‘At the centre of a bombastic maelstrom of sound’

• Published date: 29 January 2022
• Publication title: Otago Daily Times (New Zealand)

Released in Britain in early 1978, the album might have been conceived as the antidote to punk rock, which had been wreaking havoc on the music industry

The unlikely looking figure of Meat Loaf stood at the centre of a bombastic maelstrom of sound, an operatic blend of heavy rock, fantasy lyrics, a choir of backing vocalists and long, multipart songs.

It was rock’n’roll redesigned as gothic movie and Broadway spectacle.

Meat Loaf had met the songwriter Jim Steinman, his collaborator on Bat Out of Hell, when he auditioned successfully for Steinman’s musical More Than You Deserve in New York in 1973. The pair worked on the Bat Out of Hell material for several years and were rejected by numerous record companies before the album appeared on Cleveland International label, distributed by Epic Records.

The album reminded many listeners of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and its producer, Todd Rundgren, initially thought that Steinman and Meat Loaf were deliberately parodying Springsteen.

Sales of the record got off to a slow start — it took the airing of a three-song video on the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test to kick it off in Britain — but the album turned into a slow-burning phenomenon, becoming an almost permanent fixture on charts around the world on its way to selling 43 million copies. In Britain, it spent more than 500 weeks on the album chart.

Though Meat Loaf enjoyed a follow-up hit in 1981 with the album Dead Ringer (another collaboration with Steinman and a UK chart-topper), he then suffered declining sales until he made lightning strike a second time by reuniting with Steinman for Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell (1993), which topped the charts in the US, the UK and several other countries, with sales of 20 million.

He completed the trilogy with Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose (2006), although that managed to sell only a couple of million copies.

Meat Loaf was born Marvin Lee Aday on September 27, 1947 in Dallas, Texas. His father, Orvis Aday, was a police officer, and his mother, Wilma (nee Artie), a schoolteacher and gospel singer with the Vo-di-o-do Girls quartet. Orvis was a notorious drunk and Wilma would sometimes leave Marvin with her mother for safety when her husband had been drinking.

After Thomas Jefferson High School and a stint at Lubbock Christian College, Marvin enrolled at North Texas State University. A keen football player, he acquired his nickname after an impatient football coach yelled “hey, meatloaf!” at him.

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