‘Lips’ is staying on his metal as Anvil pondernewfilm
IT IS two hours before Canadian heavy metal band Anvil play The Garage in Islington and front man Steve “Lips” Kudlow is finishing a sound check so loud that the amps might have been turned up to 11. It’s the kind of Spinal Tap reference the hard-rocking but genial Lips and his fellow Anvil founder, drummer Robb Reiner, have taken in good part since the 2010 release of Sacha Gervasi’s documentary film, Anvil, rekindled the near-dead career of the Jewish rockers from Toronto.
The documentary followed the band on a disastrous European tour which resulted in them becoming known as the real-life Spinal Tap, the spoof group in the movie This Is Spinal Tap that both celebrated and ridiculed heavy rock, appealing both to those who love and loathe the genre.
Yet, 30 years ago, Anvil were sharing the bill with some of the biggest names in heavy metal. Many fans credit Anvil with creating heavy metal’s faster, harder, bastard offspring, speed metal. But whereas bands such as Scorpion, Whitesnake and Bon Jovi became multimillionaires, Anvil languished as, well, “oblivionaires”. There were times when lead singer and guitarist Lips and his mate Reiner would have found it hard to get a gig busking at a station. To pay the bills, they eked out livings in the jewellery and fast-food trades. But they never stopped playing, or gave up their boyhood dreams of becoming rock stars. At The Garage, they perform to a respectable 400-orso audience in the main room.
They once opened for AC/DC in front of an 80,000 crowd. “Does it get better than that?” Kudlow asks. But he adds, as if taking stock, that the audience was “miles away. I didn’t get the same gratification as I did in 1983 at the Marquee Club in London, when I came off stage blowing my eyes out. I don’t know what’s better. You enjoy yourself to the maximum supreme place that you can every show. Then you know that you have done your job. You know that you have gotten your point across and you’ve gotten the fulfilment you were looking for when you went in there.”
In the wake of Gervasi’s film, Anvil were feted on chat shows, being hailed as a tribute to perseverance and the human spirit. The movie