Meat Loaf’s songs were so inherently cinematic – the hysterical melodrama of I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That), the three-act sex-comedy of Paradise By the Dashboard Light, the biker-movie wildness of Bat Out of Hell – that they seemed to emerge not from the speakers but from a rowdy drive-in or a tumbledown picture palace. Perhaps that explains why he never found (or went looking for) the sort of distinctive movie role that would have decanted his persona on to the screen like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan or Prince in Purple Rain. A single signature movie might have over-egged the Meat Loaf, or else looked measly next to songs that felt like all-night film shows.
If any performance distilled his essence, it was the one he gave in The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975. His first major role, it came two years before the release of Bat Out of Hell and feels now like a taster for that album. As the biker Eddie, he roars out of the deep freeze and into the pristine laboratory of Dr Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) and his guests (Christopher Biggins among them), fouling up the place with his uncouth manner and nasty exhaust fumes. Bellowing out Hot Patootie (Bless My Soul) and parping on his saxophone, he introduces some grubby animal magnetism into the air of camp debauchery. It doesn’t last long: Frank-N-Furter kills him with a pick-axe.
