He’s behind you!

I have been watching with interest a series of programmes called ‘I’m in a rock & roll band’, and have been both amused and bemused as to what constitutes a really good rock & roll band.

What has made it interesting is the variety of rock celeb’s both past and present that were wheeled out to pontificate at length on who was the best singer, best drummer, best guitarist etc (I was totalled offended that as a bass player I got listed as ‘the other one’ and was unceremoniously lumped in with the keyboard player, saxophonist and ‘Bez’ from the Happy Mondays…however; the bass players lot is generally a lonely unappreciated one).

It did amuse me to discover what they considered to be the greatest of the great.

I was totally baffled for instance that in the final programme they rated ‘Slash’ from Guns & Roses over say, Eddie Van Halen. But there you go, it’s was only a TV programme and lives were never going to be changed or saved.

One iconic rocker that made me chuckle every time he proffered an opinion was Gene Simmonds from Kiss.

Here is a man that made a career, and a very successful one at that, by taking the absurd and making it even more ludicrous.

Bottom line is if you have had the chance to witness a Kiss concert you have been a participant in a rock & roll pantomime, which remains in your memory for ever.

Now I have been to some iconic concerts, I mean I even saw Queen before they were massive and had just got to number one with Bo Rap. I have seen some of the best that rock has got to offer, but I have NEVER again seen anything like Kiss.

Friend and partner in crime Bassbin had obtained tickets to see Kiss at the Stafford Bingley hall somewhere in the vicinity of Birmingham.

It was to be a rock & roll week for me as only a few days before I had been to the very first ‘Monsters of Rock’ gig at Castle Donnington and had seen Rainbow, Judas Priest, Saxon, the Scorpions and a load of American bands I had never heard of.

This was August 1980 and was the signal for a new resurgence of British Rock Music.
An amazing day ruined only by the leaving of car lights on and being stuck in the car park with a flat battery half the night (they didn’t have those warning buzzer things back then…and there were four large blokes crammed into a Mini Cooper).

Anyway, I was in the mood for ROCK and Bassbin and I set of for Stafford Bingley to witness the major spectacle.

We stood patiently in line with the hundreds of other punters trying to make the one packet of cigarettes we possessed between us last the distance (one every hour I think was the ration….thank goodness I gave that one up as a stupid habit to have).

Anyway, we eventually got in and hustled our way down to the front and waited for the festivities to commence.

The opening act were a great little band that I had seen several times before called ‘Girl’ who featured guitarist Phil Collen who went on to play for Def Leppard. We thoroughly enjoyed their set but were really in the mood for ‘larger than life’

And boy did we get it.

With explosions so intense it nearly burnt our eyebrows off Kiss took to the stage.

To say that they were wonderfully over the top would be an understatement and a half. You had a bass player (Simmonds) dressed as a massive demon with a huge gothic costume and with makeup something akin to a clowns face gone mad, staggering around with a pair of demonesque platform boots spitting stage blood every where. A singer again with the face paint and high heeled boots. and the guitarist and drummer being pretty much similarly attired and the stage was set for a good night of ‘Wow’.

I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what the band sounded like as all I could manage was a mouth open catching flies expression as rockets flew out of the guitars resulting in massive explosions high in the rafters. Gene Simmonds suddenly taking flight and careering high over the heads of the audience spitting blood over everybody and the drummer suddenly rolling towards us as his drum riser turned in to the kind of gun turrets that you only find on a battle ship.

By the time we stumbled from the arena our senses had been well and truly pulverised. Now that is what I call a rock & roll band.

Oh, just as aside, as if some cosmic prankster was having a joke on our behalf, we went and left the lights of the car on again, so once again we spend half the night sat in the car park. However; this time it was a Ford Capri and there were only two of us.

No matter what the hassle though, you could not remove the stupid grin off of either of our faces.