Oh dear sometimes pure effort isn’t enough. Check out Rogue Male First Visit from 1985 on Music For Nations.
They had songs about motorcycles, they looked like particularly burly extras from Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, they were heavy, they were at least 80% made of metal (50% chrome, 50% titanium), presumably drank toasts from the skulls of their enemies and I assume all their home furnishings were made of studded leather.
The cover of First Visit pretty much gives you all you need to know, it’s a cyborg. Okay fine, cyborgs are pretty cool but it’s better than that, by far. Can you guess why children? Because it looks a bit fierce? nope, that’s just a cyborg thing – you buy a new one, it comes with ‘bit fierce looking’ as standard. Because it’s wearing a furry cloak and epaulettes that make it look like particularly camp eastern European dictator? nope, that’s just the way cyborgs roll. Well, check out above the scary robo eye, yes the hair. IT’S A CYBORG WITH A FREAKIN’ MULLET !! Praise be! It doesn’t get much more 1985 than that*.
Unfortunately, there’s also a clue as to First Visit‘s limitations right there too. There’s no nice way to say this, it looks a bit cheap and that also runs to the production. This in turn means that we’re stuck with a muddy mix which effectively neuters the dynamics of their Motörhead / Tank / UK Subs boogie. I have no doubt they were excellent live (they had a reputation for it) but for Homo Legous 21stCentuius there’s precious little evidence of that here. Best of the bunch is opening track ‘Crazy Motorcycle’, followed by ‘All Over You’, which takes as its central tenet that Mr Rogue Male is about to blow his, umm, load ‘All Over You’, but don’t worry children it’s far too indecipherable to be properly obscene and I’m sure there was a hidden political message. There is a revenge story of sorts, I think, on the second side of the LP in ‘Dressed Incognito’ which involves a woman catching her fella at it with a lady of dubious virtue and offing them both.
To be honest that was pretty much all I could make out, the production really was that bad. In fact fr ages I was convinced he was shouting ‘I didn’t do anything to Elvis’ on the last track, which you have to admit is a damn cool line. Unfortunately, closer listening revealed it to be the much more mundane ‘I didn’t do anything to deserve this’.
As always I feel that I need to say that First Visit is a far better LP than any I have ever made and again, I feel honour-bound to say it is the best album with a mullet-toting cyborg on the cover in my collection and you should know that’s not a claim ever to be made lightly.
Now before I go I also have to draw your attention to a seldom-glimpsed phenomenon on the inner sleeve, yup Male Camel Toe (MCT). Now I have spotted a particularly striking of this before, but this one is a doozy – in fact I’d go so far as to identify it as, a rare, Double Armadillo. Respect.
432 Down (with a mullet).
*which is why large swathes of my homeland still regard it as a desirable ‘do.