After five decades, heavy metal’s most outrageous made-up men refuse to grow old gracefully. James McNair meets Kiss
James McNair/the Independent
Kiss’s lead singer and rhythm guitarist Paul Stanley is 60 now, but he had his first hip replacement op aged 52. It was the nightly strutting in eight-inch heels that did it. “Every scar on my body was proudly earned,” he says when asked if he regrets Kiss’s stilt-like footwear. “There’s nothing worse than looking back and wishing you had done things, but I did ’em all. That’s how life is supposed to be lived.”
Today, Stanley is wearing flats – zebra-print flats. “Nice shoes,” says the
PR woman who’s introduced us. “Thanks – I shot them specially for you,” says
Stanley. Together with fellow founding-member of Kiss, Gene Simmons, 63, this
is how Stanley, AKA “The Starchild”, talks.
It’s a playful and meticulous kind of braggadocio, the endearing silliness of which he and Simmons are at pains not to acknowledge. To drop the mask would be to undermine the welcome and enduring pantomime that is Kiss.
What they do like to talk about is merchandise. The Kiss Kasket that helps your funeral go with a kerrang!; the Kiss Kondoms that put the kitsch into kontraception – these and sundry other alliterative goods make Kiss seem more brand than band. This time around they are in London to flog Monster, a ridiculously outsized book of glossy Kiss concert photos that weighs for stone, costs around £2,740, and measures three-feet by two-and-a-half feet.
“People say of great books I couldn’t put it down,” says Simmons, “but this one’s more I couldn’t pick it up.”
Monster the album is out, but as is so often the case with Kiss, the new music almost seems like an aside. The cartoonish, New York City-formed band’s fabulously entertaining live shows remain the yardstick by which we measure their worth.
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