Johnny Rotten, put down the butter and get back to work! You promised us thirty years ago you’d kill off these rock and roll dinosaurs and superstars and yet here we are in 2010 and KISS are selling out Scotland’s premier music venue as if the ice age – Spinal Tap, never happened.
The theatrics are of a suitably high standard, this is a KISS show after all: a high frequency of fireworks, pyrotechnics and stage-hand wizardry all combine to create some ludicrous rock circus and here are the guys wearing make-up to complete it. Gene Simmons lumbers around the stage in massive platform shoes, looking like a man who has run through a kitchenware store with a powerful magnet. Watching Simmons on camera is a surreal experience, his face-paint gives him the appearance of a haunted cartoon character who has witnessed his family dying in some freak accident, but it’s preferable to watching Paul Stanley’s spangly, shapeless ass, subject to a close up no less than six unnecessary times.
Minor and unsurprising details aside, the set is good, all the most famous songs are there and the selections from latest album ‘Sonic Boom’ are mercifully slight. It’s reasonable to expect a few new songs but it is like nurturing a child with precocious talents, give them a few words of encouragement but firmly remind them that there’s other important matters at stake, for a this is a band who, an expert writes: “have had one good song in the past twenty years and even then, that was a cover”. But the classics are all good value, though they do their best to murder ‘Detroit Rock City’ in as messy and unpleasant fashion possible, like someone beating an animal to death with a spade.
So for all their preposterous gimmickry, they were actually good, give them their due. Driving home, we hear over the radio that Gene Simmons has been pecked to death by a flock of ravens; within a week Bobbie Gentry has released a song tribute and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, at least until Cheap Trick are in town again.