It’s a tale as old as time: an artist makes it big, then spends years agonising over their next magnum opus, spending colossal amounts on studio fees, producers, accommodation and – in some cases – certain creative indulgences. Sometimes the gamble pays off, but more often than not, the album flops, leaving the musicians in trouble.
Here are 11 of the most expensive albums ever made.
11 of the most expensive albums ever made
1. Fleetwood Mac: Tusk (1979)
In 1978, Fleetwood Mac set about recording the follow-up to Rumours, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. This would be a daunting task for any band, but for a group as volatile and debauched as the Mac were at the time, it was an elephantine undertaking.
Talking to Uncut in 2003, Christine McVie recalled the excess that characterised the sessions: "Recording Tusk was quite absurd. The studio contract rider for refreshments was like a telephone directory. Exotic food delivered to the studio, crates of champagne.
"And it had to be the best, with no thought of what it cost. Stupid. Really stupid. Somebody once said that with the money we spent on champagne on one night, they could have made an entire album. And it’s probably true."
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Not only were the band living the high life, but relationships became so strained that the three songwriters – Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie – were effectively working on solo projects, with Buckingham’s control-freak tendencies threatening to derail the sessions completely.
The album ended up costing over a million to make – far more than Rumours – and sold less than half as many as its predecessor.
2. Pink Floyd: The Wall (1979)
Pink Floyd’s 1979 double-album The Wall faced problems from the start. Initial demo sessions at the band’s own Britannia Row studios in London were fraught, with producer Bob Ezrin acting as an intermediary between bassist and songwriter Roger Waters and the rest of the band.
What’s more, the studio had had to be upgraded as its equipment was deemed unfit for purpose. Not that the band could afford the refit – bad management had left them facing huge tax bills; the four members of the band were even advised to leave the UK to avoid bankruptcy. They reconvened in April 1979 at Super Bear Studios near Nice, France.
During sessions, tensions between band members escalated to the point where Waters and keyboardist Richard Wright’s relationship totally broke down. Meanwhile, things were becoming strained between Waters and guitarist David Gilmour.
“During the making of The Wall, we had some pretty heavy arguments,” Gilmour later told Uncut. Sessions dragged on, and studio costs rocketed. In August ’79, with the band on holiday, their increasingly desperate record label Columbia offered them an improved contract if they delivered the album by Christmas.
Waters booked studio time in LA and suggested they return from holiday 10 days early. Wright refused, incensing Waters, who threatened not to release The Wall unless Wright left. The keyboardist quit but was later employed as a salaried member of the touring band for the subsequent tour – a production so costly that it reportedly left his former bandmates $400,000 in debt.
While The Wall’s incredible sales – with 30 million sold, it remains the biggest-selling double-album in history – made up for any losses, the album was the beginning of the end for the prog behemoths.
3. Meat Loaf: Dead Ringer (1981)
Nobody expected Meat Loaf’s debut album, Bat Out Of Hell (1977), to be a hit, but when it became a worldwide phenomenon, the pressures of success soon took their toll. Meat Loaf was constantly on the road, wrecking his voice by playing six shows a week. Burnt out, the singer threw himself off stage during the encore of a gig in Ottawa, Canada, falling 20 feet, breaking his leg and bringing the tour to a grinding halt.
Bat Out Of Hell writer Jim Steinman crafted a suitably bombastic follow-up, initially titled Renegade Angel, but after months of working on it, the vocalist was unable to come up with the goods. "It was psychosomatic at first, because I didn’t want to do it," Meat Loaf later said. "[But] I freaked myself out so bad that when I tried to do it I couldn’t."
Steinman ended up recording the album himself, after renaming it Bad For Good, but without Meat Loaf’s powerful lungs powering it, it didn’t have anywhere near the impact of Bat Out Of Hell. A role in the 1980 comedy Roadie, plus massage therapy and healthier living, got Meat Loaf back on track, and he eventually recorded a second album of new Steinman songs, Dead Ringer, in 1981.
No expense was spared, with musicians including Cher, Mick Ronson, Nicky Hopkins and Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan of The E Street Band, but Dead Ringer was too little, too late and sold just two million copies, a fraction of the 40 million-plus copies of Bat Out Of Hell he’d shifted. Twelve years later, he and Steinman reunited for Bat Out Of Hell II, a massive hit that put Meat back on top.
4. Def Leppard: Hysteria (1987)
You can’t fault Def Leppard’s ambition. Preparing to make their fourth album, Hysteria, the intention was to make a hard rock version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller – a globe-conquering album where every song could be a single. And no expense was spared in trying.
