Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Third/Sister Lovers!

Article theme: People Ain't No Good - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

"I want a circle of ten bathing beauties overlapping hands, but then the same thing but smaller, under the album title, which should be rendered backwards, overlapping the band name" - someone, correctly.

Big Star's first two records were largely the sort of slick popcraft that should have ignited radio had they been marketed properly. Sadly for Alex Chilton but happily for the rest of us, that never happened, and by Third, the wheels came off and the band cranked out a rollercoaster of despair, elation, calm, despondency and manic energy all the less navigable because it was never actually released with a proper track listing, so you'll bounce from one wild extreme of emotion to a totally different one depending on whether you spin the disc as you received it or hit shuffle or your iPod (I'm a millennial, OK? Give me a break). My version opens with "Kizza Me", which could have been found on #1 Record, but then lurches into "Thank You Friends", the most caustic assault on the uselessness of everyone around you one could hope to write (I'm going to make them play it at my funeral). Shortly thereafter, a dirgey ode to depression segues into an unironic Christmas song celebrating the birth of Christ with lyrics like "the wrong shall fail/and the right prevail". Mr Bungle doesn't cause this kind of whiplash.

"Blue Moon" is achingly tender, "You Can't Have Me" makes defiance lighter than air, "Dream Lover" sounds like an OD victim slipping into unconsciousness, and "Stroke It Noel" is blissful with a surprisingly merry string section out of nowhere. With such a wealth of bangers dripping with the resonance of each human emotional state, it's no wonder David Lunch's favourite goth supergroup project This Mortal Coil covered at least three across two of their albums. But for me the greatest cut of all is "Nightime" (sic?), an endlessly haunting ode to a gf in mid-breakdown, in which it sounds like Chilton shares not a little of the anguish. Imagine cranking out your towering, epochal masterpiece in the very act of giving up.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Sorry!

Yeah, the first image that came up when I searched for this was a poster instead of the actual album cover, which has the driver running over a ball in the road. On the poster there is no ball, making a nonsense of the album title. Oh well.

Just as my favourite Pink Floyd album is Adam and Eve by Catherine Wheel, so too my favourite Smashing Pumpkins album is Sorry! by, uh, Catherine. No offence to Billy Corgan (who, despite what soybeards will tell you, was probably the 90s' least douchey rockstar), but Sorry! is more consistent than any given Pumpkins album and makes good on the haze-of-noise component of the sound to which the Pumpkins never quite committed to my liking. We can, however, credit the Pumpkins 100% for the template: "Saint" opens with a drum roll just like "Cherub Rock", while "2am" swipes the cinematic string section from "Spaceboy", and the signature squirrelly lead-work that set the Pumpkins leagues apart from the grunge pack can be found throughout (although, again, I prefer Catherine's guitar tone. Sorry!). Moreover, the blend of dazed boyhood whimsy and sneering aggression is no less authentic for being studiously cribbed from the more famous Illinoisans. It's just all so much more interesting than Burt Cobain's one-note whining, it makes you wish more people had ripped off Corgan over Cobain. Catherine is funnier too: the Bee Gees' "Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You" is an inspired cover choice. And Catherine weren't afraid to colour outside of the lines either: "Flawless" anticipates Bri'ish shoegazers Slowdive's diversion into blissed-out country (as Mojave 3) by a cool year. Most importantly, their video for "Saint" was the most 90s video of all time.

Catherine released another album, 1996's Hot Saki and Bedtime Stories, which cut back on the noodling and leaned more into red-cup pop-punk house party vibes, but for my money was somewhat weaker overall. Still, Sorry! stands the test of time as one of the mid-90s' finest gems. Give it a spin, asshole!

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: DaDa!

The album cover being a modified detail from Dalí's Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is a return tribute to Dalí, who was a major Coop fan and declared his act "musical surrealism". Dalí made a First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain, the story of which is the best thing you'll read all year.

Everyone knows Alice Cooper for his pioneering theatrical stage show and his slew of classic anthems from "Eighteen" to "Elected" to "Poison", but the thing that really stabs you in the neck as you delve into the Cooper catalogue is how eclectic it all is, like a Ween album strung out over half a dozen decades. The first two albums are as uncommercial as it gets, weird psychedelia with odd melodic gems jutting out randomly like teeth out of a Briton's gums. Then there's the era of unimpeachable classics from Love it to Death through Billion Dollar Babies or even Welcome to my Nightmare (depending on how charitably you view Muscle of Love), but even this hit-making hard rock era has its oddities like the dark jazzy atmospherics of "Blue Turk" or the James-Bond-meets-King-Crimson pastiche of "Halo of Flies". Then you've got disco parodies and showtunes on Goes to Hell, sci-fi new wave on Flush the Fashion, hair metal, industrial and more. For every wild left-turn that crashes in flames, there's one that pays off in spades, but by far the oddest and greatest Alice album is one he doesn't even remember writing or recording at all. Just as Bowie's cocaine album (Station to Station) was his best and bleakest, so too was the Coop's. Now I'm not saying you should dabble in white powder for the sake of a tune. I mean, fuck it, Minor Threat coined straight edge and their Complete Discography is one of the few punk discs that holds up after half a spin. But just as LSD seems to inevitably lead to inane surrealism and heroin to insomniac self-pity, cocaine seems to have a distinctly dark and empty energy you wouldn't guess from something that has adults bouncing off the walls like kids on Halloween candy.

