Episode #25 - Sheer Chart Attack

Part of the enduring appeal of hard rock and heavy metal was always that it was downright unfashionable. As we gazed through a curtain of unwashed hair in our embroidered patchouli-soaked denim and studded wristbands, we were the outsiders, worshipping at an altar of spandex and noise, members of an exclusive club.

The great monuments to the broad church of the guitar-driven music we all love so much were forged in battered Transits slogging their way doggedly up and down Britain’s near-deserted motorways after a gig in front of a half-full pub in the arse-end of yet another godforsaken anonymous town.

Ah, yes. The trusty Transit (or Bedford, if you were hard up). The ultimate utility vehicle of the hardworking rock band.

By day, the unassuming detritus-strewn makeshift tour bus ferrying tomorrow’s new big thing to the next staging post on their journey to superstardom against a soundtrack of empty Hofmeister cans clattering between guitar and drum cases, and a badly secured amp.

By night, the grimy shag wagon where the lead singer and/or guitarist - and sometimes both - made an entirely different type of music with a new friend from the front row while the drummer and bass player shared an uncomfortable beer and a smoke in the cab, desperately avoiding eye contact and pretending they couldn’t hear the porcine grunting going on behind the wafer-thin aluminium partition.

Being a member of an unfashionable club was about as cool as it got. If New Wave was a cuisine of the nouvelle variety, then The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was a meat pie, chips and gravy, all washed down with a beer, a Rothman’s King Size and a sloppy blow job behind a pub skip.

Then, sometime between 1984 and 1986 it all changed, and it was all Jon Bon Jovi’s fault. The chiselled, clean cut good looks, the knee-length trench coats, the leather, the lace. The hair, goddammit, the hair!

Suddenly, horror of fucking horrors, heavy metal stopped being the antithesis of mainstream respectability. And why? Simply because Richie Sambora woke up one morning with the riff to You Give Love A Bad Name in his head.

Almost overnight, it wasn’t enough to smell like you’d been mummified in a hippie’s Afghan coat for two centuries. Everything now reeked of bubblegum, VO5 and Colgate, and your best mate’s mum was singing along to Pour Some Sugar on Me while she cooked the Sunday roast or changed the timing belt on the family Volvo (get us and our hifalutin woke ways).

It felt like that scene from Apocalypse Now where the backbeat whump-whump-whump of the helicopter gunship is the counterpoint to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blasting from its skid-mounted speakers. Except this gunship was playing Never Say Goodbye on amps turned up to eleven.

But was it really as bad as we all remember it? The Sadmen decided it was time to find out and so, for episode 25 of the pod, they each went off to find a record that mainstream America had liked enough to send it to the top of the Billboard 200 …

Bad Company - Bad Company (1974)

Normally it’s Mark who can be trusted to find a comfy pair of corduroys, don a paisley shirt and grow the kind of moustache that would render a Dutch porn star flaccid with envy; but this time it was Richard who hopped on his Raleigh Chopper and set off for 1974 to hook up with a post-Free Paul Rodgers and Simon Kirke.

Rodgers may be best known for being on every rock compilation going as the singer on All Right Now, but commercially it was Bad Company that became his vehicle for critical success.

Bad Company, it could be argued, was the original rock supergroup, teaming Kirke and Rodgers with ex-Mott The Hoople guitarist Mick Ralphs and former King Crimson bass player Boz Burrell. Add the imposing figure of Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant to steer the band’s career, and you had a recipe that even Albert and Michel Roux would have banged onto their thrice-Michelin-starred menu.

Bad Company’s debut album is a sweeping soundscape of vintage and authentic Americana - no mean feet for a bunch of lads who variously called Teesside, London, Lincolnshire and Herefordshire home. I mean, it’s hardly Nebraska, right?

Although four of the six albums recorded by this classic line-up would score top ten slots on the Billboard 200, this was the only one that made it to the summit itself. So, how would it fare under the Enter Sadmen microscope?

