Peter Frampton said the success of the 1976 album Frampton Comes Alive! left him feeling “constipated” – and revealed he now knows what he should have done to follow it up.

The guitarist previously admitted he hadn’t wanted to deliver I’m In You as his next record, knowing it wasn’t good enough and that he hadn’t taken enough time over it. It took him several years to put his career back on track.

In the full version of a previously-excerpted interview with Guitar World, Frampton said of Comes Alive: “It came out and just exploded. … I realized that I had a lot of friends that I didn’t have before. Everybody had their two cents to put in, especially the people that were rubbing their hands together because I suddenly became the hen that laid the golden egg.”

He returned from vacation to be told that his touring schedule had been massively upgraded. “Then I got the call: ‘Are you sitting down? The album is No 1.’ I couldn’t believe it. But on the next call I was told that I’d broken Carole King’s Tapestry album record and I was now the biggest-selling album of all time. And that’s when I got nervous… Because I knew that I couldn’t follow it.”

He explained: “That album took me six years to write; it was a live ‘best of’ up until that point… I felt I’d lost before I’d started after that phone call. That was when I think I started to over-imbibe and wanted to numb myself. The golden hen was now constipated… once I’d heard that I was the biggest, I hated hearing that. I think it shut me down creatively more than anything.”

Frampton reflected that the solution was now clear to him. “Truth be known, I should have probably commissioned every great writer there is and sat down and written with all of them. That would have been the only way to have dealt with that situation.”

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