It was expected that once Robbie Williams left Take That he would disappear and that Gary Barlow would be the succesful solo act.

Is the first mention of Take That on the Word Blog?!

when Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware left to form Heaven 17, leaving Phil Oakey on his own with the visual director Adrian Wright to carry on with the League, all the money was most definately on H17......How very very wrong they were

it was George and Ringo that set the pace, the former with critical acclaim, Bangla Desh Concert, and (see an earlier thread) probably the best Fabs solo album, and the latter with four years of singles chart success both in the UK & US.

Meanwhile John tails off spectacularly, and Paul takes three or four years to hit his stride.

(Coat on, outside, waiting for taxi)

Marillion have survived the loss of Fish and Steve Hogarth has now been singer longer than the big Scotsman himself. I admit neither have gone on to have massive albums sales, but both parties fanbases and tours seems to be in a pretty healthy state these days.

The sweet commerciality of Stewart/Goldman and the inventiveness of Creme/Godley gave us some of the best and original "pop" songs of the early 70s: I'm not in love/ Life Is A Minestrone/ and especially Rubber Bullets. When they split, both duos went to hell in a handcart*.A classic case of the sum of the parts being greater than the individual talent.

*Godley/Cremes "Cry" being a notable exception.

The start of his solo career was an unfortunate time for Dave Lee Roth to start going bald. I'm telling you, if he'd kept his mane he would have been much more successful!

..Thats EXACTLY what I meant... Good Morning Judge etc were absolute dross... Tho' I have got a soft spot for I'm Mandy (Fly Me). It's in the back garden, and the hole is already dug!

...But Dave Grohl really re-invented himself rather than disappearing under a large pile of money.

Is it that so many of our "Rock Legends" still have a full head of (usually black) hair?
My circle of friends (55+) are all in varying degrees of baldness and/or greyness?
Is the hair loss/ miscolour gene somehow related to musicall ability?
I think we should be told!

Who would have picked Norman Cook going onto superstardom?

The Housemartins spawned The Beautiful South and Fatboy Slim (not to mention Beats International).

Apart from The Beatles, how many other bands have produced two or more successful off-shoots?

Who'd have thunk that after this lot dissolved, the tonally challenged singer would establish himself as a solo act, while the supposed creative and musical powerhouse would make a turgid and lacklustre album
with his new band then pretty much disappear without trace?

Who'd have thunk that after this lot dissolved, the tonally challenged singer would establish himself as a solo act, while the supposed creative and musical powerhouse would make a turgid and lacklustre album
with his new band then pretty much disappear without trace?

Sorry about that folks.

A 25-year solo career (not all a huge success, but still), while Marr disappears into anonymous session muso-dom. 25 years!

And Suede, for a while at least, defied the odds of replacing "Senior Creative Force" Bernard Butler with a 17-year old by going on to be huge with Coming Up and Head Music (even if the latter was around 72% balls).

Ladies and gentlemen, the ever-so-prophetic words of Roger Waters. (Who used to be in Pink Floyd). Cue 20 year long soul-searching.

Re: backing wrong horses, I can't help recalling some major label (remember them...?) gave Noel Redding a colossal, hitherto unprecedented advance when he left the Jimi Hendrix Experience and formed Fat Mattress. I understand he went off, spent it and eventually delivered an unloved slab of vinyl. The warning signs should have been there for even a late 60s, over-monied, over-zealous record biz imbecile to see: (a) it involved Noel Redding, hitmaker to the, er, um... (b) it was called 'Fat Mattress', which even then must have been perilously close to calling your band 'Utter Drivel', (c) Jimi wasn't involved in it in any way. And didn't somebody make the same mistake by giving Andrew Ridgley a solo album deal after Wham? Called 'Son Of Albert', wasn't it? SURELY it can't have been A&Red by the same guy who gave Fat Mattress the deal? Did record labels keep guys like that around for when they needed a tax loss...?

I thought the smart money would be on Carl Barratt. How many people can name Pete Doherty and not Carl? I know that's probably down to the tabloids, but Babyshambles have done arena tours whilst Dirty Pretty Things faded and split. I wouldn't have expected Doherty to be the one to make a solo album with Stephen Street and Graham Coxon either.

I still prefer Barratt's stuff, myself.

At the height of their initial fame, songwriter Vince suddenly quits the band to form Yazoo and Erasure, and then sells millions of records.

