“Bad Boys” by Whitesnake

"Bad Boys" rides on Whitesnake's self-titled seventh album, the 1987 record that usually goes by 1987, which Geffen put out in America that March with EMI following in Britain two weeks later. David Coverdale and John Sykes wrote it together. Coverdale sings lead, Sykes plays guitar and sings backup, Neil Murray holds down the bass and Aynsley Dunbar handles drums and percussion, with Don Airey and Bill Cuomo guesting on keyboards. Keith Olsen produced it with Mike Stone and mixed it himself.

The album around it was Whitesnake's swerve into glam metal, in the look as much as the sound, and the change paid off in a big way: it spent ten weeks parked in the runner-up spot on the Billboard 200, kept off the top by U2's The Joshua Tree, and moved more than 25 million copies around the world.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.