Bad Company singer Brian Howe, 66, dies of heart attack on way to hospital days after breaking ribs in crash
Brian Anthony Howe, the lead vocalist for Bad Company, died from cardiac arrest on Wednesday, May 6. As per reports, the 66-year-old was one his way to a hospital when he died.
Howe suffered from heart disease and reports claimed that he had had a heart attack in 2017. Howe’s career skyrocketed in 1983 when he became the lead vocalist for Bad Company's 'Penetrator' album after replacing Paul Rodgers.
Born in July 1953, Howe, also a songwriter, handled most of the writing for 1990's album 'Holy Water', which made to the top 40 and attained platinum status.
His last album with the group was 1992's ‘Here Comes Trouble’. The album went gold with a top 40 hit, "How About That".
In 1994, Howe left the group telling media that he was tired of his bandmates. “Leaving Bad Company was not a difficult decision. It had got to the point where nobody was contributing anything to songwriting and quite frankly, the band was getting very very sloppy live. I quite simply, along with Terry Thomas, got tired of doing all the work and then getting nothing but resentment for it from Mick and Simon,” he said at the time.
After leaving the group, he tried his hand at a solo career but never got the level of success which he experienced with Bad Company. Even years after he left the group, his repo with his other bandmates was not good. He released his second solo album ‘Circus Bar’, a follow-up to 1997's ‘Tangled In Blue’ in 2010, but said in a statement: “Here Comes Trouble I thought was a well-balanced CD for Bad Company, but the founding members wanted to go back and live and record in 1974 again, so we had to part ways.
“I thought the band could have been much bigger than they were, but the other guys were so resentful of the success achieved with my songs. They really hated the fact that the hit songs were now mine and they were being [in their mind] cut out of songwriting. You only have to look at what they have written in the years since to know that they simply had run their course as songwriters."
Just days before his death, Howe got badly injured in a road accident on April 30 in Florida, in which he suffered broken ribs. When a fan recently asked him about his recovery after the accident, he wrote on Facebook: “Horrible. Broken ribs are NO fun.”