"Four and a half million dollars!" guitarist Phil Collen laughed in a 2012 interview with Music Radar, reflecting on the recording cost. "Which was ludicrous. Who knows what that would be in today’s dollars? We had to sell three million copies just to break even, and for a while, we didn’t know if we would."
From the outset, the band was up against it. Work on the album began in early 1984, but trusted producer Mutt Lange wasn’t available. They turned to Jim Steinman, but after months of work, it was clear that producer and band weren’t seeing eye to eye. They scrapped the sessions and began again, producing the album themselves. But on 31 December 1984, tragedy struck when drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car accident.
His bandmates stood by him and, incredibly, Allen taught himself to drum again using a drum kit with electronic pedals. Lange returned in the summer of 1985, and Hysteria was eventually finished in January 1987. But did the album recoup its massive costs? In this case, yes – Hysteria sold over 20 million copies worldwide and included seven hit singles. Sometimes you’ve got to think big.
5. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless (1991)
According to My Bloody Valentine lynchpin Kevin Shields, the band’s label – London-based independent Creation Records – thought their second album, Loveless, would take five days to record. "When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, they freaked," said Shields.
Loveless ended up taking roughly two-and-a-half years to complete, with sessions taking place at 19 different studios and costs estimated at £250,000. While this is small change to many of the acts on this list, for Creation boss Alan McGee at the turn of the ’90s, it was a fortune. According to McGee, the cost of the album pushed Creation to the brink of bankruptcy and contributed to his nervous breakdown.
Legend has it that Shields named tracks on the album such as ‘Soon’, ‘When You Sleep’ and ‘To Here Knows When’ after his responses to an increasingly frantic McGee’s phone calls asking for updates on when the album would be finished. Shields would later claim the budget was exaggerated, but whatever the cost, Loveless ended up being an indie hit (100,000 sold in the UK alone) and a pivotal influence on future generations of moody indie noisemakers.
6. Happy Mondays: Yes Please! (1992)
In early 1992, Factory Records was in deep financial trouble and needed hits fast. Mancunian indie-groovers Happy Mondays were their shining hope – the band’s previous album, 1990’s Pills ‘n’ Thrills & Bellyaches had sold almost half a million in the UK alone and made inroads on charts worldwide.
But with frontman Shaun Ryder struggling with heroin addiction and his bandmates also enthusiastic hedonists, they were in no shape to record a follow-up.
Factory had the bright idea of sending the band to Blue Wave Studios (owned by singer Eddy Grant) in Barbados to record. There, alas, the band’s drug use escalated, with things getting so out of hand that they ended up pawning the studio’s furniture and recording equipment to fund their habit. Keyboardist Paul Davis wrote off three hire cars during their 63-day stint on the island; the band’s ‘freaky dancer’ Bez overturned a Jeep and broke his arm… three times; Ryder literally sold the shirt off his back.
Somehow, an album’s worth of backing tracks was recorded among the madness, but Ryder was too incapacitated to write or sing any lyrics. On the band’s return to England, Ryder was admitted into a detox centre and then spent two weeks recording vocals on the backing tracks.
Though some of the band have since claimed Yes Please is their favourite Mondays album, the general public didn’t share their enthusiasm – on its release in September 1992, it limped to No 14 in the UK album chart and sold just 50,000 copies. Factory Records went into administration two months after.
7. Garth Brooks: In... The Life of Chris Gaines (1999)
In terms of sales, US country star Garth Brooks was untouchable in the ’90s, releasing seven albums that each sold millions. It seemed that middle America couldn’t get enough of his polished-to-a-sheen, honky tonk arena rock.
But even middle-of-the-road country rockers yearn to be taken seriously as artists eventually and in 1999, Brooks hung up his cowboy hat, threw on an emo wig, grew a soul patch and dressed in leathers to take on the fictional persona of edgy Australian alt. rocker Chris Gaines.
The idea was that Garth Brooks in...The Life of Chris Gaines was the soundtrack to the film The Lamb, about the Aussie rocker, set to be released in 2000 but which never materialised. Brooks appeared as both himself and Gaines on SNL, shot footage as Gaines for a VH1 Behind The Music special and concocted an elaborate backstory for his alter ego.
While Brooks was too big to totally fail (the album sold two million in the US, despite costing a rumoured $5 million to make), these conceptual hijinks went down like a lead balloon with his mainstream audience and The Lamb was quietly put to one side.
8. Michael Jackson: Invincible (2001)
The tenth and final studio album by Michael Jackson is thought to be the most expensive ever made, with an alleged budget of nearly $30 million. Jackson began recording material for the album in October 1997 and finished it just eight weeks before its release, in October 2001.
