These days, 43 years is a very long time in pop music. A week is a very long time in politics. Still, that’s how long it took for a band’s song to reach a million people.

In 1980, New England, a melodic rock band from Boston, couldn’t do anything about the failure of their second record, Explorer Suite.

But John Fannon, the lead singer of the band, says, “We spent a lot of our youth trying to make great, timeless music.” He was proven right in 2023 when Travis Scott’s song Sirens used the title track from Explorer Suite. The song became a worldwide hit and now has more than 12 million views on YouTube.

Fannon says, “That’s pretty cool!”New England looked like they were going to be the next big thing in American rock a year before Explorer Suite came out.

It was clear that guitarist and lead singer Fannon loved The Beatles because the band’s sound was like a hard rocking Electric Light Orchestra.

And the band had a strong business link to one of the biggest rock bands in the United States. Bill Aucoin, the smart manager who helped Kiss become famous, was in charge of them.New England’s self-titled debut record came out in 1979, and it was co-produced by Kiss lead singer Paul Stanley. And New England played to tens of thousands of people every night in stadiums as Kiss opened for them on their first tour across the whole US.

In an interview with Classic Rock in 2023, Paul Stanley said, “New England was a great band.” His voice sounded a lot like John Lennon’s, and you could hear in New England bands that were affected by The Beatles—it was like The Beatles went through ELO.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – SEPTEMBER 23: (FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY) Travis Scott performs onstage during the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on September 23, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)

And it wasn’t just Paul Stanley who thought New England was great. Journey were working in a room next door at Davlen Studios while New England were making their first album in Los Angeles. Journey’s singer Steve Perry would listen to what New England were doing. I quote, “Steve told us he loved our sound.”

What went wrong and where?

The band’s first song, “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya,” a melodic rock anthem like “More Than A Feeling” by Boston, reached number 40 on the US Billboard chart. This was their first mistake.

“I Never Want to Lose” He said, “You were a real tour de force.” “That’s a really great song.”

But Fannon remembers, “We didn’t understand why our management and record label took us off the road to work on a new album while Lose Ya was still going strong.”

Then there was a terrible accident. The band’s record label, Infinity, put a huge amount of money into an album of talks and songs by Pope John Paul II that were sung in Polish. When people didn’t buy the Pope’s album, which got about a million returns, the label went bankrupt.

“We were shocked,” Fannon says. “That express we were on was starting to lose its wheels…”

When Explorer Suite came out, New England signed with Elektra Records, but Fannon says, “Going with Elektra was another huge mistake.” The record release was pushed back for a long time, and the band lost steam.

In 1981, a third album called Walking Wild was made in just two weeks with another famous producer at the helm: Todd Rundgren, who was also the producer of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, which was one of the biggest hits of the 1970s.

But when Walking Wild failed the same way New England’s first two records did, they were out for good.

John Fannon left New England in 1982 because he was unhappy with it. He says, “I quit the band because it wasn’t fun anymore.”

The band’s keyboard player Jimmy Waldo and bassist Gary Shea left to start the band Alcatrazz with Yngwie Malmsteen, who used to sing with Rainbow, and ex-Rainbow singer Graham Bonnet.

John Fannon went in a different direction. He started out by writing the music for TV ads. He says, “I was still making music, and it was a great way to make a living.”

Since the end of New England, he has kept working in different roles as a “composer, sound designer, and producer.” He now thinks of himself as “semi-retired,” but the four original members of New England have come back together to play live again in recent years.

Fannon says, “The book about New England is both sad and happy.” For forty years, I’ve heard the same thing over and over: “They should have been huge.”

“But our music has stood the test of time,” he says. Travis Scott used the beginning of Explorer Suite as the beginning of his song Sirens, which is the most recent example of this.The voice you hear is John Fannon singing, “Every night I look up at the stars, but when I look for you, you’re never there. Explorer, are you out there?”

“I studied Aerospace Engineering in college,” Fannon says about what made him write those words. “I’ve always been deeply interested in space.”