Sixteen Stone can comfortably be regarded as Bush’s most popular album, with three tracks – Comedown, Machinehead, and Glycerine – entering the US Billboard Hot 100 and clinching the number 8 spot on GW's 2014 list of 50 iconic albums that defined 1994. Yet, as Gavin Rossdale reveals in an interview with Billy Corgan on his The Magnificent Others podcast, label executives at Disney’s Hollywood Records did not seem to believe in the album’s potential.
“What happened is, we delivered the record that was Sixteen Stone to them. The story is, according to the guy from our label, Rob Kahane, that at the record company, they threw the CD and said, ‘Not only are there no singles on this record, there’s no album tracks.’
“And they threw the record at him – because Frank Wells [former President and Chief Operating Officer of The Walt Disney Company], who had signed us, got killed in a helicopter crash. So we’re being reviewed by the subsequent team there, and they dropped us.”
Having his dreams shattered forced Rossdale to go back to where he was before. “I went back to work, I was back painting. I had no idea what was possible. No one told me what was possible. I didn’t know what’s possible.”
When asked whether there was an appetite for Bush in the UK, Rossdale adds, “That was the height of Brit pop, right? So people were looking for the next Pulp, the next Oasis… and our style, I suppose.
“So I was well-known enough to the whole community to get demo time – I’d never hear back what they thought of the demos, but I quietly was building up the repertoire of having the real band, because Nigel [Pulsford, the band’s lead guitarist] would do the stuff at his house, and then we’d go in.”
As Rossdale details in a recent Guitar World interview, “I wish we’d had bidding wars – a mad time dining out with everyone falling in love with us. But no; we had one dude with a small label who believed in us.”
The album finally saw the light of day when it was released by Trauma Records on November 1, 1994. The rest, as the adage goes, is history.
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