Forget fame and fortune: the public has an appetite for self-destruction, and metalheads Anvil are the latest act to benefit from their failings, writes KEVIN COURTNEY
YOUR NAME IS Steve “Lips” Kudlow. It’s not a name that has been on everybody’s lips. You are the singer and guitarist in veteran Canadian heavy-metal band Anvil, and for the past 27 years you have been banging your head against a brick wall, trying to find fame and fortune. But so far, success has eluded you, and now you’re on the wrong side of 50, and you’re still playing the toilet circuit, or second on the bill to a puppet show.
Oh, you came on strong in the beginning – your 1982 debut album Metal on Metalwas hailed as one of the "heaviest albums in metal history", and earned your band the sobriquet "demigods of Canadian metal". You played at big festivals alongside bands such as Whitesnake and Dio and had a huge influence on the likes of Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. All of these bands went on to sell millions of records – except for you. You became the also-rans, casualties of the metal wars, missing presumed dead as a doornail. But you never gave up the dream, and so picked yourself up, slung on your Flying-V guitar and kept on searching for that elusive fame. But now you've reached the end of the road, and you're ready to hang up your axe and give up the fight.
But you don’t give up, because although you may have become old, irrelevant and faintly comical, you’re not a quitter. You vow to make one last-ditch attempt to crack the big-time before it’s pension time, to gamble what little you have left on a death-or-glory race for the prize. The world has ignored you for a quarter of a century; now it’s time to show the world that they were wrong.
THERE ARE NOsecond acts in American lives, wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. But Canada's forgotten rockers are getting one more crack of the whip thanks to a documentary chronicling the band's years in the rock'n'roll wilderness. Anvil! The Story of Anvil, made by the band's friend and former roadie Sacha Gervasi, was a hit at this year's Sundance Festival and was screened at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival last Thursday.
A hilarious, often touching account of two lifetime friends following their dream, even though it seems to be taking them nowhere, the film has been compared to the classic mockumentary This is Spinal Tap.
Indeed, many who have seen the film thought it was another Tap-type mock-doc – the fact that drummer Robb Reiner is a namesake of Spinal Tap's director confirmed their suspicions. But Kudlow and Reiner are all too real; their missteps and misadventures as they try and try again to drag themselves out of obscurity – well, you could make it up, but it probably wouldn't be half as funny.
The success of The Story of Anvilhas turned the band's fortunes around and finally made stars of its ageing protagonists; they now count Slash, Lemmy and Keanu Reeves among their growing army of celebrity fans. Kudlow and Reiner were 14 when they first played together, and they vowed to keep on rocking until they were old men.
They can’t keep doing it forever, though, but before the zimmer frames come out, they’re going to make the most of their twilight stardom.
There's even a petition to get them to play Glastonbury 2009, so don't be surprised if the fields of Pilton, Somerset, echo to the sounds of Jackhammer, Metal on Metaland Winged Assassins. Their long-suffering families may finally see a payoff for their years of patience and support; that is, if Anvil don't sabotage their second bite at the cherry and sink into obscurity again.
FIRST YOU FAIL. Then you write a book about how you failed. Then you get a young hot-shot director to make a film about how you failed.
Then you watch as your once-moribund career takes off into the stratosphere, and a world that once spurned you comes beating a path back to your door. In the world of movies and books, it seems that failure is a viable option, a sure-fire way of turning terminal decline into box-office or publishing gold. How I Became a Big Star and Made Pots of Money?Predictable. How I Screwed it All up and Fell Face First in the Gutter?Now that's entertainment.
Ondi Timoner's documentary, Dig!follows the divergent fortunes of two US bands, The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Warhols singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor and BJM leader Anton A Newcombe are firm friends and bitter rivals, and as Taylor-Taylor’s star rises, Newcombe’s falls to earth in a blaze of self-destructive behaviour.
Guess which of the pair is the more watchable.
The success of Toby Young's 2002 memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate Peopleproved that the public has a bit of an appetite for self-destruction. Inspired by the British writer's time in New York, where he got a job at Vanity Fair, the book is a catalogue of disasters brought on by Young's own arrogance, tactlessness and prodigious drinking. Young gets himself fired from Vanity Fair, manages to offend some of the most powerful people in publishing, and generally gets people's backs up at the various parties he crashes.
The book became a best-seller, and was made into a film starring Simon Pegg, so Young has got the last laugh on Manhattan high society.
In the late 1970s, Neil McCormick was attending school in Mount Temple in Dublin, and preparing for his destiny – to be the biggest rock star ever to come out of Ireland. What he wasn't prepared for, however, was the rise of his classmate Bono. As U2 rose to greater heights during the 1980s, McCormick struggled to secure a record deal for his band, and despaired of ever making it past the pub circuit. While Bono played Live Aid, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, and topped the charts, McCormick became convinced that the U2 frontman had stolen his life. It didn't help that Bono regularly phoned his old friend from various exotic locations. "I'm your doppelgänger," joked the U2 singer.
McCormick didn't make it as a pop star, but he did become a successful music journalist, writing for the Daily Telegraph; his book, I Was Bono's Doppelgänger, will resonate with the thousands of Irish rock bands who fully expected to be up there with U2, and still can't believe they're not global superstars.
It's the mid-1990s, and Luke Haines is the singer and songwriter with acidic pop band The Auteurs. Their debut album, New Wave, is hailed as a masterpiece, and is nominated for the 1993 Mercury Music Prize. But a dark shadow is looming on the horizon, and it's called Britpop. Pretty soon, the UK music scene is overrun by Blur, Oasis, Elastica, Sleeper, The Bluetones and Shed Seven, and Haines watches in horror as the public goes wild for Wonderwall, Parklifeand the notion of "cool Britannia". The worst insult of all is they're calling him the father of Britpop.
While the rest of London swings and the new mods wave the Union Jack, Haines remains holed up in his dingy Georgian flat in Camden, writing such acerbic songs as Unsolved Child Murderand Light Aircraft on Fire. The law of diminishing returns kicks in, and The Auteurs sell fewer and fewer records until, eventually, Haines disbands the group and embarks on a new project – a concept album about terrorism in 1970s Germany entitled Baader Meinhof. The public buys Bittersweet Symphonyinstead.
Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfallis Haines's alternative take on those halcyon days of pop, told from the vantage point of bitter but resigned hindsight. It's like going down a portal into Haines's fevered brain, and seeing the world from inside an iron mask of the soul. It's funny, tragic and honest, and it will make you want to run out and buy The Auteurs' entire back catalogue. Haines has turned his time in Britpop's shadow into a darkly humorous treatise on that most shallow era of modern music.
If it earns its author another chance to show the world how wrong it was, then that won’t be a bad thing at all.
Bad Vibes: Britpop and my Part in Its Downfall by Luke Haines is published by William Heinemann