Not that DaDa doesn't have laughs - "I Love America" is almost tryhard in its comic aspirations, though redeemed by the fact Cooper actually meant it - but there's a sort of desperation in the laughter, like a guy trying to distract himself from gnawing despair with a good time. The synthy opener is weirdly beautiful and almost goth, but Cooper sounds like a for-real mental patient on it, far from the theatrical madness of "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". "Enough's Enough" sounds like it was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, a tale of an abusive monster of a father taunting his boy now that his dear old mother is no longer there to protect him, set to a dissonently bouncy bit of new wave that reflects the awful glee in the bad dad's jibes. "Former Lee Warmer" is a tale of a mute, mentally retarded brother kept locked up in a family home that makes those Phantom of the Opera organ tones you'd hear in haunted house parodies actually creepy again. "No Man's Land" is actually hilarious but the casual mention of "my other personalities" brings chills back to a superficially comic scenario. "Scarlet and Sheba" is like some kind of twisted BDSM tango that evokes a dungeon with the scent of candles heavy in the air. "Fresh Blood" takes a startling detour into funk and seems to describe the unhappy lot of a Renfield stewarding a vampire from kill to kill amid the festivity of an uncaring city. "Pass the Gun Around" is a raw sketch of the end of the road against the grandest, most ostentatious arrangements on the album, with a Dick Wagner solo that sounds like David Gilmour having the worst nightmare of his life. Maybe Alice just doesn't want to remember.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Adam and Eve!

In accordance with our censorship policy, female nipples have been replaced with convicted murderer Stephen McDaniel, to avoid any offence.

Because you're irreparably basic, your favourite Pink Floyd album is The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon. Because I'm a handsome patrician, my favourite Pink Floyd album is Adam and Eve by Catherine Wheel, one of the best and most interesting bands of the 90s. Debut Ferment brought classic rock grandeur to the shoegaze sound, followup masterpiece Chrome was face-punching space rock, and failed attempt to sell out Happy Days at least had my personal theme song on it. But on their GOAT B-sides & rarities collection Like Cats and Dogs, you'll find their cover of "Wish You Were Here", which presaged their full-album pastiche of "Welcome to the Machine"-era Floyd.*

You might think pastiche is a limiting format, that the result couldn't very well transcend gimmickry, that it would be fated to live in the shadow of its inspiration. But you would be characteristically wrong because Adam and Eve is great and uses Floyd as a genre the way a hundred billion doom bands used Black Sabbath, while imposing the Wheel's own more inimitable quirks and sensibilities. Bob Ezrin and only-album-artist-you-can-name Storm Thorgerson reprise their schtick from the Floyd catalogue but charismatic frontman Rob Dickinson (who is Bruce of Iron Maiden's cousin) takes the Wheel and wrests the sound in his own distinctly un-Roger-Watersishly positive direction. Lyrics like "don't you think the sarcasm's a little hard to stomach?/the cynicism's boring" ("Here Comes the Fat Controller") are as bold and caustic a revolt against the practically mandatory nihilism of the 90s zeitgeist as everyone pretends grunge was against those evil hair bands. In fact the track cuts short abruptly with a one-two punch "clamping down" effect in stereo just as it seems it will exult forever, like The Machine of corporate radio saying "that's quite enough of that". We don't mind; we'll be listening again.

Adam and Eve is far too long and I wouldn't cut a track, a verse, or an indulgent soundscape because the meandering, dynamic ebb and flow is the point. "Broken Nose", "Satellite" and "Controller" are standout anthems, but the plaintive, wistful strains of "Ma Solituda" and "Thunderbird" are no less resonant for being stood out from. The album feels vaguely conceptual but good luck pinning down the concept. Sex, love, friendship, burnout, melancholy, childhood, fantasy and nostalgia alternate with the fluency of a lucid dream. "There's far too many ghosts", Dickinson intones, and maybe that's the key. First "Phantom of the American Mother" quotes lyrically, and then "Goodbye" musically, from "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", so the album is already haunted by the ghost of Syd Barrett. Further lyrics allude to Bruce Lee, Sir Michael Caine, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and then there's the titular pair whose archetypal tragedy haunts every man, woman and child. The closing track laments an unnamed girl who left town years ago. But with remembrance of old lovers, childhood favourites and estranged friends comes the warm afterglow of the good times. Does "Thunderbird" refer to the creature of American Indian myth, or the Supermarionation show from 60s British TV? Either way, urged on by eager, tentative piano lines, it sounds like it evokes the delicate integrity of childhood play: "just speak it more discreetly/you're making it sound absurd".

IDK if I'll write more music reviews but if I don't, listen to Adam & Eve instead of trapcore or post-slop or blackened EDM or whatever you think makes you sound interesting.

*When I sat down to write this, I was under the impression that the album was called Welcome to the Machine. Berenstein Bears confirmed.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Six String Samurai!

