Rolling Past Expiry Hard Rock 2010

>>The Kids "Anvil Chorus"

aka The Heavy Metal Kids. It's their second album. Not quite as good as the first but still way better than average. Singer Gary Holton wound up on a very popular Brit TV show as one of a crew of migrant bricklayers and construction workers, then died just as he was getting famous, of a drug overdose. Was definitely mining the street glam rock thing and I recall posting a couple YouTube vids of them on some German music show.

The television series produced a good crew of Brit actors you now see in American productions -- Tim Spall, Bill Nighy, for example -- so if he hadn't up and died he might now be famous, too.

Listened to The [New] Runaways "Fast and Loud", a Kim Fowley production effort to revive the band with new personnel sometime in the late Eighties, I think. I never actually saw a copy when it was released, so it might have been enjoined in stores but has now been reissued because of someone's desire to ride along on the minor success of The Runaways revival.

It was a band of laughably lousy ringers, doing songs with embarrassingly sub-moron lyrics like on the first two Runaways albums. But with absurdly tacky, sometimes hilariously inappropriate production and two singers of much less talent than Cherie Curie and Joan Jett. The only thing that came to mind when I was listening was Daphne & Celeste fronting a band of mates trying to do late Eighties Alice Cooper mixed with teen angst torch songs about wanting to be with the bad boys, or the guy/graffiti artist with "boots of fire" -- no joke. Seriously, boots of fire. And they do a song called S-P-E-E-D-M-E-T-A-L which is more like speedy Cramps novelty material.

Actually, the record is so bad I'm having a great time making jokes at its expense. Perversely, xhuxk might actually like parts of it because it has those qualities that led him to put those entries in Stairway to Hell that intensely irritated purists. Kind of an accidental whoopie cushion of a record which I will probably listen to, at most, only one or two times again in my entire life. Two might really be stretching it. Once again, maybe.

And I actually saw a copy in BestBuy where it was listed with The Runaways, with the same name on the label, waiting to trick some unwitting person who doesn't smell the rat.