Let’s have that chorus one more time SAM LEITH

I think somebody somewhere must be tolling a bell. Less than a week ago, I was driving my young family down the M4 and my wife, in charge of the music, was taking requests. “Put on Bat Out of Hell,” I said. And, over her protests, I cranked it up. Five minutes in, she asked to put something else on. No. She asked again after seven minutes: “It does go on a bit.” I wasn’t about to yield. So we played the whole, glorious thing. Yesterday, listening to it again, my eyes misted with tears. I’ve loved Meat Loaf since I was 11 or 12 for the same reason that I love Marvel comics and the work of Stephen King: the broad strokes of the emotional paintbrush, the ease with absurdity, and the sheer brio of the style. Meat Loaf was never cool or good-looking. He was never, ostensibly, deep and meaningful. Rather, he took the most profound human themes – sex, death, damnation, sex, motorcycles and sex – and treated them with an over-the-topness that you can only elsewhere find in grand opera. Meat Loaf had all the joy and life force you could want or, indeed, ever need. And that’s why Meat Loaf outlasts the cool stuff – because cool wears off. Typically, the songs that you identified with in your teens, the ones you cried to alone in your room, are the songs that make you cringe now. Yet Meat Loaf has his cake and eats it. He evokes and celebrates the intensity of those adolescent feelings – but gives you a giant wink as he does it. I think that’s what makes these songs of love and lust, in their way, properly grown-up. Think of the wry double-perspective in the Paradise By The Dashboard Light trilogy – which tells the story of a boy so desperate to get his leg over in a parked car that he promises the object of his affections that he’ll love her until the end of time. Part three finds him – because, no cad, he keeps his promises – “waiting for the end of time... so I can end my time with you”. And then there was the persona. Meat Loaf was the high-camp rock-and-roll equivalent of Saturday afternoon wrestling. It was entirely natural that Richard O’brien recruited him for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

As “Eddie”, in leather jacket and Pickelhaube, he rides a motorcycle out of a walk-in freezer to sing: “Hot Patootie, bless my soul, I really love that rock and roll!”, before Tim Curry murders him with a pickaxe. An old girlfriend of mine’s mum used to sing “Hot potato patootie” with inaccurate enthusiasm. A friend reports first hearing Bat Out of Hell when he found a schoolfriend’s mother blasting it out while she hoovered. The testosterone rock didn’t just speak to teenage boys; Meat Loaf ’s joie-de-vivre spoke to all of us. In each of his songs, the subtext was: let’s have that chorus one more time. Ain’t we got fun? Isn’t life itself, in the end, just a matter of getting a chance to sing “Hot Patootie” before Tim Curry arrives on the scene? Yeah, we got fun. Let’s have that chorus one more time.