Calling the greatest movie of all time, Six String Samurai, a Mad Max ripoff is a bit of a stretch as, like Albert Pyun's Radioactive Dreams, it seems to owe more to Streets of Fire than Wheels of Fire. In 1957 there was the usual nuclear war, but this time none other than Elvis Presley rose up from the ashes to become King of Lost Vegas, the last bastion of hope in the wilderness. Now the King is dead and our hero, referred to as Buddy, is marching to Lost Vegas to claim his throne.

Buddy's look could be described as "disheveled", but I'm not sure he was ever sheveled to begin with.

The movie opens with a young boy witnessing a massacre and following our bespectacled swordsman as a substitute for his late family. Buddy spends the first part of the movie trying to ditch the kid before (spoilers!) eventually warming to him (somewhat). For he knows that death is on his trail in the form of villain Top Hat.

In an inversion of ZZ Top logic, he is in fact the one in the top hat.

Few post-apocalyptic movies play as fast and loose with style, tone and logic as Six String Samurai, which slips deftly between MTV surrealism, 90s camp and neo-western cool, features a colourful array of characters ranging from cavemen who pursue our heroes in the slowest car chase ever filmed to gas mask wearing cultists who worship a wind farm, and by its final stages boldly commits to unapologetic supernatural shenanigans as Top Hat really turns out to be Death himself, or the spirit of heavy metal, or something.

You should not be permitted to attend rock concerts short of this level of drip.

My limited research (I read a couple YouTube comments) leads me to believe this gem was made on a small budget and still flopped, with no one involved in it going on to do much else, except the composer, who seems to have scored gigs in the Fast and the Furious and M*rvel C*nematic Un*verse series. But in a way this gives it a doomed cult classic cred that feels appropriate to the material. I can't see it playing the same if any of the actors had gone on to be recognisable stars.

The guy who plays Buddy is in fact great, and his anonymity in movie history makes him a real man-with-no-name archetype.

If you pay to go to a film festival you'll come away with the impression that indie productions have to be black-and-white dramas about gay cowboys eating beans. Six String Samurai shows the world what they could be instead. The fact this isn't in that 1001 Movies To See Before you Die book is a travesty typical of the state of publishing. Watch Six String Samurai.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: nah.

CUSTOM CARS: the cavemen drive one.

MUTANTS: there's a hip hop dwarf who leads a gang of fishing net clad guys who gargle their lines, so your guess is as good as mine.

GOGGLES: I guess the gas mask guys count.

TOTAL: 3/5 - mid post-apocalypse of the day.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Radioactive Dreams!

You remember the nuclear war in 2010, right?

Albert Pyun remembers.

The name Albert Pyun is well-known among B-movie dorks for his various cyborg flicks, but it's clear that his real love is Walter Hill's top kino Streets of Fire. Pyun even filmed an unofficial sequel to Streets in 2012, which I have yet to see because I'm not honestly sure it was ever released, and checking would mean opening a whole other tab.

Rejects from The Warriors or rejects from The Lost Boys? You decide.

Nonetheless, the spirit of Streets pervades this 1985 Pyunkino every bit as much - perhaps more - than that of The Road Warrior. Like Streets, this movie mashes genres, lurks in deep shadows, and has dramatic scenes set to diegetic female renditions of Jim Steinman-esque anthems.

Seldom has live-music-based nightlife enjoyed such a resurgence after the bomb.

Philip and Marlowe are brothers who sat out the war in a bunker stocked with pulp detective novels and emerge into the post-nuke world expecting it to be like 40s film noir instead of 80s shoulderpadcore, leading to a number of high-larious misunderstandings, mostly revolving around the different meanings of the word "dick".

Fortunately the idea of the 80s collectively shoving the 40s in the locker is funny enough to sustain even the 106-minute cut of this thing.

While it would be easy for the reddit letter media fan to dismiss Pyun's work as kitschy drivel, Radioactive Dreams has a pretty strong throughline of coming-of-age, innocence lost and wisdom hard-won that puts anything released post, say, 2019 to shame. Give it a spin (or don't).

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: a couple show up on extras.

SHOULDER PADS: the bikers at the start have them.

CUSTOM CARS: nah.

MUTANTS: two kids are referred to as "The Disco Mutants", though they don't look mutated to me. There's also an enormous rat the size of a bus.

GOGGLES: Also sported by the bikers.

TOTAL: 4/5 - Pyunkino

Call It Heavy Metal Noise

If your favourite movie doesn't open with a spaceman driving a muscle car in space you are gay.

Heavy Metal is the best van art kino. If I had a van it would look like Heavy Metal, which would make me unemployable, but that's OK because van ownership lends itself to serial killing anyway, and I would rather be a serial killer than a wagecuck, and more productive.

Based Robby the Robot working the hot dog stand.

Heavy Metal isn't a movie like Captain America Infinity War is a movie. That is to say it isn't flavourless corporate crap promoted on the basis of, and meaningless without, a context situated in an interminable continuity that rewards its developmentally stunted audience with canned water cooler topics. It's a throwback to an era when a movie wasn't a soulless cartographic exercise in world building for r*dditlords. It's not a "universe", but an experience.

There aren't enough ziggurats in everyday life.

