Entertainment For Lively Minds
Meat Loaf: not quite the singer he used to be?
Posted by yorkio on 2 October 2011 - 4:31pm.
The Aussies certainly got their money's worth there. Come back Florence, all is forgiven.
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I had the great misfortune of seeing Mr Loaf...
at Knebworth Park in 1985, supporting Deep Purple. He'd broken his foot or something, so he arrived onstage in a wheelchair. This, frankly, made his attempts trying to pull his backing singer during Dead Ringer for Love seem faintly - OK, completely - ludicrous. The punters showed their appreciation for his efforts (and the lousy weather) by showering him with lovingly-tossed bottles of piss. This resulted in his telling them to go fuck themselves, which didn't exactly endear him further to them. All in all it was an unmitigated disaster.
I was there as well.
It was one of the worst things I've ever witnessed on a stage. I forget which song it was but it involved Mr Loaf and the backing singer screeching "Fuck you!!" "Yeah, well fuck you too!!" at each other for quite some time. The bottles of widdle were well-deserved. I think they played about half of their allotted slot.
The Scorpions came on next, if I remember. They, by contrast, were ACE.
Even worse than
Kevin Rowland in a dress at Reading?
I've only seen the pictures of that.
DON'T POST THE PICTURE!
I was there
"shudders at memory"
I lasted a minute and a half, Yorky...
...did any kind of tune ever appear?
And Crowthmeriser - wasn't there some kind of comeback version of Mountain at that Knebworth show? Any good?
I can't say I remember that...
I spent most of the afternoon watching Shit Man™ as I nicknamed the longhair who had toppled into the communal cesspit whilst trying to combine drinking cider and having a crap. He was so drunk he simply wandered around the festival site groaning and whiffing. You could tell his location from afar by watching the crowd move aside as one as he approached.
And I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a b-e-e-e-e-ell!
Not in the conventional sense. The slow bit of Bat out of Hell (10:20 onwards) is truly astonishing though.
Bloody hell, Yorki...
...I've just fast forwarded to the bit you describe. It's beyond belief. It's like a atonal Vic&Bob pub singer. How can this man look himself in the mirror and take people's money at the door?
Not unreminiscent of this
Colin, I think you're being a bit too kind there...
He sounds like a catatonic water buffalo that's about to expire. Retire, Loaf. Retire.
No really... retire.
I have this idea...
...that if Loaf retired with immediate effect (in fact, retired like a Bat Out Of Hell, gone when the morning comes etc etc), Paul Shane might be drafted in - if he has a gap in his cabaret schedule - to cover any remaining gigs in the Meat Loaf diary. It couldn't possibly be short-changing the fans any more than Loaf would...
Been a while since I've heard
such a tight band, and such truly dreadful singing.
I was at the game
and heard virtually nothing of the set - the swirling wind made the performance virtually inaudible. So I was pretty lucky there.
A thought: Why do we bother with pre-game entertainment? Comments about the Trade Descriptions Act aside, does anyone really care? The sight at the Rugby League Grand Final on Sunday of the predictable batch of kids out of dance school waving flags and banners around in a manner that probably took a choreographer minutes to come up with was just cringeworthy.
Pretty much nothing matches the sound the crowd makes when the teams comes out, and again when the game gets underway. Something this big doesn’t need any sort of build up; at which point did some marketing genius decide, “I know what this needs to make it better. Really ordinary performances from overpaid so-called stars.”