Review:

on 2011-03-08 CharlesMartel Said:

When I was in my late teens, I used to spend Tuesday evenings down at Tiffany's in Bristol, it being the only place in the city which did not play chart-oriented disco dross the whole time. The principal DJ there was a huge fan of Kiss, and began to promote a Kiss-Night. The idea was that the whole evening would be devoted to playing music by Kiss. Now, under normal circumstances, I would have sought to attend this with as much sincerity as a serial philanderer at a speed-dating evening. However, three of the guys in the same social group as me at school wanted to go, and hit on the novel (or in retrospect, not so novel) idea of plastering their faces with grease paint in the same pattern as the members of Kiss. They needed a fourth person, and as I couldn't play any musical instruments with any competence either, I got roped in/persuaded/semi-volunteered into being the fourth Kisser.

I guess I felt that with my face covered in black and white grease paint I could hide my identity and later deny all claims I had participated on the grounds that nobody had actually seen me there. The question was, which Kisser was I going to be? As the other three guys were all Kiss fans, they picked their favourites. I was left with the rump. I went as Peter Criss. True enough, I met people who I knew, and not one of them could recognise me through the cat-like whiskers painted on my face. The ruse had worked. My anonymity and credibility had been protected.

Also present at the evening were a couple of guys from Kiss's record company and/or management. They were there to lend their support and to give each and every person who turned up dressed and made up as a Kisser a copy of the solo album, just released, of their chosen Kisser. And that is how I ended up with a copy of this album. Now, I was no great fan of Kiss but getting a free album seemed to me to be a worthwhile return for a night masquerading as a barely competent drummer, but scant reward for the pain of trying to scrape the paint and sweat mix off my face when the evening was over.

In truth, it was reward for neither. I no longer have the album and it was not until I was checking out an internet list of the Worst Albums of all time, and found it sitting there ashamedly as the 25th worst album of all time that I remembered I once owned it. And then I realised what I did with it.

"Peter Criss" was the only album which I ever burnt. It took a while to get going. I had to pour white spirit on the cover and then wrap the cover in newspaper soaked in white spirit before I threw a match on it. It went up with a whoosh as the heat caught the white spirit and the newspaper burst into a column of flame a foot high. Then, as the flame died down, the grey smoke of burning paper slowly turned to the thick, acrid black smoke of burning vinyl.

I deeply regret my actions of that day. Indeed, I am ashamed of what I did. Burning that album, although I did not realise it at the time, added to the pollution of the world by releasing dense carbon atoms into the atmosphere. Burning that album was the most wanton act of contributing to global warming I have ever done. It was a terrible thing to do. If I had access to a time machine, I would go back to that day in early 1979 and undo what I had done.

But first, someone would have to tell me what is the most environmentally friendly way of completely and utterly destroying such an appallingly bad collection of the worst sort of musical crap you could ever wish to hear.
Rating: 1/10