It's an anthology of vignettes animated by different units, giving it an ever changing but somehow consistent visual sensibility which is loosely tied together by an aptly ever changing glowing green sphere called the Loc Nar, which serves as narrator and primary antagonist. It's a coveted object that seems to influence people toward evil, reminiscent of Tolkien's Ring, which serves to remind you young faggots that decades before Lord of the Rings was franchise fodder to be raped and cannibalised by Hollywood studios (The Hobbit Cinematic Universe Trilogy Now In 48 Frames Per Second), it was a counterculture stoner classic and inspiration for metal bands whose members had sex (not black metal).

The sum of all evil bullies a young girl for the lulz.

Halloween goals.

The greatest and best segment is heavily inspired by Moebius's Arzach strips, and stars a mute albino waifu riding a big pterodactyl bird across a desert landscape. Arzach should have been the basis for the future of comics instead of Marvel and DC because it explicitly rejects "universe" and continuity tedium for dreamlike imagery and free association. The only decent comic book movies after Heavy Metal were Tim Burton's Batmankinos because they were largely surrealistic and free-associative, but with a German Expressionist aesthetic instead of the more ineffable imagery of Heavy Metal. Everything else has been terminal cancer.

Absolutely a   e   s   t   h   e   t   i   c

Taarna fights the warlord in single combat even though his entire army is just standing there, and thereby defeats the Loc Nar somehow I guess. While this would seem like inexcusable narrative incongruence to a typical subhuman 2018 Cinemasins viewer, in the context of a fever dream like Heavy Metal it makes perfect sense, because sense exists in a state of relativity to the exoticism and superreality of the art, something 2018 mouthbreathers will never understand.

Based Taarna has zero tolerance for the {{{green}}} menace.

Heavy Metal also features two of the great bastards of cinema: Harry Canyon, a cynical, amoral future noir cab driver and occasional carjacker-disintegrator, and STERNN, based criminal Chad mastermind who's got an annngle.

When you have a chin like that you can park anywhere you want.

The first time I watched this kino I thought it was just OK, but now I love it, because in a world of long hours, dumb politics and constant disappointment (Britain), we need psychedelic adolescent escapism with arthouse characteristics more than ever.

Alice Cooper's STEVEN: who is he and what is the meaning of life?

Many music performers have alter egos they inhabit at various times on record or onstage. Eminem routinely slips into his Slim Shady persona to wreak havoc on celebrities and society in general, while Nicki Minaj pretends to be more than 40% human parts. But none of these alter egos are as mysterious as Alice Cooper's Steven. This article includes spoilers for the concept albums Welcome to my Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, DaDa, The Last Temptation, Along Came a Spider and Welcome 2 My Nightmare. It will also be a lengthy, unfunny dissertation on an obscure aspect of rock music history which I consider it my autistic duty to elucidate.

I wish I had this subtly creepy wallpaper.

Welcome to my breakdown

Steven first appears in 1975's Welcome to my Nightmare. The nightmare is presented as being Steven's. We are introduced to Steven in the song "Years Ago", in which he sings "All my toys are broken/And so am I inside, mom". Many people take this as an indication that Steven is a young boy, but in the song he doesn't seem to be so sure. Different voices alternately sing "I'm a little boy/No, I'm a great big man/No, let's be a little boy, for a little while longer? Maybe an hour?"

At its end the song segues into "Steven" with the phrase "I think I hear my mom calling..." and "Steven" then kicks in, with the name being repeated in a refrain that becomes more insistent. Steven says "it's right outside my door". He seems to be very afraid of whoever - or whatever - is outside his door.

The next song is "The Awakening". In this song Alice sings of waking up and looking for his wife, only to find that he has stabbed her to death in his sleep. The final song on the album is "Escape", which features the lines "But where am I running to? There's no place left to go/Just put on my makeup/And get me to the show".

What does it all mean?

Welcome to my Nightmare is a concept album. I believe it tells one continuous story - the origin story of Alice Cooper himself. Steven is the fictionalised Vincent Furnier - Alice's birth name. Steven is a grown man who is married. He also drinks to excess, and it makes him violent, or at least he fears it will. The song "Only Women Bleed" reflects this fear. It is preceded on the album by "Some Folks", which goes "I'm just no good without it/I'm not a man at all". While it is not specified what this refers to, I think it's alcohol.

The nightmare starts off in general terms. "Devil's Food" and "The Black Widow" are about generic scary things, like giant spiders and being eaten. But gradually the songs shift to more specific fears. Jack Torrance in The Shining had similar demons - he drank, and he once hurt his son. Like Jack, Steven is haunted by these fears.

Why does Steven drink? He drinks because of something that happened in his past. As mentioned above, there is some confusion about whether he is a boy or a man, but he must be a grown man to be married. I believe that in his nightmare he regresses into a little boy as a way to try to hide from the horrific realities of his life. After pleading to be a little boy for a while longer, he is frightened by someone outside his room, which leads to his awakening - his efforts to avoid reality are in vain.

"I think I hear my mom calling" - but he doesn't hear his mom calling. The cries of "Steven" in the song of the same name are from a woman, but not his mother - his wife. She is crying out to him as he is stabbing her in his sleep.

When he wakes up, Steven realises that he has done what he feared the most - he has killed his wife. Now his only recourse is to do what he has tried to do in the dream - to escape into another persona. "Just put on my makeup and get me to the show". He escapes into madness; into the persona of Alice Cooper.

