Cashing In On Christmas

Cashing in on Christmas
Hear those cash tills ring
Jingle bells make money
Everybody sing
This is our Christmas single
Please make it number 1
And give us all your money
To make our Christmas fun

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Some talents just flare so brightly and intensely with truth and righteousness that they just can’t last. Great lost UK metallers Bad News were the outfit that epitomise this for me. Their debut Bad News is a true metal classic.

In their brief lifespan this London outfit supported Iron Maiden, sold out the Marquee attracting guest performances by Jimmy Page AND Brian May and played both the Reading Festival and Castle Donnington in 1986. Sadly the band were torn apart, metaphorically by clashing personalities and literally by crowd violence. Their record label Frilly Pink Records could never give them the financial legover they needed and they slid back to civvy street, forgotten by all but the most faithful, just a footnote in the annals of rock.

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An LP as complex and as rich as Bad News doesn’t I think benefit from a detailed note-by-note analysis, in the same way that only the most skilled, most sensitive amongst us can write about Dark Side Of The Moon and/or Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and actually add to our understanding of them. What I will try and do though is just give you a taste of my favourites.

Bad News and Frilly Pink staked everything on their big single ‘Warriors Of Genghis Khan’, a just and sane world would have responded accordingly. After the atmospheric intro when Den Dennis hits that riff and Vim Fuego barks out the opening lines ‘Burning, looting, raping, and a’shooting‘ before repeating them 3 times it gives us all we ever need to know about man’s inhumanity to man. The anachronistic weapon sound affects far from spoiling the spell of the words drive them home all the harder. By the time the band hit that oddly jarring sitar break I am just sold. This was a big staple of any mix tapes I made back in the late 80’s.

One of the best things about Bad News was their sharp self-knowledge, how else to explain the part-live recording of ‘Hey Hey Bad News’ here? in which the band’s deliciously plodding boogie is interrupted by the crowd chanting ‘Fuck off Bad News!!’ pretending they really mean it, back to the band*. Vim Fuego’s solo here just really rips into, through and beyond the song, saying everything his voice is unable to.

Bad News title track is a real cri de cœur. There is something really crunchy about the solid late 80’s production here** and I love the way that the band each take a solo on this number, a clear if unlikely homage to Roxy Music’s ‘Re-make/Re-model’. True story.

Fires of hell, doomsday bell
Prison cell, bloody hell
On my masturbike

That the title track just sets up one of my all-time favourite metal tunes ‘Masturbike’ is beyond compare. Pure Motörhead-esque fury of such potency that in amongst al the screaming, the band channelling the full righteous fury of their music just resort to profanity of the C-wordiest kind. Bad News would never have claimed to be a political band but here is the lived experience of 80’s Thatcherism; stick that Billy Bragg.

The humanity and pathos of ‘Drink ‘Til I Die’, built around one of the band’s greatest guitar performances, is something truly to behold (behear?), ‘Give me another drink Mr Bartender / If you don’t I’m going to stick your dick in a blender’. It gets darker from there on in too on this one way hell ride to oblivion and ecstasy, to quote from elsewhere in their canon.

If I was looking to be a bit controversial I would say that Bad News is not enhanced by their cover of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Yes I understand that the band seize the chance to radically deconstruct the melody and Vim rebels against the whole tyrannical concept of harmony entirely at one point, to pointed affect. I know that many respected critics actual cite this version as bettering the original, but I don’t want to wade into/reopen that whole debate^.

Finally and most festively comes their all-time classic ‘Cashing In On Christmas’ which has become such a beloved, honest, spiritual part of all our Christmases that it is difficult to write about. So just listen instead and travel on the wings of their artless art.

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I will stop there, I have sullied Bad News with my inadequate writing skills enough for one lifetime. Needless to say my copy of Bad News isn’t an original on Frilly Pink Records just a Back On Black reissue of comparatively recent vintage.

You gotta kick away the blues
So sing hey hey bad news!

1260 Down.

PS: Some rare backstage documentary footage:

*’you’re looking good, stop throwing things‘ is a great line, undercutting again the essential pomposity of the rock performer in a live setting , bridging, or maybe even breaching, the ‘us/them’ divide along fundamental Brechtian lines.

**Brian May manning the desk on this occasion.

^my family don’t want to have to spend the Christmas period in a safe house.