| The year of the Bat (Part 1/4) Typed by RSG | |
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RSG 11:53 pm UTC 08/25/07 |
| It stayed in the UK charts for eight years and become the biggest-selling debut album of all time. It also nearly finished off the singer for good. Classic Rock brings you the story of Bat Out Of Hell. WORDS: JON HOTTEN Meeting Jim Steinman, the creator of Bat Out Of hell, was a memorable experience. After enjoying years of vicarious thrills from his widescreen, technicolour songs, the real thing was no disappointment. He shook hands with a soft, pudgy mitt; long fingers and manicured nails. He had a huge rush of totally gray hair, a slobby, unexercised body, a rounded, moon-face that had rarely seen the daylight and a voice like that of a cartoon character, The Hooded Claw. He wore an expensive leather biker's jacket on which naked women had been wonkily painted. We were at Pinewood Studios, where he was supervising a video for the track It's All Coming Back To Me Now, the first single from his Pandora's Box project. The director was perhaps the only man in the world who could match Steinman in the scope of his creative vision, Ken Russell. And even Russel, by now a well-lived 60-something with Tommy, The Devils and Whore on his CV and years of working with Ollie Reed under his belt, seemed to be feeding off the kinetic blast of Steinman's peculiar madness. The video script, such as it was, called for Elaine Caswell to be sexually aroused by large Python, writhing on a bed that lit up in time with the music, while surrounded by a large python, writhing on a bed that lit up in time with the music, while surrounded by a group of bemused, semi-naked dancers on a day-trip from their regular gig in Cats. The two-day shoot was over-running badly, and the cost of continuing was over L35, 000 an hour. Steinman casually offered to pay himself, and Russell nodded back and grinned. They were having a fun time, and over lunch they were plotting an unscripted climax to the video, one that would come as a shock to Virgin Records, who were nominally the clients. Steinman demanded - and Russell whole heartedly agreed - that thly fitting end to the cut was for a man to ride a motorcycle up the steps of a local church-tower, jump it out of the turrets at the top and then expolode. To the surprise of only two men - Jim and Ken - the wardens of the 500-year old church refused. But that was Jim, captured perfectly in his moment: you start off by thinking big, and then you take it from there. We met twice more over the next few days, and he proved a fascination and complex man. He was obsessed with motorcycles, and yet he hadn't passed his driving test. The characters in his songs were heroic figures, beautiful and doomed, but he was a bachelor who lived a solitary life. When we went to dinner, he ordered everything - literally everything - on the menu and ate a little bit of each. Aside from music, his great love was fine wine, and one of his managers told me if he wrote about every wine that he tasted in the same way that he wrote his songs, "it would be the greatest book wine ever written..." Above all, spending a little time with Jim Steinman proffered an insight into how someone could write a record as unique, as mad, as special, as crazy, and as dumb and overblown as Bat Out Of Hell, still the biggest-selling debut album ever released, and as of now, the third biggest-selling record of all time. As the(y) saying goes, it's always the quiet ones that you've got to watch. A classmate of Jim Steinman's once said: "Jim knew what it meant to be cool and knew that he wasn't." Instead, the odd-looking kid who spent much of his time "imagining I had a bat perched on my shoulder" created in his head a place for the kind of man he knew he'd never be: a land for the heroic. Now he just had to convince the rest of the world | |
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