Alice Cooper Goes to Hell

Steven didn't appear by name on the next album, and it seemed to be about Alice, the entertainer, being sent to a comedy disco Hell for all the controversy that he caused with his antics during the early 70s. However, if you subscribe to the above interpretation of Nightmare, Alice and Steven are really the same person. This is, however, complicated by the inner sleeve of the LP, which featured this text:

Lay still, Steven, and I'll tell you a bedtime story. I'll tell you a bedtime story that's not for all children. It's a very special story, that only special children will understand. It's a half-awake story, and it will be better if you close your eyes. It's a story that takes place in a dream, like other nightmares you have known. It's a dream that Alice has dreamed. You can dream along with him. You can follow Alice down the staircase, deep, down the stairs to the pit where he doesn't want to go, but he has to.

If you go to sleep now, Steven, you can go down the long and endless staircase and sing sweet songs to Alice and free him. And if you can't get to sleep, Steven, and in the middle of the night you get out of bed, when everything is quiet and the trees are still and the birds are hiding from the dark, you can lay down on your bedroom floor and press your ear tightly to the boards. If you listen very carefully you can hear Alice searching for a way out, forever chasing rainbows.

Sleep tight, Steven. And have a good night.

You can read this in all sorts of ways. One way to look at it is that Steven really is a child, and Alice is a character in a story his mom or dad told him. Another is to think of this as a prequel to Nightmare - that Alice was a character in a story, and in "Escape" on Nightmare, Steven drew on this childhood memory to create a character to escape into.

But there's another possible meaning that fits into what we learn on the next Steven album, 1991's Hey Stoopid. That maybe this is something a doctor is telling the now institutionalised Steven. In this analogy, the doctor is trying to get Steven to give up his Alice persona. The pit where Alice doesn't want to go, but has to, isn't really Hell, it's the unconscious mind. The doctor may be trying to get Steven to get rid of Alice, to lock him away under the floorboards of his own psyche. He is treating Steven as a child because Steven has now fully regressed into one.

A Wind Up Toy

Hey Stoopid only mentions Steven at the very end, on track "Wind Up Toy". The song implies its subject is in a mental institution, with doctors who run tests but can't determine what is wrong with him. The song also mentions his parents: "Daddy won't discuss me/What a state I must be/Mommy couldn't stand/Having such a wound-up boy".

This could mean that his parents are alive, and have given up hope for his recovery. However, it could also mean he has regressed to his child-state and only imagines that they are around. This seems likely if we take into account the information that we later learn from "Hell Comes Home".

The Last Temptation

Steven appears again as the protagonist in The Last Temptation, Alice Cooper's 1994 album. This time he seems to be free. In the tie-in comic he's depicted as a young boy. This could mean it is a prequel or that Steven is imagining himself in a free world. I do not believe this is a prequel to Nightmare and all the other albums. For a start, it's called The Last Temptation. It could hardly come before Nightmare, in which Steven has succumbed to the temptations of alcohol. Moreover, Steven is shown to have sexual desires for the character Mercy, which means he must be of a mature age in reality.

So in The Last Temptation, Steven goes (in his mind) to the sideshow, where he meets the Showman (depicted as Alice in the comic), who offers him things. The Showman shows him how his life could be boring or miserable, and offers him a way out. In crisis, Steven prays for salvation, and ultimately confronts the Showman and rejects him. The Showman is strongly implied to be the Devil, which is basically confirmed on the next album, Brutal Planet, as the Devil on that album shares his catchphrase, "nothing's free".

The Last Temptation is a morality play, and Steven's rejection of the Devil seems to clear the way for his redemption: "I'm Heaven bound/Go back to where you belong". Thematically, it also represents a rejection of the sideshow, the "Escape" from reality Steven has relied on for so long. By overcoming his demons both literal and figurative, he may now be able to rejoin the world.

Along Came a Spider

The name Steven reoccurred on 2009's Along Came a Spider. This album revolves around a serial killer named Spider who's collecting legs from eight victims to create his own giant spider, like a cross between Dahmer's zombies and The Human Centipede. At the end of the record he reveals to Steven that he's been in this cell for 25 years, so couldn't possibly have committed the recent murders.

From the wording it could be interpreted that Steven shares the cell with him, or that he has some sort of multiple personality disorder, because he uses the word "we". I don't think it's common practice for the criminally insane to bunk up together, but if Steven isn't in the cell with him, why is he there? Well Steven on The Last Temptation and Spider both kind of find Jesus in their respective storylines, so maybe Steven is a priest now and he's visiting Spider in prison. I don't know if that was the idea though. It could not be. Another possibility is that Steven is another personality of Spider.

DaDa theory

Alice Cooper's best album is also one of his less widely known. 1982's DaDa told the story of Sonny, who may also have multiple personalities. Some fans believe that Sonny is also Steven. Potentially, Alice, Steven, Sonny and Spider could all be the same person (of course, they are IRL). I don't believe that Sonny was meant to be Steven, as there are no overt continuity references on DaDa, and Sonny commits suicide at the end of the album. However, Sonny and Steven both seem to share something in common in their backstories: an abusive father.

