CREATURES OF HABITS

In the late 80s, FM seemed poised for huge success. By the mid-90s the dream, and the band, was effectively over. Then almost 20 years later a one-off gig offer changed everything...

- Paul Elliott

He didn’t have to hear Smells Like Teen Spirit to know that he was fighting a losing battle. It was in 1990, a year before Nirvana’s game-changing hit shook the world, when Steve Overland, the singer with FM, realised that his band had missed the chance of becoming rock’s Next Big Thing.

Epic Records, the powerhouse label that was home to the multimillion-selling likes of Michael Jackson and George Michael, had seen huge commercial potential in FM’s brand of slick melodic rock. “They were saying we were the British Bon Jovi, the next Foreigner,” Overland recalls.

FM had the tunes. They had the look, with more than enough hair to compensate for their balding and daftly named keyboard player Didge Digital. And Steve had the voice, smooth and soulful like a young Paul Rodgers. But when the band’s second album, Tough It Out, was released in 1989, Steve had sensed trouble during a meeting he attended with his brother Chris, the band’s lead guitarist, at Epic’s offices in New York.

“There was a really negative attitude from the Americans about working alongside the UK side of the company,” Steve says. “And I remember sitting there thinking: ‘This is gonna go wrong.’ We’d made a brilliant album, we’d delivered it to one of the biggest record companies in the world, and it’s theirs to fuck up. You know, it’s out of our hands.”

As he had feared, Tough It Out failed to break big, even with its firecracker of a single in