The Comic Strip, Part 4 - This is not Spinal Tap

"Bad News Tour" - January 24th 1983

In the summer of 1964, two groups of television executives came up with the same idea. "Let's have us a sitcom about a family of old time horror movie monsters who live in the suburbs." I sometime wonder about the state of their hearts as they looked at the other network line-up and saw that they were not alone. Also what was there to the zeitgeist at the time that made this idea so appealing?

Late 1982 was the time for fictional inept heavy metal bands in faux documentaries.

It's not hard to see why. While metal was big in the seventies, the eighties began with it on the wane, except for a small core who refused to give it up, not realizing the sense of increasing desperation that they were displaying. The big powerhouses (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, etc.) were collapsing of their own weight, and the newer bands were trying to distinguish themselves by either pushing the prog-art noodling to a newer and more absurd level (culminating in things like GWAR) or trying to strip down the artifice to become more of a particularly loud bar-band.

To put the two into context then, Spinal Tap is one of the seventies powerhouses, Bad News is one of the up and comers. With Tap, you see a group that is so used to their success that they are completely baffled when it starts to fall apart. Bad News is just starting out, they know what they are doing and they know how to go about getting it. They know how to work their image, they can banter with rock journalists about the limitations of Heavy Metal as a genre. They even argue with the documentary crew when they get moved around after a cut-away shot, because they know it will be a continuity error.

The only thing that they don't understand is that they are completely untalented. Tap is a musically talented band that has good melodies with horribly dumb lyrics over them. Bad News is just godawful noise.

There was a Bad News album released in the 'eighties, and I see that it is still available on Amazon UK. Scrolling down the list:

"Customers who bought music by Bad News also bought music by these artists:

• Spinal Tap
• Monty Python
• Adam & The Ants
• 10cc
• Vain"

God bless the British and their keen sense of irony.