The Nightmare returns

Steven is mentioned one more time to date in the AC discography: in track "When Hell Comes Home" from Welcome 2 My Nightmare, the 2011 sequel to the original. The song describes a scenario in which a young boy shoots his alcoholic father who has returned home in a menacing rage. This boy appears to be Steven, which, in keeping with our conception of Steven as a grown man in Nightmare 1, makes this a prequel within a sequel, like the Vito scenes in Godfather 2. Killing his abusive father may be the traumatic event that caused Steven to lose his childhood, which he would spend his adult life trying to get back.

As Steven is only mentioned on the one track, it seems likely that the protagonist for the rest of the album is Alice himself, as on Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Except, as we know, Alice is likely the creation of Steven. The album ends with his surprise death, which would seem to put an end to the character once known as Steven. Except, as we know, Alice Cooper is the grand villain of rock and roll, and like all good villains, he can never truly die.

Do YEW have an autismal theory about a series of albums going back to 1975??? Poast!

How to pronounce heavy metal band names

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Mad Max Ripoffs: World Gone Wild!!!

World Gone Wild opens with the one thing even The Road Warrior was fundamentally missing: hair metal. In this world (gone wild), oh, let's say...water is scarce. A few nice hippies live in a community with water known as Lost Wells, which is made of cars.

But trouble comes looking for them in the form of a bunch of choirboys riding a helicopter. Not through the sky though; they just drive it around like a car. Maybe the budget didn't stretch to flying the fucking thing. The leader of the baddies, played by Adam Ant, is named Derek.

The Lord Humungus. The Immortan Joe. Derek.

So Bruce Dern kills one of his choirboys by flicking a bowl off the ground into his neck. Impressed by his fuckery of physics, Adam Ant decides to leave, but with the ominous suggestion he'll be back. It's up to Bruce Dern to find a hero to save his town, and that hero is none other than Michael Paré, from Streets of Fire.

Paré shows he's got what it takes by beating an Old West-style gunslinger, so Bruce Dern and the female lead take him and a bunch of other hoodlums back to Model T Fort to prepare it against Adam Ant's purposelessly delayed return. Much time is killed with Adam Ant reading from The Wit and Wisdom of Charles Manson and everyone trying to rape Main Girl, who is practically approaching Hood Ornament Girl from Wheels of Fire levels of getting raped.

Finally all the good guys' bad guys spring their trap for Adam Ant and his choirboys and motorcyclists, and have a whale of a time killing them with snakes, golf clubs and purple spandex, like this fruity fuck:

This movie is particularly endearing because of the attention to detail evident in the locations and costumes. One woman has CDs for earrings, while another guy has like a hubcap for a hat or something. This sort of repurposing of crap is an overlooked part of the post-apocalypse aesthetic. The movie also develops its setting reasonably well, and has plenty of likeable misfit characters. I would recommend this movie, if you've already seen all the good ones.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: a couple.

CUSTOM CARS: nothing stands out, but the fort is made of cars, so that counts.

MUTANTS: none, but there are cannibals.

GOGGLES: Derek wears them.

TOTAL: 3/5 - somewhat post-apocalyptic.

Album review: LIE: The Love And Terror Cult, by Charles Manson

Hey folks it's that time of year again!!! The time when I review an album of music for your listening pleasure. Today's album is a bit of a classic, yet sorely overlooked by the music press due to its singer/songwriter being involved in some interesting side projects. Charlie "Jesus Christ" Manson was a hippy who auditioned for the Monkees and squatted in one of the Beach Boys' houses, before breaking away from show biz to develop his own sound. I used to own his live album too, but I sold it because it sucked balls. It was recorded in a prison and the main instrument was the toilet flushing in the background. But LIE: The Love And Terror Cult, an album released to help fund his trial expenses, is his real artistic statement.

Sadly, Charlie's image was a little too unorthodox for the mainstream charts.

The album starts with "Look At Your Game Girl", which would letter be covered by the Guns and Roses. This sets the standard that will be maintained throughout the artist's oeuvre, in which the lyrics start off coherent and flatten out into a repetitive drawl like something a crazy wall-slapper would say over and over. He then lurches into "Ego", an uptempo meditation on Freudian theory with a nice string break for variety.

In fact there's quite an impressive variety of sounds on this album, though almost all anchored to this cool-ass chunky guitar sound. Charlie's vocals are similarly varied, as he tries on different personae on the various tracks. "Mechanical Man" he sings like a mechanical person of some sort, and relays the sad story of his pet monkey who died, although this may not be entirely autobiographical.

Charlie also lets the Family girls chime in on "I'll Never Say Never To Always", which sounds exactly like the kind of slightly-off nursery rhyme type melody they used to put in horror movies in the 70s, so maybe Charlie invented the trend.

The production is a little rough around the edges, but that's good because it allows Charlie to spread out his ideas, which often seem like sketches and half-finished musings, but are always tuneful and intriguing.

It's a shame Charlie didn't pursue his music more successfully, because you could slip some of this stuff into a playlist of late-60s standards like Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane and Crackerjack Fuckface* and you'd never know. In a parallel universe somewhere Charlie is remembered as a rock star like Jim Morrison, instead of a crazy-eyed cult leader who cut a guy's ear off and his hangers-on killed people.

9/10 very good album.

*This is not a real band.

In defence of hair metal

In this article I struggle to articulate why, contrary to everything you've been told, hair metal is great and people who don't like it are communists. For the purposes of our article "hair metal" includes glam metal, sleaze rock, hard rock, and anything else I want it to, because it's all the same thing.

