Acts that sold well but didn't really have a following

Back in the day I remember them being described as "everybody's second favorite band".

"Reality Used To Be A Friend of Mine" still a theme song of mine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AtHRBFIzBA

Some of us Prince fans liked 'em too, just seemed logical.

But in the 60s, The Grass Roots and everybody else (with any hits, at least) had an fan club: so some kind of following, of whatever size, duration, intensity.
Pamela Des Barres (Miss Pamela of the GTOs) got into rockland Hollywood by running the Captain Beefheart Fan Club in middle school, as she specifies in I'm With The Band---so yes even he, being some kind of optimistic about hits, like any others. (And who wouldn't want a fan club?)

Supergrass absolutely had and have a following.

the number of Gaz Coombes threads on ILM alone proves this

the "pm dawn fan" line is from their first hit, obv not some kind of statement on the type of 'following' they inspired (or didn't)

Did Status Quo have an actual following?

yes, I remember when they did a guiness world record most gigs in a day thing, it was about 1990, they used a helicopter to get between them or sth, there were a gang of hardcore Quo fans aged 10-12 who were trying to follow them

Seriously? Of course they did!

I'm not from the UK nor alive in the 70s, so Status Quo is very much a blind spot and a mystery to me.

They did Picture of Matchstick Men, right?

They had seriously hardcore fans - and no doubt still have.

yeah I feel like this thread is gonna be condemned to being "acts whose fans I don't know of because our demographics don't mix"

Quo had multiple hits in the 1990s with shit medleys of rock & roll hits over the same chugging boogie rhythm

I seem to recall Steve Malkmus being a very outspoken fan of Status Quo

Status Quo fans were known as the Quo Army. They also had their own fan chant! I'd say that was a following.

think it's easier to think fondly of Quo if you (as an American) know them as a decent psych-rock one hit wonder and not (as a britisher) as a band with more hits than the beatles across four decades, most of which are both samey and shit. when they used to turn up for totp with another 5-minute medleys my heart would sink.

Like Steven Malkmus, I will defend them up till about 1976. After that forget it.

I only know them for the song they did with Scooter

I saw a tabloid headline some years ago with one Quo saying "I hardly think about the other Quo", who had recently passed away. Not quite as sad as Ray Davies spending most of his set when I saw him slagging off Dave (though can't say I was surprised), but kinda sad.

I'm not a Quo fan but most of their 70s hits were OK and some were great.

Yeah, early 70s Quo albs are great, more varied than their reputation suggests and sometimes surprisingly heavy. Fans of AC/DC or Thin Lizzy would definitely have a good time with recs like Quo from 74. Even now they're touring reasonably sized venues - and seem to be very popular in Germany

https://www.statusquo.co.uk/tour

Supergrass were the favourite band of Nicky Graham (RIP) of Big Brother UK stardom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXOV2zeN61o

There are so many American radio rock bands like this. I mean, who would say out loud where other people could hear them, "Yeah, I'm a big 3 Doors Down fan"?

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Saturday, February 10, 2024 12:40 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hang out with normal people instead of music nerds and you'd find plenty who'd say that!

― the most powerful man in cornish politics (Matt #2), Saturday, February 10, 2024 12:46 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Saw someone in a Three Doors Down t-shirt last month, and it's rare that I see anyone wearing a band shirt (other than those that are being endlessly printed and available everywhere, like Def Leppard and Nirvana)

Are there still Sha Na Na super fans other than Andy Daly’s Hot Dog character?

― B. Amato (Boring, Maryland)

probably not, but even when i was a fan i never really knew any of the members except bowzer, whose career has gone full will smith since he started appearing in the "super mario bros" series of games

There are a lot of late 1990s bands (aforementioned Three Doors Down, Third Eye Blind, 311, Matchbox 20) that come to mind, but I'm sure each has a following if not a subculture I'm not aware of.

3EB have a serious fandom, for sure

I knew someone who was a super fan of Bran Van 3000.

this thread doesn't make any sense to me at all. I guarantee every one of these artists has super hardcore fans (PM Dawn seems like an outlier they are basically a one hit wonder to most people, underrated group though)

but like in a world where we evaluate by stuff like TikTok and Twitter buzz and streams, I just checked and Bad Company, who were mentioned in this thread, was touring in the mid 70s, headlining 10,000-15,000ish arenas all over the USA.

3EB have a serious fandom, for sure

― atmospheric river phoenix (morrisp), Monday, February 12, 2024 11:17 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

on this board, in fact (me!!!!!)

xpost PM Dawn had three top 10 hits. I mentioned them as a weird case where they obviously had hits (and likely fans) but were disrespected in the Hip Hop community in various ways: KRS One bum rushing them off the stage at their own show, Snoop and the Dogg Pound yelling homophobic slurs at them, the parody of them in Fear of a Black Hat, etc.

There’s that old adage about how every band is someone’s favorite band. I’ve read the book by Jake, the drummer of Semisonic, and he talks about reading comments about his wardrobe etc. by fans on the Semisonic messageboard back in the day. You figure if a band like Semisonic can have a fan board…

(of course, some fandoms are bigger than others)

P.M. Dawn was my favorite act in 8th grade.

