Air Supply Artistfacts

1975-
Russell HitchcockLead vocals
Graham RussellGuitar, vocals
Air Supply, soft-rock specialists from Melbourne, Australia, had a few modest hits in that country but got their big break when their song "Lost in Love" got the attention of Clive Davis at Arista Records, who signed them in 1980 and helped make them hit machines in America, where they landed eight songs in the Top 5 that decade. Their most famous songs are "All Out Of Love" (1980) and "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All" (1983).
Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell (yeah, that's confusing) formed Air Supply after they both performed in a 1975 Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar. They took on other band members, who are credited on their early albums and appear on the covers, but eventually pared down to a duo. "We always had a band, and at that point, they always were in the photos, and they actually shared in everything," Graham Russell said in a Songfacts interview. "But there were a couple of small squabbles within the band, so we said, 'Okay, we've got to stop this. It's going to be Russell and I from now on.'"
By the time they hit it big in 1980 with the hits "All Out Of Love" and "Lost In Love," Russell and Hitchcock were in their early 30s and both had children and had no desire to indulge in drugs or other hedonism common in the industry.

"A great night for us would be having a bottle of wine," Russell said in The Yacht Rock Book. "But we never got really crazy, and we perhaps paid the price for that, because we were never considered really 'cool.' We were having all these massive hits, but we weren't cool."
The name Air Supply was chosen as a contrast to Heavy Metal.
They are very popular in Southeast Asia, where their songs are karaoke favorites.
The original version of "All Out Of Love," released in Australia, went:

I'm all out of love, I want to arrest you

"Arrest you" means get your attention, but Clive Davis at Arista knew that wouldn't fly with American listeners, so he had them change "I want to arrest you" to "I'm so lost without you."
Air Supply has been active since 1975 with a break from 1988-1989 when Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell worked on other projects. Hitchcock put out a self-titled solo album in 1988.
Their 1983 Greatest Hits album far outsold any of their studio albums. That was the year their hits dried up, but they released a steady stream of albums until 2010 when they put out Mumbo Jumbo.

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