Enter Sadmen: The Hard Rock & Heavy Metal Hall of Fame mark2s

So this episode is all about the albums you bought and lisened to and thought, fuck me that's a great album! Or possibly, fuck me, that's terrible! And then, 30 years later, you discovered your opinion had done a 180 degree turn.
 
In this episode, Mark revisits he much maligned Black Sabbath experiment that saw Ian Gillan step up to the mic, Steve discovers that Ratt's Detonator tickles his ears a little differently to he wya it did in 1990, and Richard recalls he moment Van Hagar suddenly made sense ....
 
 

Yes, Sadfans, we're giving over our 75th episode to the unsung heroes of every band that ever set foot in a recording studio or onto a stage - those apparently indefatigable timekeepers without whom there would be little or no momentum.
Stuck behind the kit at the back of the stage, these are the artisans of the hard rock and heavy metal engine room.
Whether it's a sense of rhythm combined with a diver's boot (h/t to Gillan's Mick Underwood), the professorial science of Neil Peart, or the tour de force blunt trauma approach of Bonzo, these are the men and women who provide the metronome when you're standing with your feet apart and headbanging your way to an early aneurysm.
Naturally, the list of noteworthy sticksmen is ineffably long, so consider this part one of a theme the Sadmen will undoubtedly return to in episodes to come.
But for this episode the lads have picked three drummers who have, to some extent, shaped the technical art of hitting the skins with a lump of wood.
First up, Phil Collins in his second outing with Genesis for 1972's Foxtrot. Having already helped to shape the Charterhouse proggers' sound on his debut release, Nursery Cryme the year before, Collins, Banks, Gabriel and Rutherford return a year later with a release that would achieve immortality in the genre.
The boys' next stop was six years later, as Y&T - then known still as Yesterday and Today - drop their sophomore 1978 release Struck Down. Though three years away from the standard-bearing  Earthshaker, this is the album that perhaps best showcases the undeniable talent of their man on the kit, Leonard Haze.
And the lads round off proceedings with Jeff Pocaro and TOTO's commercial juggernaut IV, which boasts the ghost notes on album opener Rosanna that to this day separate the men from the boys when it comes to high drumming art.
Enjoy!
 

Episode 74 sees the lads tackling the subject of inventions. If ever there was scope to push the envelope on a theme this, surely, is it. And so it proved, as Mark fishes out a set of what can only be described as 15th Century blueprints to qualify Dokken's 1981 debut, Breakin' The Chains.
(Don't get antsy, America - we know the better known version of the album was released in Amercia in 1983 with a title tweak - Breaking The Chains rather than Breakin' The Chains - and a very different running order, but where there's a reissue the Sadmen always take the original release for the review - and, besides, in this case it has a better back story!)
Not for the first time on the podcast, Rich went soft, opting for a post-Balboa and post-Dave Bickler Survivor and their 1984 album Vital Signs (the invention? An oscilloscope ... yeah, yeah ... they're all tenuous on this show, friends).
And (also not for the first time) Steve went hard, opting for a band that has never actually existed with Piledriver's Stay Ugly from 1986. And if you don't know the PIledriver back story, that's worth this episode's admission price alone. (The admission is free, by the way. You know ... just in case that's a dealbreaker).

The latest episode of the Enter Sadmen podcast finds the boys in more familiar territory as the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes serves up 'Death' as the theme for Episode 73.End of life certainly offers up a wealth of stuff to go at in the world of hard rock and heavy metal, which makes it even more bewildering that Steve and Rich didn't follow Mark's lead and go with something completly literal.
As it was, Mark arrived at the Sadmen party with an album in another one of those covers that, much like the Scorpions Lovedrive, had post-pubescent teenagers nursing a boner in the record shop.
Witchfinder General's 1982 debut Death Penalty, was a marketing man's dream, yet the band still managed to evade mainstream celebrity. The songs on offer may provide good clues as to why, but Mark argues that there's lots of fun to be had ... if, in 2023, you can get beyond the gratuitous presence of female breasts on the cover.
And so to Steve and Richard,m who could have gone with pretty much anything buit instead chose to plough a furrow in Scandinavia's death metal scene.
First up, Richard with the npw-legendary Epicus Doomicus Metallicus from Candlemass - a 1986 release that was determinedly ignored by the record-buying public until after the band was dropped by its record company - at which point they went out and bought it by the truckload.
And finally, in this episode, Steve puts forward the case for Entombed's Wolverine Blues, now a neo-classic, but then, in 1993, another radar-avoiding old skool throwback.Prepare for laughter in the face of Death Metal.

Sometimes artists feel the need to escape the confines of the environment in which they made their name and give voice to the individuality of their art. Or some such bollocks.
In any event, whether going solo or, in the case of Doro Pesch, being forced by a legal ruling to cease and desist using the name of the band which made her famous, rock and roll's highways and byways are crisscrossed by the tracks of musicians who have wandered off the well-beaten track.
We meet three of them in this edition of Enter Sadmen - an episode in which the lads were sent off to find famous rock musos who, for whatever reason, decided to ply their trade under their own name.
They don't come much bigger than Percy Plant, of course. The erstwhile golden-maned lead singer of demigods Led Zeppelin first tasted artistic life outside that particular juggernaut in 1982 with Pictures At Eleven - and a very successful sojourn it turned out to be. But it is 1990's Manic Nirvana that commands our attention for part of the next 80 minutes.
Doro, still smarting from losing control of the Warlock brand in the courts, was canny enough to know that sentiment aside, she was Warlock and that her fanbase would hang on her every note, regardless of the collective name she and her musicians gave themselves. And no one would be hanging on those words more fervently than Steve.
What wasn't quite so clear, when she released her first 'solo' album - the presumably self-referencing Force Majeure - was why she chose a decidedly iffy cover as the calling card. Luckily, things got rapidly better thereafter.
But first of all we encounter a man who could make girls swoon at the mere suggestion he might be on Top Of The Pops on a Thursday night with the other guys in Duran Duran. Yes, you read that right. Mark turned up to this party with the other Taylor in the Durannies - Andy - and his 1987 solo debut, Thunder.
Now go and look up the word 'eclectic' and see if that don't just sum up Episode 72 ...

So, a question. How maqny albums can you name where the title track is worthy of its status? And of those, how many eclipse even that honour to be classed asd truly epic?
That was also the question that was asked of our hardy rock and roll adventurers by the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes for this, the latest leg of the marathon attempt to review the greatest hard rock, heavy metal, prog (etcetera, etcetera) albums of all time (well, of 1970 to 1995, at least).
It's worth saying from the outset that Steve managed to misinterpret the brief as incorporating title tracks that he simply liked, which is how Exodus's 1985 debut Bonded By Blood managed to find its way into proceedings. But, y'know, hey ho.
Rich and Mark, on the other hand, rocked up - literally and metaphorically - with two bonafide essentials.
First on the turntable for this episode is the first vinyl offering from Deep Purple MKIII, complete with Coverdale and Hughes on shared voal duty -1974's Burn. As with all three albums, the track opens the album's account. But would it be the best of the collection? That was definitely up for debate.
So, too, the question of the title cut from Motӧrhead's 1979 offering, Overkill. Mark unapologetically claims this to be not just streets ahead of the following year's chart-bothering Ace Of Spades, but entire cities ahead. You can judge for yourselves, and see if Steve (a self-confesed Lemmy-sceptic) and Richard agree.
And then there's Bonded By Blood. A criminal omission from what should be termed the Big 5, or just a lot of noise and little substance? Steve dons his gown and wig and presents the case for the defence.