We Should Consider Ourselves Lucky
By: Ian Danter

Here in the UK, KISS info is extremely hard to come by unless you have access to the internet, but judging by the Sound Off articles that I've been reading, America is suffering yet again with information overload about the band. It's happening over here with the Spice Girls - they, like KISS, have marketed almost everything with their name on it (apart from pinball machines!) and the UK is now growing tired of the constant hype.

With all this moaning and whinging from KISS fans that I've read, I'm concerned that everyone has stopped looking at the big picture. Think about it for a second.... how excited were you when you heard about the reunion in 1996? How well did the band match up to your expectations on that 1st tour? How pleased were you to have new material to listen to, no matter how it compared to stuff in the past?

I know I was thrilled, impressed, pleased, etc. because I knew I should celebrate the band being around, as they surely wouldn't be around for long. I've read reviews of the Argentine TV concert special where the knives are out and the backlash is in full swing... "In the third bar of the first verse of "Within" you can clearly see that Peter does not execute his double flam ratamacue as well as he should have, whilst Paul definately plays the wrong inversion of the E minor chord in the middle eight etc. etc."....... this, as Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap so famously said, is "nitpicking" folks!

First off, if you're seriously telling me that the collective performance on the Buenos Aries gig is worse than at Largo in 1979 on the Dynasty Tour, then you should seek help. Anyway, it's very easy to sit there on your fat arse and dissect a performance from the comfort of your own sofa. If you'd been at the gig itself, then you almost certainly wouldn't have noticed half the things you picked up on.

Cherish the band whilst they're around, because when they do call it a day, that will be it - there will surely be no 2nd reunion in 2009 on Gene's 60th birthday! We ALL have our differing opinions on what the setlist should and shouldn't be, but the fact is that we should consider ourselves lucky to have KISS back in make-up, and it could have been a lot less exciting had the four of them not put the effort in. Psycho Circus was, in places, a much better album than I expected, and my girlfriend, who knows very little about the band, was so impressed with both the album and the March 25th gig at Wembley Arena that she is now "converted."

We KISS fans are standing too close to the band to be properly objective about their progress - let them introduce wrestlers, let them do Broadway musicals, let them do whatever they want. Believe me, they'll quit the moment they see diminishing returns, financially speaking, from their ventures. And when they do quit, I don't want to read of anybody moaning that they "didn't do this" or "did too much of that" because I will have absolutely no sympathy for you... you clearly don't know when you are on to a good thing. Tell me, chaps, do you always have to be unhappy just to be happy?

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