After Hours

After Hours is Bad Habit’s debut album. The band began in 1986 in southern Sweden, when American-born guitarist and songwriter Hal Marabel and keyboard player Doc Pat Shannon started experimenting with arrangements and harmonies. The aim was to bring melody into hard rock; the models they named were Journey, Toto, Van Halen and Boston. Bassist Patrik Sodergren (then billed as Stevie Rose), singer Bax Fehling and drummer Jan Andersson followed, and the demo they cut in May 1987 was issued as it stood by CBS as the mini-album Young & Innocent. Andersson was soon replaced by Chilean-born Jaime Salazar, and the band moved to Virgin. It opens with the urgent keyboards and guitar of “Living on the Edge,” then the wide chorus of “Rainbow” and two ballads, “More Than I” and “Never Find Another You.” “Rowena” is the standout, still spoken of in AOR circles. It closes with a cover of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” a bold move on a debut. Ten songs, 44 minutes, produced by Marabel himself, then credited as Hal Johnston. By the band’s own account, they were the first act to get an independently produced video onto Swedish national television, for the single “Need Somebody.” That same year they toured the Soviet Union at length, to real success.