Episode #15 - Sheer Art Attack

We’ve all been there. Loitering in the record shop, pretending to be browsing whilst gawping at the cover of the Scorpions’ Lovedrive and nursing a boner. It’s an unwritten rite of passage for male rock fans of a certain age (and in fact, the Scorpions were serial purveyors of controversial album covers in the late 70s and early 80s - as evidenced by the original album art for both Animal Magnetism and Virgin Killer).

Show us a true devotee to denim and leather and we’ll show you someone who owns at least one record that was bought purely on spec because it boasted an album cover that was big on intrigue or rich in artistic merit. Or simply had a lovely pair of tits or a woman’s naked arse on it (and preferably both).

As with all rules, there are exceptions that prove this, of course - Rich being one of them. So when the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes spat out Sheer Art Attack as the theme for Episode 15 of the pod with a requirement for each of the boys to contribute an album they bought just because of the cover, they had a bit of a problem.

What, exactly, do you do when one of your merry band confesses that they have never been so spontaneous that they have bought an album without knowing whether it was actually any good? Once they’d managed to put their incredulity aside for a moment, Mark and Steve were all for banning Rich from the whole episode. But then he mentioned Marillion and Fugazi. And, well, that’s enough to weaken any man’s resolve.

Blackfoot - Strikes (1979)

It’s no surprise to find Mark back in the 1970s, even if it’s at the point where it’s about to give way to the 1980s. By the time he got this album, he was three years into his heavy metal journey and already had Lovedrive, which not only had the advantage of having a naked breast on the cover, but was also an epic album all round.

Strikes did not have any undecked female flesh on its cover. What the cover did have, though, was the picture of a fully flared and presumably very pissed off cobra. The question is whether the contents of the album packed the same punch as the venom-filled reptile on the cover.

Blackfoot, named in homage to the Native American roots of its founder and chief muse Rickey Medlocke, were part of Southern rock’s Class of ‘69 whose alumni also included the perhaps more famous yet infinitely more erratic (both behaviourally and artistically) Lynyrd Skynyrd - the band with whom Medlocke now, in 2020, plies his trade as guitarist.

Noted for being markedly heavier musically than their southern cousins, over the years Blackfoot are also heavier in human resources, boasting a total of 47 members since their formation 51 years ago - and that number doesn’t include Rickey Medlocke’s grandpappy Shorty whose harmonic histrionics and songwriting chops are responsible for one of the album’s golden moments.

Marillion - Fugazi (1984)

So, Richard’s choice isn’t an album he bought sight unseen because, as has been previously established, an album that Richard bought sight unseen is harder to find than a pink unicorn. What we have instead is an album with a cover that Richard ‘quite liked’. It’s not ideal, but we suppose it’ll have to do.

It may be the season of the witch as we write this, just 12 days from Halloween, but if you’re a Marillion fan then you don’t need to be told that Fugazi’s album cover art (by Mark Wilkinson) is packed with more Easter eggs than your local Tesco superstore on Good Friday.

It’s hard to imagine, just a year after the release of their 1983 debut album Script For A Jester’s Tear, that Marillion could have racked up quite as many ‘in’ references as appear on the cover of their sophomore effort. No spoiler alerts - one of the joys of the album is discovering the hidden references to Script… and the contents of Fugazi - but we can confirm there are no tits on the album cover, though there is a (presumably thieving) magpie. Thank you very much - we’re here all week, ladies and gentlemen.

So … Fugazi, in which we learn the actual meaning of title, get a crash course in the myth of the incubus (and succubus, for that matter), debate the thesaurus-swallowing capacity of one Derek Dick (that’s Fish, to the uninitiated) and agree that we’ve all shagged a lizard at some point in our lives.

And if that doesn’t whet the appetite then we don’t know what will.

Bad Steve - Killing The Night (1985)

Prepare yourselves for laughter. Lots and lots of laughter. Mostly to do with cheese slicer mankinis and a concert that never was. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

For this episode, the Sadmen welcome the very first bonafide one-hit-wonder. A German band whose impact on the world of rock would be out-rippled by a Red Admiral.

It is a tale of missed opportunities (though these largely concern three members of the band who were unlucky enough to have joined - and then left - fellow Teutons Accept a nanosecond before they hit paydirt), missed bandwagons and quite a lot of missed notes.

But a charge that cannot be laid at Bad Steve’s door is that they were boring.

To fully appreciate this episode, you probably need to watch this …

Steve reckons there are only seven people in the world who own this album, and two of them co-host the Enter Sadmen podcast. So if you like your rock rare rather than well done, then this should be right up your strada.