I guess it doesn't help that a lot of their stuff available on streaming is actually re-recordings made by people who weren't in the group

No doubt The Charlatans have fans, of course they do, but still I was surprised to see them headlining Reading festival in 1999. The headline acts on the other days were Blur and RHCP, both of which have rabid fanbases.
By comparison, The Charlatans seemed more like competent workhorses - well liked but rarely LOVED with plenty of hits and a lot of critical acclaim but somehow... eh, do they have a legion of followers who know every word and discuss the band's mythos? I don't know, maybe I was born a bit early for them, but I don't feel like they do?

Charlatans have probably been helped along a bit in recent years by Tim's extracurricular activities.

There's gotta be some equation like... whoever has the biggest delta between sales/chart positions when they were popular and currently streaming numbers (or maybe current streaming numbers minus their one big hit)? Something like Sean Ross does with his Lost Hits posts on that radio website.

yeah, this was well before Twitter. They must have just released Us & Us Only (a good album! I like it!), but y'know, just hard to see them up there with Blur and RHCP as a band that a significant number of mainstream rock/pop people would drop their chips for

how non-famous do you have to be. like, vertical horizon? days of the new? do they count?

I'm pretty sure Days of the New have a very strong fanbase.

Seemingly any band that plays guitars can get a bit of a fanbase

not true in my experience

you gotta make the right faces

I thought that was more of a bass thing.

https://gui✧✧✧.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Joe-Bonama✧✧✧@2000x1500-696x✧✧✧.j✧✧

ugh

how about Lou Bega? where my fellow Lounatics at?

Lou Bega's one of those performers where I wouldn't be surprised if he had a huge following in Switzerland or Denmark or somewhere like that.

A little bit of Margrethe in my life, a little bit of Elinor by my side, A little bit of Rigmor is all I need, a little bit of Lærke is what I see

Dude is probably raking it in doing Cameos

i saw an odesza concert video recently (very corny) and it looks like they have a massive following.

Pink has a massive audience of middle-aged moms. I can't imagine any group of music fans less likely to draw — or be seen as worthy of — the attention of music journalists.

ime middle aged white women f'kn love p!nk - exclusively as a live act. i'm talking people who aren't even really music fans; sometimes they drive without even the freakin radio on! just a different mentality about how they engage with pop culture. but man! they love her!

xpost unperson - YES EXACTLY.

I HATE MUSIC BUT I LOVE P!NK

lol no PK not like that... i hesitate to say "casual music fan" because they love some folks enough to go see them live consistently.

but for fans like us, seeing live and wearing the shirt isn't the main engagement - it's really important to us, but we're about more than that with our engagement. not saying one is more/less valid than the other; just a big difference between them.

i have to end this with: the level of appreciation and knowledge about the music that's come from some p!nk fans who i've encountered is really remarkable and admirable. they were on that different tier of fandom but their enthusiasm was just as apparent as any obsessive record nerd.

I wouldn't consider myself a P!nk fan but if I look at a list of her singles I can sing the chorus to almost all of them. Feel like she's a staple "background music in semi-public settings" choice (or what in my head I consider "gym music").

Some of this reminds me of when I saw the James Last documentary. I had never heard of him (I definitely knew Pink) but he seems to be huge with people who aren't music nuts

That got me to thinking about Wet Wet Wet. They fell between so many stools - nestled in between Brother Beyond and Crowded House, which admittedly is a very large gap. They wrote their own material, so they weren't idiots, and their cover of "Love is All Around" was massive. Their albums consistently charted higher than their singles, which is odd for a pop band. Usually it's the other way around.

But then they split up and seemed to just evaporate. They've since reformed, with unspectacular results, especially compared to e.g. Take That. But even in their heyday I never had a feeling that they had a fanbase. They were slightly too mature to appeal to kids, nowhere near mature enough to appeal to fans of e.g. Level 42, and there was always a suspicion they were aimed at teenage girls, and yet they seemed to want to be the modern heirs of, I dunno, the Four Tops or whatever.

Oh Marti Pellow definitely had a huge fantasy in his time. A big heartthrob for people of a certain age

Yeah, I've met quite a few people who were big WWW fans.

My nomination is Hot Chocolate. Many years of hit singles, but I'm not sure there was ever much of a fanbase - it felt like their hits mostly became hits based on their individual merits.

Their frontman became a cop

Cop Chocolate

Wet Wet Wet were gigantic for over a decade but there was just no market for new music from them once they returned

Marti now appears to be solo and the others are now touring in a McBusted-type coalition with Go West

Errol Brown was never a policeman!

Tory, yes. Cop, no.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0VOJ0Z3vY0

my memory of the 70s includes a bunch of relatives who loved Hot Chocolate, Errol Brown is pretty much the definition of a human trademark

people loved Wet Wet Wet in their big hit years too

also i don't have deep knowledge of her whole career but there's a bunch of P!nk songs I love and i've done "Try" at karaoke way too often

most of this thread is "acts that individual posters have at best tangential knowledge of" tbf

And he sang Imagine at a Tory conference in the 1980s, never forget.

Who? Marti Pellow?

Not long after I moved to Glasgow, someone said to me that 'they're very loyal to their artists up here', and they were right, WWW/MP can still easily fill decent size venues up here even now (that's when Marti isn't doing panto/musical theatre). See also: Fairground Attraction/Eddi Reader, Texas.

Hot Chocolate cop:

Original guitarist Franklyn De Allie (born 1944) later became a police officer, and died in Warwick, Bermuda in 2018.[17]

And xps Errol Brown was the tory.

Any Scottish band that has some success remains a big deal to the Daily Record/Sunday Mail until the end