Buckcherry

Frontman Josh Todd's mea culpa gave the Californian rockers their biggest radio hit, with a song that music fans of all stripes can identify with and which has brought many to tears.

- Henry Yates

At the turn of the millennium, a betting man wouldn’t have touched Buckcherry. The Californians had enjoyed gold sales with 1999's self-titled debut album, home to crossover hit Lit Up. But 2001 follow-up Time Bomb was a relative stiff, and the following year’s hiatus suggested aband realising the zeitgeist was against them. “That period was when what I call ‘nerd-rock’ — y’know, the shoegazer dudes with the Buddy Holly glasses — and fuckin’ rap-rock was going on,” recalls frontman Josh Todd. “We didn’t fit into any of that.”

With their sleazeball riffs and Todd’s serpentine stage presence, Buckcherry seemed more like a glorious relic of the mid-80s Sunset Strip. Even when he and lead guitarist Keith Nelson rebuilt the line-up in 2005 with Stevie D (guitar), Jimmy Ashhurst (bass) and Xavier Muriel (drums), the industry hardly welcomed them back.

“Nobody would sign the band in the United States,” Todd remembers. “We got a small advance from a Japanese record label, and that’s how we made the 15 record [2005 in Japan]. In the States, our manager Allen Kovac said: ‘Fuckit, I’ll start my own label and we'll put it out on that.’”

Thankfully, as an adaptable and prolific songwriter, Todd was holding a couple of aces. The first was Crazy Bitch, a leery, lascivious old-school strut seemingly designed for the stripper pole. The second was its polar opposite, Sorry, a wistful, instantly catchy country-rock ballad that Todd had initiated as a fun song to sing with his youngest daughter, then realised it was the perfect way to apologise to his wife.