Guns ‘N’ Roses - Appetite For Destruction (1987)

Right, let’s explode a few myths and set the record straight from the off.

First off, that whole ‘overnight success’ thing.

Misplaced nostalgia may favour the romantic notion that G’N’R became an immediate commercial sensation following the release of their now (in)famous debut album, but the slightly less romantic reality is that Appetite didn’t hit the top of the Billboard chart until August 6, 1988 - a full 382 days after it first hit the shops the previous July.

That said, had Geffen not dicked about by releasing the double A-side It’s So Easy/Mr Brownstone and Welcome to the Jungle as the lead singles, and had instead jumped straight to the album’s obvious chart-botherer, Sweet Child o’ Mine, it may well have been a very different Mills & Boon story.

After that particular penny dropped, the song sold 3 million copies on its way to the top of pretty much every singles chart going, pretty much everywhere in the world. Predictably enough, Appetite’s trajectory consequently went stratospheric. Best selling debut album of all time, blah, blah, blah, game changing sound, blah, blah, blah, ker-ching!

Second, the classic G’N’R line-up is not the original line-up, as some people may feel compelled to tell you. In fact, the band’s origins lie in a mash-up between members of a little-known band called Hollywood Rose (guitarist Izzy Stradlin) and the better-known L. A. Guns (Axl Rose, Tracii Guns, Ole Beich and Rob Gardner). Ta-da! Guns ‘N’ Roses. After which sentence, our spellcheck has gone for a quiet lie down.

Axl also had a convenient surname, because otherwise, with Stradlin being the only Hollywood Rose member to defect, the band would have ended up being called Guns ‘N’ Rose. And that doesn’t have quite the same cachet, does it?

Finally, the original vinyl release features not ‘Side 1’ and ‘Side 2’, but ‘Side G’ and ‘Side R’, with songs on Side G being largely about the seamy, violent side of life and those on Side R being concerned with affairs of the heart, though they’re mostly anything but tender.

All in all, a potent cocktail of noise for the Sadmen to unpick. Would the biggest selling debut album of all time surpass its Billboard-topping achievement and also top the Hall of Fame - or would it ride the night train into oblivion?

Skid Row - Slave To The Grind (1991)

Yeah, Skid Row had a number one album - who’da thunk it? Certainly not Mark, who couldn’t have been more surprised to see the New Jersey rockers on the list of #1 Billboard artists if Sebastian Bach had turned up on his doorstep quoting Keats and explaining the intricacies of astrophysics and intergalactic travel.

Thing is, Skid Row’s self-titled album released two years previously had been a critical and commercial success, but even with the paternalistic benefit that comes from being Jon Bon Jovi’s new pet* it was hardly the kind of stuff that had you nodding sagaciously to yourself and predicting that superstardom lay just 24 months down the road.

Yet, here they were. A number one album and a slot on the undercard for Guns ‘N’ Roses’ sell-out European stadium tour of ‘92.

The Skids career at this point, then, was more Park Avenue than, well, Skid Row. But time can be cruel, and fortunes change. By the time the follow-up Subhuman Race came out in 1995, the hard rock landscape resembled a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland from which Grunge had expunged all life.

As a band, they had hit rock bottom, with Subhuman Race the contractual release that, even with the legendary Bob Rock at the helm, captured a band in artistic and social freefall. In a rare moment of astuteness, Bach describes it today as Skid Row’s St. Anger, whilst ex-bandmate and Skid Row’s songwriting muse Rachel Bolan says, simply: “That record sucked.”

So, for this episode it’s safe to say the boys were assessing what would turn out to be Skid Row’s last commercially successful outing. But would it be enough to trouble the big guns at the top of the list (see what we did there, Skid Row fans?)?

*Look, settle down at the back - we really haven’t got anything against JBJ, okay? Well, apart from New Jersey. And no one’s gonna argue with us on that.