Lita Ford, or Sebastian Bach. Pic by Zoran Veselinovic.

1. Hair metal gives you priapism. Priapism is when you have a boner that lasts longer than nature or common sense would ordinarily allow. Exhibit A are these lyrics from Dangerous Toys:

Sport'n a woody, when you're walkin' by

Sport'n a woody, when your titties fly

Sport'n a woody, rippin' my fly

Sport'n a woody, till the day I die

As you can see, in addition to some of the most beautiful poetry ever committed to song, this represents an enormously long time to be presenting with a hardon. Note that the title is "Sport'n a Woody", because hair metal loves the -'n formation. You wouldn't want to write "Sporting a Woody" and look stupid now, would you?

2. Hair metal bands know no fear. Not only does Mötley Crüe routinely shout at the Devil, but Dokken actually scares Freddy Krueger. Nikki Sixx is mostly famous for dying of a heroin overdose, waking up, and going home to shoot more heroin.

3. Everyone had to be hair metal in the 1980s, including classic rock acts like Aerosmith and Alice Cooper. This means that if Jim Morrison had survived longer than is cool, he would have sprayed his hair and sung about dicks. I think we can agree this is definitely something that should have happened. Furthermore, "bad ass" 90s metal bands like Pantera and Alice in Chains used to be hair metal before their big breaks, generating endless lulz.

4. Also called "cock rock". Bands included Cycle Sluts From Hell and Faster Pussycat, and Danger Danger, all of whose songs had repeated one-word titles, like "Bang Bang" and "Dicks Dicks" (maybe).

5. Gave the PMRC (sort of the 80s version of SocJus) fainting spells over their lyrics. Dee Snyder hilariously trolled the retards by revealing that the song they thought was about sexual torture was about a trip to the dentist, giving us a good idea of how stupid the people presently whining about video games are going to look in a few years' time.

What's your favourite hair metal band??? Does it matter??? If a train leaves the station travelling at 45 degrees, how long does it take for Suresh to find x???

Bastard role models: Lee Ving

Lee Ving was the lead singer in Fear. Fear is a band about beer and hating people. Fear is awesome. They have such varied and interesting material as "Let's Have a War", "Fuck Christmas", and my personal favourite, "New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones".

Fear probably laid the groundwork for such sonic pioneers as Anal Cunt, and such intrepid bloggists as Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5. Everyone likes Fear.

Go away.

Have a bastardly St Patrick's Day!

St Patrick's Day is by far the most important day of the year after Rare Disease Day and Houseplant Appreciation Day. It's the day when everyone celebrates the Patron Saint of Irishness, St Patrick O'McKilFitz. But do you know the real story behind the legend? I assume not, even though I don't know you.

St Patrick invented Ireland in around the 12th Century BC, on a dare. Another version of the story holds that he was tasked to invent it in order to populate Boston, Massachusetts, which is in the United States. Once a year, on St Patrick's Day, St Patrick flies around the world dispensing gifts made by his workshop full of leprechauns. Leprechauns make better gifts than elves, because they're magic. Every leprechaun is swag as fuck, because they all have a pot of gold that they keep at the end of their rainbows. This means they are well financed and can make dank memes for all the happy children.

Some historians contend that St Patrick was himself invented by the Irish, thus creating an infinite loop like in a time travel movie (all of them). This is true, because the Irish are not bound by the laws of the material world (Finnegan's Wake). What is known is that the Irish have the best luck in the world. This is because their history is one long, unbroken stretch of famine and Britbong oppression. Legend foretells that one day they will unleash the luck of the Irish, conquer the world, ushering in a new era of peace and enlightenment, and finally transcend into beings of pure energy.

How to speak Irish: a beginner's guide

1. Always greet Irish people with the phrase "how's your crack?" This is something all Irish people say to one another. It will get you loved.
2. Colm Ó Cíosóig: is the drummer from My Bloody Valentine. This is an excellent primer in Irish pronunciation: his name is pronounced "Charlie Bob". Note the accents on the "o"s.
3. Irish people do not say "top o' the morning". They used to, but now this is seen as a sure sign of a poser. The real Irish now say "Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH".

If you follow these simple steps, you will be welcomed with open arms. Happy St Patrick's Day!!!

Bastard role models: Dave Wyndorf

You're looking for the one who fucked your mom? It's not him.

Dave Wyndorf is the guy from Monster Magnet. Monster Magnet is so rad. Dave Wyndorf can wear sunglasses all the time, even though he's from New Jersey. Dave Wyndorf reminds us of a better time (the 90s), when everyone looked like The Dude and no one gave a shit. Dave Wyndorf shares a habit of taking his cues from Marvel Comics characters with fellow bastard role model Dr Octagon. He coined the phrase "what would MODOK do?" (WWMODOKD), and really, this is a very good question. Remember when comics didn't suck (the 60s)? Me neither. Not because I'm not that old, but because I got Alzheimer's.

Monster Magnet videos were also very good. They looked like music videos back in the days when rock bands could afford to make real videos, instead of standing in a warehouse or a hipster bar in ironic suits. Monster Magnet rules a bit.

