There’s one thing I liked about Marvin Lee Aday and that was his choice of football team. Meatloaf, for it is, or rather was, he once said this:
“I thought, I don’t want to go on and say I’m a Manchester United fan or a Liverpool fan.
“I’m gonna go down to the third level. And so I picked Hartlepool. I read about them and I found that the people of Hartlepool had hanged a monkey thinking he was a Frenchman, and I loved that story. I read everything I could about every game they played. I knew all the players. I knew who the coach was. I knew there’d been major criticism of the coach, about whether he should have put one player in or not. I was ready.”
I am guessing this was a few years ago because Hartlepool haven’t been to the ‘third level’ for a while now, but liking a team because the people once hanged a monkey because they thought he was a Frenchman can’t be all bad, can it?
As for Meatloaf’s music, the less said the better. Some wise sage once said that his hit Bat Out Of Hell was America’s Bohemian Rhapsody. I completely agree with that, but not in a good way. There are few bands I despise more than Queen, who inflicted said Rhapsody on an unsuspecting world back in 1975. “Overblown, pompous, melodramatic, self-indulgent”, as Meatloaf literally said about himself. Actually, I’ve used worse descriptions than that.
Until Meatloaf met Jim Steinman, who wrote all his material, he was a jobbing actor, appearing in musicals and the like when one day along came Bat Out Of Hell. As with Bohemian Rhapsody, everyone in the world, except me, loved Loaf’s syrupy faux rock and soon everyone, against except me, was singing Two Out Of Three Ain’t bad, Bat Out Of Hell and the excreable You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth. I was making do with Steely Dan’s Aja and The Clash’s album The Clash. You will never persuade me I got the wrong end of the deal.
Even though I hated – and hate is a strong word, which I really mean here – Meatloaf’s music, I quite liked the bloke. He frequently appeared on British TV and always seemed cheerful, amiable and very loud. As long as his music wasn’t loud, I could live with it.
Meaty returned in 1993 with Bat Out Of Hell 2: filling up my pension pot (I’m not sure about the second part of the title: I may have made it up) and to my horror made something even worse. I’d Do Anything For Love (but I won’t do that). What? Clean the dishes? Anal sex? Watch Mrs Brown’s Boys? He never said, but it quickly became my equally most hated Jim Steinman song ever, alongside Bonnie Tyler’s abysmal Total Eclipse of the Heart where she sang, over and over and over again, “Every now and then.” Don’t ask me why: I hated that line as much as I hated Margaret Thatcher.
But, as ever, I was out of step with the world and her husband. And today, we learn that Meaty is no more.
I’m obviously sorry for his family and friends. Despite my dislike of his music – and I fear I won’t start liking it just because he has shuffled off his mortal coil – it doesn’t look his final years were much fun in terms of both his health and his ability to sing, which given he couldn’t actually write his own songs, didn’t leave him with much to do musically.
“Rock’n’roll was never meant to answer the questions of the universe,” he later concluded. “It’s a laugh. I’m a laugh. So laugh at me if you like. I have no problem with that.” I wouldn’t call what he did ‘Rock’n’roll’ but it made a lot of people happy, including him. I think that’s all that matters, really.
