Air Supply - Lost In Love

With the release of Lost in Love, Air Supply led the early part of the '80s with a successful run of soft pop love songs of the sweetest variety. Graham Russell's overly poetic, overly romantic lyrics were usually accompanied by the fragile plucking of an acoustic guitar or the soft tinkling of piano, and throughout every album their insipid musical style never strayed. Air Supply's recipe was indeed rewarding, since the first three songs released from Lost in Love made it into the Top Five, with "Every Woman in the World" reaching number five and the title track hitting number four, while "All Out of Love" gave them a number two hit for four straight weeks. The rest of the tracks on Lost in Love are carbon copies of the hits, but it was this album that kicked off their illustrious career and helped their Greatest Hits album, released in 1983, earn platinum status four times over. The albums that followed, 1981's The One That You Love and 1982's Now and Forever, yielded seven Top 40 hits between the two of them, carrying on where bands such as Bread, Firefall, and England Dan & John Ford Coley left off in the '70s. Because of Air Supply's faithful allegiance to their sentimentally flavored tastes, the Greatest Hits will most certainly suffice, but Lost in Love stands as the perfect proxy.

Air Supply - Lost In Love

In 1975, two men met while performing in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock had a gift with soft rock, and they began to write and record songs together immediately. Over the years, they would hire studio musicians or enlist band members, but Air Supply was always about Russell and Hitchcock. They released four albums, none of which did exceptionally well, before Rod Stewart invited them to open for him during an Australian concert tour. Then, he brought them to the States. In 1980, they released their album Lost in Love, and their melodic songs of love and loss were played on practically every radio station in the country, including one of their biggest hits, "All Out of Love." They have sold more than 100 million albums in over four decades, and are still going strong. Their seventeenth studio album, Mumbo Jumbo, was released in 2010.

With a career spanning over four decades, Lord Graham Russell and Lord Russell Hitchcock met on May 12, 1975, at rehearsals for "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Sydney, Australia. They became instant friends with their common love for The Beatles and, of course, singing. Since then, the duo continue to perform worldwide, with over 130 concerts annually, and just marked their 5,000th concert in Las Vegas.

GR: Well, we never make long range plans but, we still do 130 shows a year, which is quite a lot. It (our relationship) is still quite good in many aspects. We still love to play together. As for being on separate coasts, well, we both like being away from the maddening crowd of New York and Los Angeles. So, we still enjoy seeing one another when we go out on tour.

Russell Graham: They were always waiting in the wings ready. It wasn't until I met Melissa Bell (Lost in Love's book writer). We met at BB King's in New York after Air Supply had done a show. She asked if I had ever considered putting my songs in a musical form, and I said, 'I have thought about it and think the songs would be good, but it would need a great story and a great vehicle.' I wouldn't want to do a story just to have the songs thrown in there. They would have to find their perfect place to really propel the characters in a story so the story would be really important. We kept in touch and she kept sending me drafts of this story, which I loved from the very beginning. And I said, 'wow, this is great, let's put it all together and I'll write some new songs for it as well.' So I wrote four new songs and then suddenly we had the script. She was really tweaking and improving on it and I was trying to do the same with the songs. Finally she said, let's do a reading. We cast for the reading and it came together extremely fast. Q: The show is set during the turn of the century, and yet your songs are more contemporary.

Graham Russell: We were probably the only two people in the whole cast who hadn't been in a show before. Most of them had been in successive shows and they were theater people but Russell and I weren't so we were the two odd men out. We kind of gravitated towards each other because we didn't know anybody. Then I realized that we have the same name, we were born in the same month, we both love the Beatles and then I realized when we started to sing that he had the best voice in the show. I thought, wow, I've got to hook myself onto this guy, he's got a great voice. But what I didn't know at that time was that we needed each other. I needed a great voice and Russell needed some great songs.

Graham Russell & Russell Hitchcock met on May 12, 1975, the first day of rehearsals for "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Sydney, Australia; they became instant friends with their common love for The Beatles and, of course, singing.

With a career spanning over four decades, Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock met on May 12, 1975, at rehearsals for "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Sydney, Australia. They became instant friends with their common love for The Beatles and, of course, singing. Since then, the duo continue to 041b061a72