Rock · Hard Rock · Arena Rock
“Half British, half American, and built for the biggest rooms in rock.”
The biography
Foreigner was formed in New York in 1976 by guitarist Mick Jones, an Englishman with a journeyman past — Spooky Tooth, session work — who recruited American singer Lou Gramm and a transatlantic lineup including ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald. The name was Jones’s joke about the lineup: wherever they played, half the band would be foreigners. Their 1977 debut, Foreigner, was precision-engineered arena rock — and it worked instantly, spinning off Feels Like the First Time, Cold as Ice, and Long, Long Way from Home.
Double Vision (1978) and Head Games (1979) made them one of America’s biggest rock bands, but 1981’s 4, produced by Robert “Mutt” Lange, was the masterpiece: leaner, harder, and home to Urgent and the synth-kissed ballad Waiting for a Girl Like You. Agent Provocateur (1984) delivered their biggest single, the choir-backed I Want to Know What Love Is, a No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic.
Gramm departed in 1990 (returning in the 1990s before leaving again), and Jones has kept the Foreigner flag flying with new lineups ever since. The catalog’s durability is the real story: few bands wrote choruses this big this consistently. In an era of rock built for arenas, Foreigner built the arenas’ favorite songs.