Even among the titans of rock’n’roll showmen, Meat Loaf was larger than life. His entrances were spectacular: he first burst onto the big screen in 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show by riding a motorbike out of a block of ice. For one playback of Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose in 2006, a cloud of dry ice dissipated to reveal him sitting on a grand gothic throne. His exits were just as dramatic: in 2003 he collapsed on stage at Wembley Arena after suffering from heart problems. In Newcastle in 2007, battling a cyst in his throat, he declared the show to be the last of his career and left the stage a few lines into “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, with a tearful “goodbye forever”.
In between, his performances were stupendous three-hour hurricanes of noise and energy, driven by the pomp and drama of a Wagnerian opera, the voice of a soft metal Pavarotti, and 265lb of quivering, wild-eyed young lust. Whenever the spotlight hit, Meat Loaf – who died today aged 74 – was a force of nature, a walking wind tunnel of a man, rock’s Brian Blessed in a Byron shirt, turned up to 11. “Even though I have the name Meat Loaf and I appear to be a clown, over the top, it’s persona,” he told me in 2010. But when coupled with the bombastic Broadway rock of Jim Steinman – a match made in …Hell – it was a persona that struck a 43 million-selling chord with a generation hooked on the largesse of prog, the theatricality of metal and the street race velocity of Springsteen’s souped-up rock’n’roll.
