With over 50 million sales to their name, and six multi-platinum albums between 1977 and 1987, Foreigner's place as one of the front-runners of the AOR genre is hard to dispute.
The band was formed when Mick Jones and Ian McDonald recruited Lou Gramm, Dennis Elliott, Al Greenwood and Ed Gagliardi. Their multi-platinum debut album Foreigner was released in 1977. It was an immediate hit with tracks like "Feels Like the First Time", "Cold as Ice" and "Long, Long Way From Home" reaching the Top 20 in the Billboard charts. The 7x platinum follow-up Double Vision (1978) proved to be their best-selling album and established their credentials as arena-filling rockers. Each of the four subsequent albums never achieved less than triple platinum success. Despite a slew of hit singles, it was not until the 1985 release of power ballad "I Want to Know What Love Is" that they finally bagged their first No.1.
Internal tensions within the band, spiraling from the egos of the creative duo of Gramm and Jones, resulted in a minor split in the late 1980s. They regrouped, released Inside Information, and then split again. When they reformed the second time it was without Gramm and the album, Unusual Heat (1991), released with new singer Johnny Edwards, failed to sell anything like as well as their platinum predecessors.
Gramm returned to the fold in 1992 and the band released a greatest hits album The Very Best of…and Beyond, which contained three new songs. But the next studio album Mr Moonlight (1994) performed badly, a casualty of changing music tastes. After having a minor hit with "Until the End of Time" in 1995, Foreigner never troubled the charts again.
The band has continued to tour although Gramm left again in 2003, leaving Jones as the only original member with a new band assembled around him. A new studio album, Foreigner's first since 1994, is anticipated shortly.
