The New Cue #332 November 3: The Last Dinner Party, Creeper, The Cranberries, MGMT, Alabama 3, Pip Blom, Johnny Marr, Shabazz Palaces

"A great one to stick on if you ever smoke DMT..."

Hello,

Welcome to another bumperama Friday edition of The New Cue, the place where we put all that is too good to give away for free. That bit before the paywall also counts as content that is too good to give away for free even though we are giving it away for free, it’s meant to be tease so you’re like, ‘Shit, this is good, really good, like it’s actually I’m improving my life, why aren’t I subscribing to this thing?’ and then you click Subscribe Now and you realise for £5 a month you are actually turning not into a better person but at least someone who can recommend some music to your friends and for that reason it might be the best £5 a month you’ve ever spent.

That’s the idea anyway. Have we persuaded you? In today’s edition: Alabama 3 and Creeper pick a mind blower and The Cranberries’ Fergal Lawler tells us about the making of their 1996 hit Salvation. Has any of that persuaded you? There’s loads of recommending too. Persuaded yet? Come on, don’t be a lost cause, click Subscribe Now and sort your life out. Here, tuck into today’s playlist:

Enjoy the edition, any aggressive undertones in these opening paragraphs is strictly unintended,

Ted, Niall and Chris

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An Album To Blow Your Mind #1

Creeper frontman Will Gould chooses an epic solo folly by Bat Out Of Hell songwriter.

Last month, Southampton goth-punk crew Creeper released their third album Sanguivore. It’s a lot of ridiculous fun, a record that amps up the theatre and anthemic bombast of their previous output, all metal melodrama and epic rock showdowns. Go on, don’t be shy:

For his mind blower, frontman Will Gould picked a lost diamond from Bat Out Of Hell songwriter Jim Steinman and then proceeded to deliver an eloquent, funny speech on why he loves it so much. So, over to Will:

Jim Steinman
Bad For Good (1981)

“There’s a great picture of Jim Steinman on the back of this, I love all the photos, they’re so funny. He was obviously famous for writing Bat Out Of Hell and songs with Bonnie Tyler and Celine Dion and all sorts of people but when Bat Out Of Hell 1 came out - which obviously was one of the top five best-selling records of all time, this amazing, really bizarre record that came out at end of disco and existed in its own little little pocket where nothing really sounded like it - after that record, Meat Loaf lost his voice and Jim Steinman had written this follow-up.

So this is supposed to be Bat Out Of Hell 2 but no-one knows about it. A couple of the songs ended up making their way elsewhere, as does quite typically happen with Jim Steinman’s work, it all gets recycled and crammed in different places, but he decided that it was going to make the record even though Meat Loaf had lost his voice and not only that, he was going to sing which is really funny, because there’s a weird kind of punk rock attitude to it, where the band’s really good but the singer is not quite there and he’s trying his best. It’s really, really cool.

It was made by Todd Lundgren, who made Bat Out Of Hell 1 in the first place. It’s very similar, there’s very similar liner notes to Bat Out Of Hell 1, where you’ve got Rory Dodd doing back-up vocals and even some lead vocal as well on the song Lost Boys And Golden Girls. It’s a brilliant, really over the top record. Me and my guitar player love this album and I knew exactly what I was gonna choose when it came through that you wanted me to pick one because it’s always the record we show other bands that everyone loves. It’s this little sleeper hit.

It’s got this line at the beginning, “I know that I’m going to be like this forever / I’m never going to be what I should / And you think that I’ll be bad for just a little while but I know that I’ll be bad for good” and that’s why it’s called Bad For Good, such a ridiculous lyric! The cover has an angel who’s breaking out of chains with a guitar with some kind of damsel on it and on his arm he’s got ‘Bad For Good’ tattooed on it.

When my guitar player got married, I bought him a Zippo lighter with Bad For Good ingrained on it. But yes, incredible album, really long, lots of the same Steinman tropes you’ll know from the rest of his writing, really, really long songs with outrageous stories that go along with them. There’s a song that’s called Left In The Dark which Jim sings and it’s a really long ballad and the story goes that one of the engineers who was trying to record him do this, he made him do it so many times, recorded it over and over, that the guy tried to kill himself because he just couldn’t hack working with Jim Steinman anymore. As much as that’s a sad story, it’s also creates his mythology around this release. So this is the one I’ve chosen. I want more people to hear it too!”

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