The One That You Love

The Australian group Air Supply, founded by British-born Graham Russell and Australian Russell Hitchcock in 1976, lit up the US pop charts with their combination of pleasant melodies and romantic lyrics set to light orchestration. This was their biggest hit, and it was typical Air Supply, expanding upon their constant theme of the starry-eyed troubadour reflecting on matters of love. The universal nature of this romanticism (and perhaps the fact that the singer's declarations of devotion were not always reciprocated by the person he was singing about) no doubt contributed to the band's wide appeal. The group ensconced themselves at the top of the charts, scoring 8 top-5 hits in just under 3 years. The titles alone of their singles evoke the sentimentalism that was the group's hallmark: "Lost In Love," "All Out Of Love," "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All."

Graham Russell writes Air Supply's songs. When we asked him if he was a true romantic, he replied: "I'd like to think I'm somewhat of a romantic, because otherwise my music wouldn't be real. But my whole background, even when I was growing up, was very much that way as well. For instance, I come from a place in England where all those great poets came from - Wordsworth and Keats and all those guys - so I was surrounded by it, and I loved poetry as a child. And I love the English language; that's what I took in school. And I became very good at it, because I just had a passion for it. When I was reading all the great poets, I just loved the way they wrote, I loved the way they made things rhyme. So I just drifted into it by mistake, really. And when it came time for me to leave school and choose a profession, the only thing I wanted was to be a composer or be in a band. I had no alternative but that." (Check out our interview with Graham Russell.)