One of the things some people will be unaware of about me, is my love of 1980's Cock Rock.
Back in the day, in the heady days of the early 1980's, it wasn't my biggest priority. I was far too busy dividing my time between other types of music. I was entranced by foppish sensitive types like the Smiths, Aztec Camera and Go-Betweens. I loved all the new garage rock, much of it Aussie, Hoodoo Guru's, the Stems, Lime Spiders, etc. I loved 'alternative' bands like The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Pixies, Wall of Voodoo. And I loved a lot of mainstream music Duran Duran, Culture Club, Prince, etc. It's not that I didn't like metal. I'd been a Kiss fan since 1975, and I always recognised a good song when I heard one. I was always attracted to the theatrics of Metal. The costumes and the posturing. It was very obvious with Kiss, but also AC/DC, Iron Maiden all had a uniform of sorts. When 'hair metal' raised it's highly bouffanted head in 1983, I was just looking elsewhere. I did however love Poison, Motley Crue, Girlschool, Lita Ford, Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, etc. I lost a bit of interest when that stuff gave way to Winger and stuff like that. I also didn't take to Guns'N'Roses. Not at all. I thought they were poseurs. I thought their whole 'I'm so wasted man' thing was tired and I'd seen their whole shtick before, done much better. I did think 'Welcome to the Jungle' was a great song and a good riff, and a couple of others were good songs. but at the time I wasn't into it. Was probably more interested in chasing up lightning Seeds singles on import. my attitude to Gunners changed when i had Andromeda Music. We had a GNR Pinball machine, and it was a brilliant game. All the way through various targets would cue bits of GNR songs. You'd lose the ball down the side and it would go 'WELL WELL WELL MY MICHELLE', or if you were doing well it'd play 'Mr Brownstone'. Suddenly one day i realised that I had been missing out all this time and went and bought the entire catalogue that day. I have never looked back.
These days my interest in metal is a considered one. I don't like it all. But I will happily go and see Motley Crue, LA Guns, anything to do with Kiss, Sebastian Bach from Skid Row, WASP, etc. I will never get a tattoo of the warrant logo and I would never claim to be HM hardcore, but i know my stuff to some degree and get along well with a lot of the people who go to those gigs. I have conversations with those guys i never have anywhere else. We talk about the next Alice Cooper tour or whether we are going to Melbourne to see brilliant Swedish Metal band Hardcore Superstar. I really enjoy those nights.
For the last few years I'd been hearing about this thing in LA called Metal Skool. Basically it was a cock rock cover band that played on the Sunset Strip every Monday night. It had built up a huge following and it was packed every week. These guys would get up and play Kick start My Heart, Nothing But A Good Time, Hot For Teacher, etc, and they'd be all dressed in spandex and huge hair, doing scissor kicks and so on. The other thing they recreated was that 1985 Strip attitude. Part of why those bands were popular back then was this crude, rude, sexist and hedonistic behaviour that was celebrated by the bands and fans alike. That kind of behaviour is quite rightly frowned upon in this day and politically correct age. Except at the Key Club in LA every week. They are up there coaxing girls to flash their breasts and talking about sex with groupies, picking on people in the audience with the most PC taunts and jibes imaginable. People just LOVED it, word spread like wild fire and it became the hottest ticket in LA. Soon celebrities and musicians were coming down to see what all the fuss was about. If somebody famous was in the house the band would ridicule them til they got up to sing with them. That lead to more people going and so on.
