UNLESS you want to play instrumental music, lead singers are (unfortunately) a necessity if you want to form a rock band.
Usually they're the focal point of the group and often the only member that people can remember the name of.
So when a band loses their front-person due to "creative differences", insanity or death, it can be hard to carry on.
Many bands have tried and few with success, but here are five acts that soldiered on after losing their lead singers.
AC/DC
T HE theory goes that replacing an iconic singer never works (and we'll look at some examples in this and future columns). But one group just ignored that theory, turned their amps back up to 11 and carried on rocking. AC/DC were on the rise internationally when singer Bon Scott choked on his own vomit in the back of a car in 1980, having released Let There Be Rock, Powerage and Highway To Hell to great acclaim. But that was nothing compared to what would follow Scott's death. The remaining band members decided Scott would have wanted them to carry on, so they recruited Brian Johnson to fill Scott's formidable shoes and finish off the album they had started. The resulting record - Back In Black - is considered the second highest selling album of all time (after Michael Jackson's Thriller), helping cement AC/DC's position as one of the biggest rock band's in history and proving that sometimes you can carry on after the loss of a distinctive frontman.
Pink Floyd
AC/DC weren't the first to make do and/or go large in the wake of losing their lead singer. In 1968, frustrated with the increasingly erratic behaviour of their original leader Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd simply decided to not pick Barrett up on the way to a gig. With David Gilmour already in the band to replace Barrett on guitar (Barrett had taken to either not playing or deliberately playing poorly at gigs), the band was able to carry on without him, with bassist Roger Waters and Gilmour sharing vocal duties. Barrett, whose drug use had effectively fried his brain, went on to record a few solo albums (with the occasional help of his old bandmates) before becoming a recluse. And while Pink Floyd's sole Barrett-era album Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is a bonafide classic, what came later was even bigger - Dark Side Of The Moon (1973) is the third highest selling album of all time and The Wall (1979) is in the top 20 biggest selling studio albums of all time.
INXS
IF Pink Floyd and AC/DC are the exceptions to the rule that you can't replace an iconic frontman, then INXS is the rule. The long-running band looked to have been finished when Michael Hutchence died in 1997 and they took a year off before finding a couple of temporary replacements in Jimmy Barnes and Terence Trent D'Arby. In 2000, former Noiseworks singer Jon Stevens joined and the band hit the studio but only one song - I Get Up - emerged from the sessions before Stevens quit, citing "creative boredom" (according to a Daily Telegraph interview). Then came the reality show involving their search for a new singer, which divided fans - many saw it as a shameless black mark on the legacy. Canadian JD Fortune won and the resulting album Switch was released to moderate sales and middling reviews. But by last year, Fortune was gone, reportedly dumped at an airport for being a coke fiend. With the remaining members still desperate to cling to INXS, they're apparently working on an all-star album of INXS covers.
Talking Heads
AS their career progressed, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne took increasing control over the band before eventually just walking away in 1992, four years after their final album Naked. The rest of the band, however, weren't so keen to hang up their instruments and in 1996 they put out an album as The Heads. The cleverly titled record - No Talking, Just Head - saw bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison bring in an all-star line-up of singers to fulfil the vocal duties. Among them were INXS' Michael Hutchence, XTC's Andy Partridge, Blondie's Debbie Harry, Live's Ed Kowalczyk, The Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano, Happy Monday's Shaun Ryder and punk icon Richard Hell. Encouraged by the response to the new songs, The Heads planned a tour and an album of Talking Heads covers, but Byrne put a stop to that by suing his old bandmates. Lovely.
Blind Melon
REMEMBER Blind Melon and their lone hit, the alt-rock anthem No Rain? The band's self-titled debut was a surprise hit, selling more than four million copies in the US. Their follow-up, Soup, was less successful but the band had attracted a fervent following nonetheless. Things ground to a halt when singer Shannon Hoon died of a cocaine overdose in 1995, and the band released off-cuts and rarities album Nico (named after Hoon's infant daughter) a year later. In the years that followed, Blind Melon sought a replacement singer with no luck until 2006, when Travis Warren of experimental indie group Rain Fur Rent joined the band, which recently had been spurred on by a couple of successful compilations. A new album followed in 2006 (For My Friends), but Warren was dumped or quit because either his voice blew out or he didn't get on with the other band members (depending on who you ask). According to their MySpace, they're still looking for another replacement.
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