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“I don’t know if I would kill someone, but I would consider it.”Īlthough his success came mostly with others performing his works, in 1981 he released his own album, Bad For Good. “I would do almost anything for what I create,” he once said with a completely straight face. Steinman threw everything into the records he made.
If he spits on me, I consider myself purified.” Steinman didn’t care a jot, replying: “To be insulted by Phil Spector is a big honour. Spector had once called Steinman “a bad clone” of himself. She probably just wants to do the housework with the record playing.” I don’t think she has any idea what she’s doing. “I mean, I’m not interested in doing what Bonnie Tyler wants to do. “There have been very few cases where I’ve been interested in what the artist thinks,” he once admitted. Like his hero Phil Spector, whose ‘wall of sound’ productions had been a huge influence, in the studio the perfectionist Steinman was in complete control. In turn, Steinman said he found Leppard “interesting, in a way a scientist finds a really strange sort of insect interesting”. “All that Jim Steinman knew about the studio was that he didn’t like the colour of the carpet,” griped Leppard singer Joe Elliott. Both sides soon realised that the team-up was doomed to failure. In the absence of their regular producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, Def Leppard famously brought in Steinman to help them with the Hysteria album. So I called Steinman and explained that we needed something that sounded like a disco party run by the Borgias. “ This Corrosion is ridiculous,” acknowledged Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch. On paper his collaboration with gothic rockers the Sisters Of Mercy seemed more surreal still, but his involvement in their production helped to make This Corrosion, Dominion and Lucretia My Reflection into hits.
Few would have foreseen him stepping in to reactivate the career of Bonnie Tyler, the gravel-voiced Welsh singer best known at the time for her hit Lost In France, but that’s what happened in the early 80s with the hits Total Eclipse Of The Heart and Holding Out For A Hero.
Steinman threw himself into a variety of projects – the more unlikely the better. He had open-heart surgery, triple bypass.” It was at least thirteen years ago that he had a stroke. “He was sick for a lot longer than people knew. In his Rolling Stone interview, Meat Loaf confided: “I couldn’t say this before, but Jim was going to do Bat Out of Hell III before he got sick.” He was talking about the completion of the trilogy, The Monster Is Loose, which eventually was made with producer Desmond Child and released in 2006. Released in 1993, the latter’s Grammy-winning first single, I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) topped the charts in 28 countries. Neither Meat Loaf nor Steinman ever managed to repeat the triumph of the original Bat Out Of Hell (produced by Todd Rundgren), although the pair worked together again on its follow-up, 1981’s Dead Ringer, and a sequel, Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell. That it went on take up residence in the UK Top 100 album chart for 522 weeks and continues to sell more than 200,000 copies every year brought sweet redemption. It took four years of determination and graft before it finally got a release. Almost every record label that Meta Loaf and Steinman approached virtually laughed in their faces, telling them Bat Out Of Hell would never come to fruition. Together they plotted their own masterpiece, although baffled critics and general music business indifference did their best to thwart the process.
When Steinman got a job in the National Lampoon road show, he managed to get his new partner a role as understudy to John Belushi. Steinman and Meat Loaf first met at a New York theatre in 1973 when the singer auditioned for his musical More Than You Deserve. At Amherst College he wrote a musical version of a futuristic rock take on Peter Pan, The Dream Engine, which laid the foundation for much of his later work, including Bat Out Of Hell and Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 hit Total Eclipse Of The Heart. Of Jewish ancestry, James Richard Steinman was born in New York City in 1947. Steinman once described his songs as walking “the tightrope of being thrilling and silly”. But he will forever be associated with Meat Loaf and Bat Out Of Hell, the original album now having sold more than 50 million copies. The self-styled ‘Little Richard Wagner Of Rock’, Steinman was behind massively bombastic hits for and collaborations with Bonnie Tyler, Celine Dion, Air Supply, Barry Manilow, Sisters Of Mercy, Ian Hunter, Boyzone and more.