After 'Frampton Comes Alive!' became a huge success, I really needed to take time off to work out what the hell just happened. Instead, I just kept working.
In the year after we signed with I.R.S. we made a record, started our own tour, toured with the Police, and our record went to No. 1. It was insane.
I think it'd be a real nightmare to put a record out and sell 20 million copies and then that's it.
Obviously, what happened from the 'Immortalized' record was we achieved a level of success that, to be perfectly honest, was unpredecented in our career. Every track released from that record ended up going No. 1 at radio.
I wrote probably my phattest banging record with Knife Party: 'Pile Driver.'
I guess coming after 'Country Grammar' and everybody thinking, 'Well maybe, that was it.' To come back with something like 'Nellyville' and to have people accept it and appreciate it the way they did, that was a great move.
We made this mountain with 'Vulgar Display Of Power,' and that was a pretty damn tall mountain to climb.
My first album, I had to write everything. Nobody was going to send me stuff just because I had a little success.
To actually pursue our ambition to its zenith, we should have made another album, because in the States we'd only had one successful album. In a sense, Wham! failed in its ultimate goal, even though it got 75 or 95 percent of the way there.
We don't want to just be known for what we did. We want to be known for what we do and what we did. We've been highly productive since 2000 when 'Crush' came out.
My joke, which isn't really a joke, is that there will be one of two tours: the tour for the album that does well, or the tour for the album that stiffs.
I had written or cowritten eight of the ten songs on 'Beauty and the Beat,' and I had written our biggest hit, 'We Got the Beat.' How was I going to top all of that?
You come off the kind of commercial success that 'Rumours' had, and you see that there are limitations to that as well as freedoms.
