Alexis Petridis | The Guardian
Kiss have fetched up in a venue slightly smaller than their usual arenas in aid of a charity. Help For Heroes benefits servicemen wounded in the line of duty: “So that we can rock,” avers singer-guitarist Paul Stanley, a man reassuringly steadfast in the belief that Iraq was invaded largely for Kiss’s benefit. Lest any long-term fans think the self-styled Hottest Rock Band in the World have taken leave of their senses and started acting entirely out of munificence, it’s worth noting that they’re also over here flogging something. Not a record but a book of photos: Monster, which is three feet high and retails at $4,299. “Kiss got an up close and personal look at a ‘finished proof’,” offers the book’s website, “and were quite impressed” – not perhaps the ringing endorsement you might hope for were you considering spending $4,299.
A three-foot-high photo book is obviously a ridiculous idea, which means, of course, that it’s entirely in keeping with Kiss’s ethos. Without wishing to underplay the band’s music – which tonight veers from the grunty glam-rock plod of 1974’s Deuce to the gleaming pop-metal ofCrazy Crazy Nights and Shout It Out Loud – ridiculousness is their very lifeblood, a state of affairs underlined in no uncertain terms by their live show. Bearing in mind Kiss have not one, not two, but three walls of speaker cabinets on stage, the sound is oddly weedy and muffled – anyone would think the cabinets were empty – but it’s difficult to find the energy to worry about it, bombarded as you are by other distractions. There are fireworks and flashbombs going off almost continually. Gene Simmons concludes one song by breathing fire. Tommy Thayer finishes a guitar solo by shooting fireworks out of his guitar. Drummer Eric Singer ends his own solo by extravagantly tossing his sticks in the air. He fails to catch one of them, but nil desperandum: he’s got a fake bazooka, and that shoots fireworks as well.
In fact, for a band who’ve clearly been doing this since time immemorial – who know enough about the way publicity works to play their opening two songs not at the audience, but at the photographer’s pit, obligingly posing and pulling faces until everyone’s got their shot – there’s something endearingly ramshackle about Kiss live, at odds with their reputation for slick cynicism. A fairly interminable version of the appropriately named 100,000 Years is much enlivened when Stanley imperiously whirls his microphone around by its lead, in the style of Roger Daltrey, then drops it.
The finale of Rock and Roll All Nite comes with a pyrotechnic display so immense – certainly by the standards of the Forum, if not by those of Kiss’s full-size show – that all the previous pyrotechnic displays look like a mere rehearsal. Looking on, it’s hard not to be, as the band themselves would doubtless put it, quite impressed.