POPFESSIONS

Rob Fitzpatrick

In 1984 I was 14 years old and looking for a pop thrill I could call my own. I’d done The Beatles and The Police and Human League and Iron Maiden and Rush, but they were all things I’d either got from my elder brother or had long since squeezed the pleasure pips out of.
 
Mentally I was ripe for the plucking.
 
Twenty-eight years later I can’t even really recall where I first came across the mighty Wrathchild, but I suppose it was within the luminescently wonderful pages of Kerrang! magazine. I was at something of a crossroads. I liked metal – of course I did! – but I was also getting swept up into a world that included darker fare like Specimen, Alien Sex Fiend and The Cure. Wrathchild became an emotional halfway house for me, a stepping-stone between the music I still cleaved to and the music I was about to start crimping my hair to.
 
1984 was meant to be Wrathchild’s year. Their debut album, the awesome Stakk Attack, was a copper-bottomed, pop-scented glam-metal gem and their “outrageous” (trans: silly) live show was nearly filling pub backrooms across the more tedious bits of the UK. They even appeared on The Tube performing the title track, a TV moment that was one of the most exciting of my entire life.
 
My best friend Rick and I began to follow them – we even joined the fan club (whose address I can still recall: 6 Coxlea Close, Evesham, Worcestershire) – and saw singer Rocky Shades detonate his glitter-filled “blazooka” at a variety of piss-smelling venues, culminating in two amazing nights: one when they filmed a show for ITV’s Live In London strand – me and Rick are under the shoulder of the guy with massive blonde hair down the front – and one when they appeared third on the bill to WASP (and Thor) at the Lyceum Theatre. I got so drunk at that one I had to have a lie down on some poor sod’s coat.
 
Sadly for the mighty Wrath, America was about to take over – the moneybags might of Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe was just around the corner. The Evil Record Biz, inevitably, stitched the band up and by the time they put another record out I was into hip-hop and didn’t care anymore. Of course, pop music being pop music, now I’m 42 I realise I actually love Wrathchild as much as I ever did. Perhaps as much as any human being could.
 
p.s. OH DEAR.