Eighteen months ago they changed their name to STEEL PANTHER and when we were in the USA last April we arranged our schedule so I could go to the Key Club. My wife (to be at that stage) had no interest in going to see a bunch of sexist metal heads, but decided it might be fun at the last minute and off we went to Sunset Strip. We got there and bought tickets but were told Steel Panther didn't come on til midnight. So we went wandering around the strip, going to Grumman's Chinese, The Roxy, the Viper Room etc got my photo taken by Tom Jones Hollywood star and with Jesus Christ (long story). Shortly after we got back the place filled up with girls in spandex and lingerie, and guys in spandex and lingerie and lots of big hair, some real some fake. After a couple of support bands (including one from Melbourne i have NEVER heard of), the stage was cleared the lights went down and STEEL PANTHER exploded onto the stage like they were at Madison Square Gardens. The Key Club holds 1200 people and is set up like HQ (Adelaide) or the Metro (Melb) on three levels, but the way they set the stage up gives the band maximum 'poncing around' space. They certainly looked the part. The singer Michael Starr looks like Vince Neil from Motley, before the plastic surgery and too many pies. He is short and bleach blonde and is wearing a cut off denim jacket and spandex tights. The drummer has the best name in rock, Stix Zidinnia (say it out loud a few times) is a powerhouse on the kit. The bass player is called Lexxie Foxxx and is constantly preening his ludicrously long blonde hair, often stopping mid song to pick up a mirror and re-apply his lip gloss and at one point doing a 'hair solo', facilitated by two of the others holding hairdryer at hip height to blow his locks about. The line-up is completed by Satchel on guitar. Good looking chisel jawed, and a shredding guitar player. The first thing that hits you is 'damn these guys can really play'. They are a really tight band, and they pull off all the Metal nuances with both precision and humour. The interaction between the band when they are playing is hilarious and often really subtle. we saw them just before their own album Feel The Steel was released, so there were some of their originals sprinkled through the set, which was like a Metal's greatest hits. Motley, Ratt, Poison, Jovi all covered with pin point precision. Their own songs had all the hallmarks of classic hair 80's tunes.
In between songs the banter was more...let's say contentious. Jordan was disgusted. She liked when they were playing, for they are extremely good. But she HATED every second of them talking between songs. They have decided to resurrect all the un-PC, sexist, racist, offensive attitude that existed in hair metal in the 80's as well as the music. Every shred of my right thinking brain knows that even as a joke all of that stuff is appalling, offensive and wrong. They said things I would never have stood for at another gig, but as it's clearly meant to be comic, or ironic. Probably. The problem is to make an 'ironic' 'fag' joke you are still doing that material, whether you mean it or not. I liken it to the Suicide Girls phenomenon. Tattooed, pierced alternative girls being alternative and being empowered and so on, but at the end of the day it's still girls taking their clothes off. It is wrong like Lonely Island is wrong yet still funny, but more Panther is way more offensive. But I thought it was funny as fuck! Hilarious (if obviously scripted), jibes at people's sexuality and ethnicity, which everybody was lapping up. I wonder what bit of my brain gave this material a 'hall pass' because it is in the context of a 'funny hair metal thing'. Is it the same as watching a Victorian play and going 'well you wouldn't treat the help like that these days, but back then for purposes tonight of entertainment...'. I guess I'd say it's about 'Context'.
When they got John Corabi (ex: Motley Crue, Brides of Destruction/Union member) up they basically paid him out and said 'Nah we're not doing any of your songs, let's do Halen', he was very clearly in on the gag.
Since we saw them last April they have appeared in Europe and the UK, becoming the most talked about act at the Download festival and selling out their own shows to rabid crowds. The skydived into a US Festival in June. In full Lycra gear. They have released their debut album full of hilariously offensive songs. Check below for the video for Death To All But Metal' and there dozens of clips and live footage of them playing live, including guest spots by Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Paul Stanley, Justin from the Darkness, and many others. be warned some of the clips are VERY un-office friendly, be warned (especially their power ballad Community Property uncut version), but if you enjoy 80's hair metal and are offended by say the video of Warrants Cherry Pie, you'll probably dig Steel Panther.
Death To all but Metal
http://video.universalrepublic.com/?plid=1481452858&v=18409155001&aid=0
*Sarah Silverman bit at the end gets funnier every time i see it. Which has been a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment