How Foreigner’s ‘Agent Provocateur’ Sent Them on a Tough Mission

Foreigner’s Agent Provocateur album helped the powerhouse AOR rockers scale new heights and achieve an important milestone. But internally, friction was building between the band’s main collaborators.

It had been more than three years since the release of their previous album, 1981’s Foreigner 4. Produced by Mutt Lange, that record showed a different side of the band to the masses, thanks to the commercial success of the ballad “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” The mesmerizing synths (courtesy of Thomas Dolby), paired with an emotional vocal by singer Lou Gramm, helped Foreigner nail down their next huge hit single — even though it peaked at No. 2, held out of the top spot by both Olivia Newton-John and Hall & Oates.

So when Agent Provocateur arrived in December of 1984, guitarist Mick Jones wanted a second shot at the top spot and pushed for another ballad, the gorgeous and moving “I Want to Know What Love is,” to be released as the first taste of their fifth album. “I told him I wasn’t comfortable with this philosophically, that we were selling our souls,” Gramm wrote in his 2013 memoir. Jones, he said, didn’t seem to care.

The success of “Waiting,” Gramm argued, had been set up by the “great rock songs” they had produced. Releasing “I Want to Know What Love is,” he suggested, would “do irreparable damage to our rock image.” Jones forged ahead and the track was issued as the initial offering, giving Foreigner their first and only No. 1 single. The cost of making that choice is something that music fans have been passionately discussing since that moment.

Watch Foreigner’s Video for ‘I Want to Know What Love is’

“It’s such a paradigm shift in their sound. Of course, it begins in a way that that made sense ifs you were a fan of ‘Waiting for a Girl like You,'” Nick DeRiso pointed out on the UCR Podcast. “But then it brings in this gospel overtone, and then an actual gospel choir. If you tuned in about midway through that single, you might not even guess it was Foreigner.”

Jones himself, as you might expect, had a different view of the whole picture, compared to how Gramm felt. “To me, if you listen back to the first four albums leading up [to Agent Provocateur], each of them had the same basic proportion of ballads on them,” he told UCR in 2016. “It’s just that on those two albums, back to back, the Foreigner 4 album and then the Agent Provocateur album, which was almost like a four or five year period of time, the ballads got overwhelmingly pushed by the record company.”

READ MORE: Top 10 Foreigner Songs

“I followed their lead at the time. It was a time when the market was starting to change in music a bit and getting rock tracks really played and being able to breathe in that time, it was just the circumstances,” he continued. “I had certainly never made any conscious decision to go soft or to become a keyboard-oriented band. It was just a phase we were going through.”

Agent Provocateur certainly had its share of strong rock material, songs like the album opener, “Tooth and Nail” and subsequently, “Reaction to Action,” are among the standouts. Mid-tempo tracks like “A Love in Vain” and particularly, “That Was Yesterday,” which also performed well and just missed the Top 10, are additional highlights.

Watch Foreigner’s Video for ‘That Was Yesterday”

In the years since Agent Provocateur was released, Gramm has clarified that he wasn’t necessarily against the ballads they were recording, but the structure and placement was important. He had more of an issue with something he saw becoming a regular thing. “I felt that a good strong ballad or an easy listening song was something that should come periodically in the band’s life,” he explained to UCR in 2015. “But I was feeling that it actually was a direction that we were heading towards at that point and I was vocally very resistant. I like the song, but you know, if you place that between a couple of rockin’ songs, it’s a good thing, but if you’re doing an album of songs like that, I was very reluctant to be a part of that.”

The strife was an unfortunate part of what had been a long and difficult cycle in the Agent Provocateur era. The band had first begun working on the album in the fall of 1983 with producer Trevor Horn. “I couldn’t go on, because we didn’t get on, so I walked out” Horn later detailed during a conversation with Red Bull Music Academy. Gramm expanded on the situation in his memoir, claiming that the producer was unfocused. “It wound up being a waste of our time and money.”

However things began, on paper, the huge worldwide success of “I Want to Know What Love is” should have brought a satisfying end to the results of their long struggle. But it came at a huge cost internally, perhaps in ways that Gramm and Jones themselves couldn’t have predicted. The frontman broke away from the band after touring for Agent Provocateur wrapped up and began working on his first solo album, which became 1987’s Ready or Not. Though he was coaxed back into the fold for Inside Information, released at the end of that same year, to paraphrase one of the band’s own songs, the damage was done.

By the end of the decade, Jones and Gramm went their separate ways again and though they reunited periodically starting in the ’90s, they would break apart again at the beginning of the next decade. “[It] was a tough time for the band, definitely,” Jones concluded in 2016, looking back at Agent Provocateur and the events that followed. “That reared its head a couple of more times before we eventually decided to go our own ways.”

Listen to UCR’s Roundtable Discussion Regarding Foreigner’s ‘Agent Provocateur’