Living In The Past?

With the recent one-off Led Zeppelin reunion (and despite the intense speculation about whether they'll repeat the exercise and do a world tour, my money's on Robert Plant now wanting to call it a day while they're ahead), it seems that rock music is well and truly back in vogue. Well, for the next ten minutes or so, anyway.

For me, though, having grown up through the whole hair metal scene of the 1980s, rock has never been out of vogue, and just the sound of a power chord, or a distorted riff puts a smile on my face.

Back then my record collection expanded at a frightening rate, thanks largely to the various second hand vinyl shops in my hometown of Nottingham, and included such artists as Bon Jovi, Ratt, W.A.S.P., Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and a myriad of other long-haired, tight-trousered men (the genuine female rock star was a rare commodity indeed), some of whom have become household names to this day, and others who were merely legends in their own booze-sodden lunchtimes.

These days I find that I'm still playing many of these old rock records, and even though some of the artists are still putting out new albums, it's the old stuff that I really connect with, something that is both a blessing and a curse for the bands concerned.

The blessing is that I'm still enamoured with them, and in many cases as well having originally bought the album as a twelve inch slab of vinyl, I've also shelled out for the very same album on CD, and then often gone for the third bite of the cherry when the more popular one's have received the special edition anniversay treatments, laden down with b-sides, demos and tracks that weren't considered good enough for inclusion the first time around.

The curse, however, is that no matter how good their new albums may be, they'll never gain entry to that special place in my heart that their 1980s albums reside, and probably never will. The reason for this is simple, and was neatly summarised by KISS's Paul Stanley in the liner notes for his band's latest DVD box set, Kissology 3, a romp through various live shows from the band's older days.

After the original line up of KISS got back together in the mid 1990s, they recorded a new album together, their first for the best part of twenty years, and he and the rest of the band assumed that the fans would be over the moon and take it to their hearts. However, the majority of KISS fans, myself included, merely saw it as a pale shadow of their previous efforts, and even now consider it to be one of their weaker efforts.

Stanley hit the nail on the head, though, when he admitted that he later realised that it was nothing to do with the quality of the new material that missed the mark, but rather the fact that we, the fans, had grown up with band's earlier output and had a lot of memories invested in and attached to the songs.

This is the reason that while I still play a hell of lot of the 80s rock music that I grew up with, I have little interest in, say, the new Iron Maiden album, which while technically excellent and proficient, doesn't have the emotional baggage, for better or worse (but mostly better) that stirs my soul when I hear the old stuff.

For this reason, I sincerely hope that those Led Zep fans clamouring for new material from Messrs Page, Plant and Jones are left wanting, as irrespective of whether they were to go on to produce the best songs of their career, there will always be that vital, nostalgic ingredient missing.

Living in the past? Perhaps. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, because, after all, the past is where I grew up.