Tom Evans died on November 19, 1983, at 36. The Badfinger bassist, singer and songwriter sang lead on “Come and Get It” and co-wrote “Without You” with Pete Ham. Those two records show different sides of his work: the voice delivering a Paul McCartney composition and the writer supplying part of a song that other singers would take around the world.
Born in Liverpool on June 5, 1947, Evans had already put his own songwriting in front of listeners before the group became Badfinger. He wrote and sang “Maybe Tomorrow” for the Iveys, who recorded for the Beatles’ Apple label.
The band were still called the Iveys when McCartney produced “Come and Get It” for the film The Magic Christian. He wanted them to follow his demo closely and selected Evans to sing lead. Released under the Badfinger name, the single reached the Top 10 in Britain and the United States. It also appeared on the 1970 album Magic Christian Music, alongside “Carry On Till Tomorrow,” another collaboration between Evans and Ham.
Their writing partnership took a different form on “Without You.” As Classic Rock recounted, Ham and Evans generally wrote separately. For this song, they combined the verse from Ham’s “If It’s Love” with the chorus from Evans’s “I Can’t Live.” Two separate ideas became the finished recording on Badfinger’s 1970 album No Dice, which also contained “No Matter What.”
Harry Nilsson heard Badfinger’s recording and initially mistook it for a Beatles song. He took it to producer Richard Perry, and his version spent five weeks at No. 1 in Britain in 1972. Mariah Carey’s recording returned “Without You” to the top of the UK singles chart for four weeks in 1994. Evans’s chorus was a central part of both versions.
Evans’s voice also belonged to a carefully rehearsed group blend. Guitarist Joey Molland told Rock Cellar in 2020 that George Harrison had the band sing three-part harmonies around one microphone. They had to coordinate the beginnings and endings of their phrases and balance their voices as they performed. “It’s not an engineer doing the balancing, you’re doing it yourself,” Molland recalled.
His writing within Badfinger extended beyond “Without You.” “Money,” “It’s Over” and “Blind Owl” were also Evans compositions. After Ham’s death in 1975, Evans eventually reunited with Molland for another period of Badfinger recording, releasing Airwaves in 1979 and Say No More in 1981. Evans and Molland subsequently led separate touring versions of the band.
A further part of Evans’s work reached listeners in 2024, when Y&T Music released I Am Myself, a collection of 21 home demos made with the support of his estate. The recordings largely featured acoustic or electric guitar, with vocal and instrumental overdubs. They offered a closer view of Evans developing songs before a full band became involved.
Y&T founder Rich Ulloa told Just Listen To This that representatives of the Ham and Evans estates had approached him about archival recordings. Evans’s widow, Marianne, contributed photographs, while the tapes were compiled, restored and mastered for release. Among the songs preserved on I Am Myself were early versions of “Fisherman” and “No Escaping Your Love,” both of which went on to be recorded by the Iveys/Badfinger.
