the band's Warsaw era, below. You can hear the Joy Division sound coming, but it's not quite there yet...
7. Pulp
They would later become one of the defining bands of mid-'90s Britpop and beyond... but the early years of Sheffield's Pulp were plagued with failure. After their second album Freaks – which had been recorded in one week and with a minuscule budget – Jarvis Cocker announced he was leaving Sheffield to move to London to study film at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
‘In 1987, I had been out of school for over five years and realised that my life was going nowhere,’ Cocker told the Guardian. ‘The intervening years had been spent on the dole while being a member of a very unsuccessful band. I decided it was time to get out while I could.’
This would have been a natural point for the group to disband and cut their losses, but Pulp guitarist Russell Senior encouraged Cocker to keep it going while he was studying in London. A few minor successes followed, with the lead single from their next album becoming NME’s single of the week. Once they moved over to Island Records in 1992, they found mainstream success. Their biggest hit ‘Common People’ was released in 1995, almost 17 years after the band first formed.
8. U2
U2 experienced a challenging couple of years between their second and third albums. Bono, The Edge and Larry Mullen Jr had become involved in a Christian group called the Shalom Fellowship, which led them to question whether they could consolidate their faith with the lifestyle of a rock band. Bono and The Edge considered quitting, but eventually decided to quit Shalom instead.
U2's second album October was released with spiritual themes at its heart, and was not a resounding success. The band ran out of money and felt unsupported by their record label – but decided to turn it around. Significant musical breakthroughs occurred thereafter, working on their next album War together at a rented cottage in Howth, a fishing village near Dublin.
9. Radiohead
After the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead suffered from burnout, and Thom Yorke with writer’s block. ‘I was a complete f****** mess,’ he told the Guardian. ‘Just going a certain way for a long, long, long, long time, and not being able to stop or look back or consider where I was, at all. For, like, 10 years. And not being able to connect with anything. Basically becoming unhinged. Completely unhinged.’ He even wanted to change the band’s name to separate any new work from what came before.
He bought a house in Cornwall and spent time walking on the cliffs and playing the piano, which seemed to reset him. Becoming interested in electronic music, Radiohead then experimented with electronic instruments in their next album Kid A, with these new influences incorporated in their music thereafter.
- Jonny Greenwood: from Radiohead to some of cinema's most unsettling scores
- These 11 albums have been pretty much disowned by their creators
10. Red Hot Chili Peppers
After guitarist John Frusciante developed a heroin addiction and abruptly quit the band in 1992, a few difficult years followed for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band were then joined by Dave Navarro, after he worked through his own addictions. Lead vocalist Anthony Kiedis then relapsed into heroin addiction himself.
Without Frusciante, the band wrote songs at a much slower pace. Their sixth album, One Hot Minute, was released in 1995 after several delays. With a much darker sound, the album grappled with Anthony Kiedis’s addiction and the recent death of loved ones, including ‘Tearjerker’ about Kurt Cobain and ‘Transcending’ about River Phoenix.
In 1998, Navarro left the band and Frusciante was welcomed back after he left rehab. They then released Californication – their most successful album.
11. No Doubt
The release of No Doubt's 1992 self-titled debut album and accompanying tour was a challenging time, with the band unsupported by their record label. Both album and tour were considered a commercial failure. Gabriel Gonzalez left the band that year, and Eric Stefani began to withdraw from the group, eventually leaving in 1994 to resume an animation career working on The Simpsons. Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal also ended their long-term romantic relationship in 1994.
In 1995, No Doubt released The Beacon Street Collection, outtakes of previous recording sessions, on their own label. With a more raw sound, it sold more than three times as many as its predecessor.
The band was sublicensed by their former record label to Trauma Records, who went on to release Tragic Kingdom, much of which focused on the relationship between Kanal and Stefani. This album launched them into mainstream commercial success.
All pics: Getty Images
