Little Richard Wagner

R.I.P Jim Steinman.

JIm Steinman has left the building, hopefully with all the stirring pomp, thunderous choruses and deliciously overwrought drama of his very best creations. There aren’t many composers and producers of popular music who have looked at this glorious mess we all love and decided to MAXIMISE everything about everything to the power of nine million, then add more explosions and revving motorbikes. At his very best and with the right compadres in train he could make enough of a gloriously enormous racket, to make the Ring Cycle sound more like a dryer on spin cycle.

As a bit of a sucker for overly dramatic music I liked an awful lot of his stuff. Here are my two favourites^ .

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The sirens are screaming, and the fires are howling
Way down in the valley tonight

It has to be Meat Loaf Bat Out Of Hell; it just has to be doesn’t it? This is simply such a ridiculous juggernaut of a track that normal critical thought just cannot be brought to bear upon it.

Yes, it is insanely overwrought, lacking in anything remotely resembling cool and is double ultra infra dig. But that’s exactly, why it is so perfect. Listening to this record is like being hit with a battering ram, being shot with a blunderbuss at close range, being fired into the side of the Great Pyramid by the Hadron Collider whilst only wearing a sequinned thong**, like … well, you get the picture. Subtlety took the morning off when Bat Out Of Hell was written.

Bat Out Of Hell is such an immense, monumental track that I do find it slightly difficult to comprehend that it has only been around for 44 years now, it sounds as though it has always been and always will, waiting at the threshold of human consciousness for an intrepid archerockologist to chisel it out. JIm Steinman did.

Truly Bat Out Of Hell should only ever be consumed in the full 9:48 version, preferably on blood red vinyl. Why would you even consider trying to divide it, to lessen it? otherwise by the time Meat Loaf gives you the full ‘Then I’m down in the bottom of a pit in the blazing sun’ for the second time, you wouldn’t actually feel it.

Todd Rundgren’s production is simply incredible on this track, as is his guitaration and the playing of everyone else involved but this post is not for them, not tonight. The lyrics and the drama of the setting pulled the best performance of Meat Loaf’s life out of him which is why this is simply the best iteration of Jim and Meat^*.

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Flash forward a decade and in the late 80’s Jim Steinman had been associated with a glut of far lesser projects, it is fair to say and really wasn’t on anybody’s list of cool alternative collaborators.

Enter the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, cigarette paper thin, wreathed in dry ice, clad in darkest midnight, Andrew Eldritch. Having retained the Sisters Of Mercy name via some legal savagery he set about creating an updated, less guitar dependent version of his band. He was trying to write something totally over the top, popularist and ‘stupid sounding’, as he tells the story he was trying to get that ‘Jim Steinman sound’. Then he had a blindingly obvious idea.

This was the genesis of Sisters Of Mercy This Corrosion*^, written by Eldritch but produced by Steinman. It is one of my very favourite songs for lots of reasons, mostly hormonal but it doesn’t hurt that in its’ purest version on Floodland it is 10:55 minutes of sonic bliss and wonderment.

Steinman makes the song sound like it was recorded with 9 choirs in a vast cathedral sculpted out of ice and chrome, whilst a storm of epic proportions rages overhead. Again it just bypasses any critical faculties I have that haven’t totally ossified yet and plugs itself directly into my pleasure centres, wibbling them alarmingly.

The lyrics are deliberately overblown and daft, everything writ large and unsubtle, the song being 90% chorus anyway. As an overdramatic teen goth I found the lines near the end to be almost unbearably meaningful, as a mature chap who should know better I only do now on certain moonless nights when the constellation of Proxima occupies the house of Nereus.

I got nothing to say I ain't said before
I bled all I can, I won't bleed no more
I don't need no one to understand
Why the blood run cold
The hired hand
On heart
Hand of god
Flood land and driven apart
Run cold 
Turn
Cold, burn like a healing hand

Lordy I wrote that in so many exercise books in school it’s scary. The words without the sound, without the ultimate bomb blast bombast supplied by Steinman are like landed fish, they bear no relation to the majesty and life they inhabit in the unbounded depths of the song. That’s no accident.

If this were a proper review I would bang on about the B-sides ‘Torch’ and ‘Colours’, both of which have more elusive charms than the title track. I should point out that the 12″ version is a wussy 8:37 take – ridiculous, Jim Steinman needed another 3 minutes for his magic to unfold fully.

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Thank you Mr Steinman for some skyscraping moments of raw unadulterated fun, gleeful over the top stupidity and titanic drama. The self-styled Little Richard Wagner knew exactly what he wanted and he got it, then added more explosions, choirs and maybe another few explosions for the road.

And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell

1075 Down (in the valley tonight).

^with apologies to my compatriot Bonnie Tyler.

**lavender, since you ask.

^*as Steinman wanted the LP credited to apparently. The record company, rather wisely, nixed that one.

*^and Dominion/Mother Russia but I’m just picking one here and ignoring their later collaboration too.