The remaining Essex boys, rudderless, paddle-less and canoe-less
will have been forgiven for sharing a collective shrug and going back to their day jobs. Instead, they hire someone who can read music to replace Vince and slowly start to rebuild.

By the end of the 80s, Depeche Mode had eclipsed the success of Vince and overtaken him - making them Basildon's massivest band ever.

what about Gabriel - I much prefer his solo stuff to the Genesis stuff without him and his credibility far outlived theirs although I concede possibly not his bank balance.

wasn't Gabriel a drummer first too? And he had a small one on stage back in the early days, didn't he, I recall. Just a small bass drum and pedal, was it?

I'm sure I watched some Floyd documentary where the original Floyd management said they stuck with Syd after he left - no brainer as he was the talent and all that.

Front men have breakdowns, management tries to run off with the name but, against all the odds, the *rhythm section* manages to make itself the biggest band in the universe. It's like the people you can't name in Coldplay becoming bigger than the Chris Martin version.

I may be wrong here, but didn't somebody - possibly even somebody connected to Word, I honestly don't know - put Plastic Bertrand on the cover of the first 'Smash Hits'? And that was the last anyone ever heard of the fellow...

...for Billy Corgan's Zwan. And Audioslave. And solo Chris Cornell. (Hey, what on earth ever happened to Soundgarden's guitarist?) And everything Krist Novoselic has done post-Nirvana. All "projects" with presumably high expectations, all come to nothing.

By the way, Lennon "tailed off spectacularly" while Ringo racked up the hits? That's funny, I seem to recall an album (& song) called Imagine doing at least as well as Back Off Boogaloo.

I have spent more money on duff Lou Reed albums than I care to calculate, and continue to do so, all out of a hope that one day he will revisit the dizzying heights of Transformer, Berlin or even New York, but mainly out of a totally blind, stupidly unquestioning loyalty to the Velvets and the memories of Reed's fledgling solo career which many like myself cottoned onto via getting into Bowie circa 1972.
A few years ago, myself and a similarly-afflicted buddy went to see John Cale in concert, basically the "Fragments From A Rainy Season" solo show which he hawked around for many years, just him and a guitar and a piano, before discovering Pro-Tools.
It was packed to the gills with songs of a uniformly excellent quality which Uncle Lou must only dream of as he slips a few of his latest atrocities, random chord sequences all and even more randomly spewed-out lyrics, between his standard crowd-pleasing fayre of "Sweet Jane" "Perfect Day" "Wild Side" etc
My pal actually looked at me as we awaited Cale's encore and said: "We've spent 30 years following the wrong Velvet haven't we?" It was difficult to argue

Became Les Holdroyd's Barclay James Harvest and also Barclay James Harvest Through The Eyes Of John Lees (featuring Wooly Wolstenholme).

Bet the latter is a bugger to get on the t-shirts.

Thank goodness they weren't joined by Woody Woodmansey as well

One of the funniest/most tortuous assemblage of words I ever read in a music mag concerned the imminent reissue of a Wooly Wolstenholme solo album. At that time he had, presumably, changed horses to Les's version of BJH - maybe to actually get his name fitted onto the T-shirts, who knows. The sentence announcing this reissue began, I kid you not:

'Les Holroyd's Barclay James Harvest's Wooly Wolstenholme's solo album...'

Imagine Alan Freeman having to say all that at high speed in a chart run down. Not that it charted (I assume)...

Which was the, presumably, midlander of their singers, who pronounced the G ever so obtrusively in this shocker, as opposed to his co-vocalest who didn't.:
"Theres a mockinbird" echoed by "mockingerbird"
Now you will never be able to hear it without hearing it, not that I guess many will bother.

Anyone predicted that Tom Morello and t'other agit rockers would team up with screechy singer from Soundgarden for world domination? (and no matter my preconceptions of Cornell, Cochise is a quite brilliant single)

Zack De La Rocha? Residing in the where are they now files in between RATM re-union gigs?

Having the two vocalists from The Beat, you'd have thought General Public would be the banker, but Fine Young Cannibals were far more successful.

...the way those two goons with bass and guitar in FYC minced around in the videos you'd think they'd just FALLEN off a wrong horse, or been hoofeed in the groin by one at the very least.

Do we all agree that was THE most ludicrous and unappealing USP of any pop combo ever - the wobbly-leg quantum-Shadows thing those guys did? Or am I missing something?

I loved it. I still base my dance style upon them, but, sorry girls, I'm taken.