My brain is mischievous. It constantly seeks to fill itself up with information that is of no real practical use. It handicaps me by deleting information regarding the location of car keys or the correct way to wire a plug and replacing it with detailed knowledge of Beatles recording sessions or whole segments of the stand up routines of Bill Hicks. I am sure that this is a source of constant amusement/bemusement/frustration (delete where applicable) to friends/family/work colleagues (ditto), although my contribution to the success of quiz teams has been duly, if reluctantly, noted.
There is no pattern to the storage of this material in my brain, no equivalent to the Dewey Decimal System that might help me make some sort of logical sense of these thought processes. Instead, random snippets will leap unbound from my subconscious and unleash themselves without prior permission on an unsuspecting world.
This brings me to Meatloaf. Not the foodstuff so beloved of our American cousins, but the corpulent musician and actor known to his parents as Marvin Lee Aday. A man who has sold quite a few records over the years, all of them, without a single exception, shit. Of course I am aware that taste is subjective and that this is what makes music such a wonderful, powerful thing. But my dislike of Mr Loaf (I won’t be so forward as to address him as Meat) is deep-rooted and can be traced back to my teens.
I am 14 years old and on a coach heading for Austria on a school trip (the purpose of this excursion has vanished from my memory over the years, but I still have a smattering of German, along with a morbid fear of both lederhosen and National Socialism). The content of the coach comprises around forty teenagers, two teachers and a huge bag of combustible hormones. This being the dark ages (or as some people prefer to call them, the 1980s) the available entertainment is limited – no telly or DVD players for us – but there is a radio/cassette player, which should save us from listening to accordions and oompah music as we travel through France and Germany.
Unfortunately, following a brief survey, it soon becomes apparent that there are only two cassettes on the coach. The first is a 90 minute recording of that week’s Top 20 radio show and the other is Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf. The Top 20 cassette does not prove popular among the more conservative elements of our travelling contingent, containing as it does the quite marvelous but not entirely tuneful “Flowers Of Romance” by Public Image Limited, and so begins two weeks of sightseeing around Tyrol, with Mr. Loaf’s “masterpiece” comprising the lion’s share of the soundtrack.
Now I’m all for giving something a fair shake before deciding if I like it or not, but frankly this was tantamount to child abuse. At first the album sounded histrionic, humourless and bombastic and it just got worse on repeated listens. Around and around Austria we travelled, Mr. Loaf’s charmless caterwauling providing the perfect ambient backing for the sounds of teenage gossip, furtive backseat fumblings and motion-induced vomiting.
Trapped in this mobile Hades, I was repeatedly subjected to this enormous pile of testicles masquerading as music for 14 days, to the point where the opening bars of the title track would reduce me to helpless sobs. My teachers clearly misunderstood the cause of my distress and believed me to be merely homesick. I took this as further evidence of their barbarity, alongside their insistence on me studying Jane Austen. On my return to England, I wrote an impassioned letter to the United Nations, describing the abuse I had suffered and suggesting that those responsible should be tried in The Hague. Answer came there none. I can only assume that Kurt Waldheim did not receive my missive.
I am well aware that many people like Bat Out Of Hell, and the sales figures stand as testament to its popularity – it still sells 200,000 copies every year and has sold an estimated 43 million copies worldwide since its release in 1977. All of which is merely another dent in my battered faith in my fellow man. I had always suspected that folks were daft, but this is self-harm taken to extremes.
Bat Out Of Hell is Spector without the sass, Springsteen without the soul. It is a horrible, horrible record. To bastardise Billy The Bard “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
