Artist · chart history · #649 in indie & aaa artist polls
Badfinger
Band Swansea United Kingdom Formed 1969
Badfinger formed in 1969 in Swansea, United Kingdom. Badfinger has 48 chart appearances on 28 radio countdowns from 14 stations on RockLists, spanning 1991–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “No Matter What”, which appears on 21 lists with a best position of #114. The station that charted Badfinger most often is WMGK (Philadelphia, PA), with 8 appearances.
Badfinger started out in Swansea as the Iveys and took their new name from "Bad Finger Boogie", the working title of the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends". The classic lineup had Welshmen Pete Ham on rhythm guitar and lead vocals and Mike Gibbins on drums, alongside Englishmen Tom Evans on bass and Joey Molland on lead guitar, and between 1968 and 1973 they cut five albums for Apple Records.
They had the knack, too: crunchy guitars, Beatle-sweet harmonies and hooks you could hang your coat on. Paul McCartney wrote and produced "Come and Get It" for Magic Christian Music; Mal Evans produced the chiming, muscular "No Matter What" on No Dice; George Harrison produced "Day After Day" for Straight Up, and Todd Rundgren did the honors on "Baby Blue". Ham and Evans also wrote "Without You", which Harry Nilsson took to number one in 1972 and which won the pair an Ivor Novello Award. Power pop owes them plenty, and by one estimate they have shifted 14 million records.
Then it curdled. After Apple folded in 1973, the band was tangled in legal, managerial and money problems, most of them caused by fraud on the part of manager Stan Polley. Ham died by suicide in 1975, and Evans in 1983; Gibbins died in 2005 and Molland, the last of the classic four, in 2025. "Baby Blue" found a new generation when it closed out the finale of Breaking Bad.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Badfinger on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | No Matter What | 21 | #114 | – | – | |
| 2 | Day After Day | 13 | #212 | – | – | |
| 3 | Baby Blue | 9 | #437 | – | – | |
| 4 | Perfection | 1 | #227 | – | – | |
| 5 | Come and Get It | 2 | #458 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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