Dave Wyndorf is my role model because he doesn't afraid of anything. He likes to write about drugs, not going in to work ("Powertrip"), and being based as shit: "I cut off my own head/I don't need it where I'm going". Like everything in the 80s was repurposed from the 50s, so everything in the 90s was repurposed from the 70s, and Monster Magnet is no exception, because it's Sabbath plus Hawkwind plus a bunch of trippy-ass Marvel retro cosmic superwank. Dave Wyndorf's lyrics capture a very specific type of person: the indolent intellectual who crashes planets into one another while he lies on the floor in a bedroom full of Heavy Metal magazine posters, weed paraphernalia, and UFOs. I'm sure everyone in the 70s and 90s was like this, and it was awesome.

Pat Bastard's Top Ten Most Bastardly Songs!!

Put this on your play list. Be sure to play it backwards until you can hear my voice. I'll tell you what to do.

1. Anything by Anal Cunt (the best band in the world).
2. "Now It's Dark" by Anthrax. This is the anthem of the best character ever from Blue Velvet: Dennis Hopper. In the song he sings his best lines from the movie, such as "don't you fucking look at me" and "I am ONE FUCKING WELL DRESSED MAN!", a sentence only Dennis Hopper can yell at people.
3. "No Man's Land" by Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper has many songs that could qualify, like "I Love The Dead" (about fucking corpses), "Sanctuary" (asking everyone to fuck off so he can sit in his room), and "Blue Turk" (about fucking corpses). But instead I went for the best bastardly song in his whole storied catalogue, which is about the time he abandoned his gig as a mall Santa to go fuck some chick.
4. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by the Beatles. This is where Paul McCartney temporarily went insane and wrote a song about a guy who murders everyone with a hammer. That's why, even though John was always the one who gave Ringo shit and trolled religion and let Yoko record music, Paul was secretly the best bastard in the group.
5. "It's Gonna Get Worse" by Catherine: a song about how much you suck.
6. "I'm Destructive" by Dr Octagon. This song starts with everyone's favourite Juvian gynaecologist murdering someone with electric wires. He then asks how the listener would react if he violently assaulted them and their pets. Finally the song devolves into rambling such as "Like a green red blue reindeer, dead lying down with a fawn/Copulating, having sex/Mating with a baboon with buffalo wings/Hahahahaha". This is awesome, and great.
7. "Bastards on Parade" by the Dropkick Murphys. This is all about an asshole who pissed away his life, but now he's going to own it and be awesome. This is an inspiration to the rest of us who are presently awful.
8. "Let's Have A War" by Fear. "Let's have a war/So you can go die". Sufficient said.
9. "I'm Sick Of You" by Iggy Pop, in which the legend himself follows someone around for nearly seven minutes telling them he's sick not only of them, but of their mom and dad, for extra spite flavour.
10. "If I Had" by Eminem, in which he reveals that even if he had all the money in the world, he'd just spend it on stupid shit to spite people. I know how he feels, and I'm a 60-year-old man with Crohn's disease.
11. "Lovey Dovey" by Local H. This is where Scott Lucas reveals that he hates it when his friends are in relationships that make them happy, and derives glee from watching them fail.
12. "Last Caress" by the Misfits: definitely the best song of all the time, this is where Danzig has something to say, and it turns out it's that he whacked your baby.
13. "Run Shithead Run" by Mudhoney. This was written for a movie soundtrack. They put the lyrics in to force the filmmakers to use the instrumental track instead. They didn't. Hilarity ensued all over the place. Easily the best song ever to play at the gym.
14. "Beat On The Brat" by the Ramones, about wailing on a child with a baseball bat.
15. "Waving My Dick In The Wind" by Ween, about the titular activity.

I haven't provided any links because I'm so lazy I've basically melted, but you've got YouTube, so go listen to the scientifically most bastardly songs ever.

Movie Houseplant Appreciation Day Presents: ¡Streets of Fire!

What do you get when you smush together a western, film noir, action flick, rock and roll musical, and set it in the Blade Runner city of the 50s? If you answered "the best movie ever", you'd be home by now.

Streets of Fire stars some guy named Michael Paré as the hero, and Willem Dafoe in a vinyl vest and Misfits-like hairdo as the villain.

"I can fit my whole head in my mouth"

Paré has to save the singer Ellen Aim, played by Diane Lane, from Willem Dafoe’s evil biker gang, the Bombers, who abduct her while she's onstage, singing original songs by Jim Steinman (Bat Out Of Hell). Along the way he recruits a band in their touring bus and Rick Moranis (Jagged Little Pill). Other rock and/or roll cameos include the Blasters and Lee Ving from Fear. After The Breakfast Club, this may be the most 80s movie ever to come out of the 80s.

"This song is called 'Holy shit these shoulderpads make me look like a Space Marine'"

Even though it's a weird, unrepeatable bomb, Streets of Fire is one of my favourite movies because it has such a unique style. The director, Walter Hill, said he wanted to make a movie featuring everything he thought was cool as a little kid, so the personality really comes through. That’s probably why the film ends with a sledgehammer duel: the perfect way to solve disputes.

Objectively the best thing ever filmed.

Have you seen Streets of Fire??? Have you seen streets on fire??? Have you seen beets on fire??? Leave a comment (in another time, another place).