Looking to rejuvenate his career, the singer embraced a contemporary R&B sound, calling on some of the hottest producers on the planet, including Rodney Jerkins, Teddy Riley and Babyface.
With money seemingly no object, Jackson paid the in-demand Jerkins a salary to work exclusively with him for two-and-a-half years, all the while hiring out multiple studios and paying for his lavish lifestyle.
"It was a lot of starting and stopping," Jerkins told Vibe. "Like, we would stop for three months and then Michael would be like, 'I got to go to Germany for a couple months,' then he’d go to LA, it was that kind of situation. And I remember one time, he was like, 'Let’s start from scratch... I think we can beat everything we did.' That was his perfectionist side.
"I was like 'Man, we been working for a year, we gone scrap everything?!' But it showed how hard he goes." When it was finally released, Invincible was a worldwide chart-topper and went on to sell over eight million copies – a career highlight for most artists, but a failure by Jackson’s standards.
9. Victoria Beckham: Victoria Beckham (2001)
Incredibly, the debut album by the Spice Girl nicknamed ‘Posh’ is estimated to be the most expensive album ever recorded by a British artist, costing Virgin Records £5 million to produce. While that total possibly includes a hefty (rumoured to be £4 million) signing fee for Beckham, it’s still a staggering amount for an album that is said to have sold 54,000 copies in the UK.
The money was splurged on a team of high-profile producers, lavish music videos for the album’s singles ‘Not Such An Innocent Girl’ and ‘A Mind Of Its Own,’ and huge marketing budgets – all in an effort to rebrand Beckham as a credible solo artist.
Virgin and Beckham parted ways in 2002; her next solo single, ‘Let Your Head Go,’ was released on Telstar the following year, but the label went bust soon after, meaning her second solo album has yet to be released.
10. The Darkness: One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back (2005)
In 2003, UK rockers The Darkness exploded onto the music scene with their massively successful debut album Permission To Land – all histrionic falsetto, wailing solos, and ’70s pomp rock. In the band’s quest for world domination, they enlisted legendary Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker for follow-up One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back.
Baker had also produced albums by Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses (he was one of many to have worked on Chinese Democracy, see below), so was accustomed to lavish budgets and rock’n’roll antics – this was no exception. Baker told Sound On Sound that over the course of a year of intense work, the band had recorded 37 songs using 400 reels of expensive analogue tape and almost 10,000 tracks.
"Of course, there were at least 120 guitar parts in many of the songs," he added, "In some places there may be a bunch of 100 guitars that come in for just two seconds." When asked at the time what he’d learned from Baker, frontman Justin Hawkins said, "more is more."
Spinal Tap-like moments ensued – at one point, Hawkins sang into a mic’ed-up champagne bucket; on ‘Blind Man,’ he recorded 160 tracks of vocals to emulate a male Russian choir. After sessions at Rockfield Studios in Wales, London’s Whitfield Street and Village Studios in Los Angeles, the album was finished.
Baker was so confident of its success that he took the band to a Bentley showroom on its completion, where they ordered cars fit for rock stars. But the largesse didn’t translate into sales, with the album selling a fraction of its predecessor.
Hawkins later looked back at the sessions in an interview with The Quietus: "The experience of it – and what we learned – was absolutely priceless; Roy is just a hilarious person. We really loved his company. Initially, we didn’t dare ask to work with him, and we didn’t think he had the time, but in the end he wanted to do it, and he really lavished the time on us.
"Everybody paid for it in the end: it was an unbelievably expensive process, but just to watch him work was amazing."
11. Guns N' Roses: Chinese Democracy (2008)
Fourteen years in the making and costing a reported $13 million, Chinese Democracy was Guns N’ Roses’ first album of original material in 17 years. In the process of making it, singer Axl Rose (the rest of the original group had left by this point) went through numerous line-ups and producers and apparently recorded over 50 tracks.
At one point, manager Doug Goldstein estimated the band had more than 300 hours of material recorded. In 1998, record label Geffen paid Rose $1 million to finish the album, with another million promised if he delivered it by 1 March 1999. The following year, Goldstein estimated it was 98% finished.
In 2006, Rose told Today, "The making of this album has been an unbearably long and incomprehensible journey… a bad dream in which one wakes up only to find they are still in the nightmare."
Chinese Democracy was eventually released on 23 November 2008, entering the US album charts at an underwhelming No 3 and eventually selling an estimated three million copies worldwide – not too shabby by most bands’ standards, but considering the cost of the album and the sales of previous GNR albums (1987 debut Appetite For Destruction has sold an estimated 30 million), it was considered a flop.
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All photos Getty Images / Album covers Amazon
Top image David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, portrait at the band's Britannia Row Studios, Islington, London, United Kingdom, 1978
