The muted reaction to Katy Perry’s performance at the Australian Football League Grand Final in Melbourne this week might be in keeping with the reviews of her new album (it’s the least well-received release in more than a decade, according to review aggregator Metacritic, with The Line Of Best Fit describing 143 as “a career nosedive from which her reputation might not survive”), but the beleaguered pop star can take some comfort from an unlikely source: Meat Loaf.
The great man wasn’t someone who did things by halves, his glorious successes matched only by equally stellar failures. Who can forget Knebworth 1986, when, with his leg in plaster and struggling to maintain balance on a wet stage, his plea to the audience to “stop throwing things or I’ll stop singing” was greeted by a barrage of incoming bottles? Or the infamous show in rural Ireland, when Meat’s threat to flee a chaotic set was answered by a flying wheelchair?
Both these legendary events pale into insignificance when compared with Meat’s own appearance at the 2011 AFL Grand Final, a booking that set a new gold standard for debacles.
It was always a risky booking, as Meat’s voice was a surprisingly fragile tool (just ask Jim Steinman, who was famously forced to abandon the follow-up to Bat Out Of Hell and release it under his own name because Meat’s voice had completely collapsed).
“I asked Meat Loaf to come up and start just rehearsing, just so I could hear what shape his voice was in,” Steinman told the BBC. “And he opened his mouth and we both like just looked at each other in shock – because the sound that came out of his mouth didn’t even resemble a human voice.
“It was like this low, guttural sound – like a dragon trying to sing. It was a horrifying sound, and there was no way we’d be able to do a record like that and he didn’t know what to do.”
In 2011, that golden voice was sounding particularly tarnished. And 99,537 people were there to bear witness, with millions more watching on TV.
The footage is startling. Meat doesn’t so much sing as he does bark. At his best, he’s flat and out of breath. At his worst, he howls like a wounded seal. It’s not pleasant. It’s not comfortable viewing. But Meat brazens it out, as committed to the job at hand as he was when his voice was unhindered by age and wear. In its own way, it’s magnificent, attacking those classic songs in an all-in, heroic attempt to recapture the Meat Loaf of old.
At the end, a disbelieving Stephen Quartermain, Channel 10’s commentator, utters a single word, somehow summing up the chaos perfectly.
“Extraordinary.”
“All sorts of names cropped up, you know?” former AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou told Footy On Nine a decade later. “Kylie Minogue. Bruce Springsteen. Rolling Stones. All very expensive.
“And then Meat Loaf’s name appeared, and no one had really heard of Meat Loaf except for me – I mean, I grew up with Bat Out Of Hell. So I use my ultimate voting power and went for Meat Loaf, and that was probably one of the worst decisions ever made.
“I hadn’t realized when we appointed Meat Loaf that he’d had a heart attack a few weeks before he came down to the MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground]. The fact that he lost his voice and he wasn’t singing at his normal range, it would have probably been preferable if we had cancelled him, but we weren’t to know the full extent of his illness.”
As for Meat, he later reported that he’d been “spitting blood” at shows leading up to the Grand Final after haemorrhaging a vocal cord, and took the organisers to task.
“I thought it was like half-time in the middle of a field, which I’ve done for NFL and World Football League finals, the other Rugby league final, which was all at halftime, with fireworks,” he told Billboard. “These were the cheapest people I’ve ever seen in my life. They said, ‘we’re gonna have 100 motorcycles’. They had three.”
The story doesn’t finish there. In the wake of the Billboard interview, Meat took to social media to apologise for what he’d said.
“I want to now make an apology for any angry or harsh words I have made towards the Australian Football League, their fans and the people of Australia,” he said. “I am truly sorry.
“I can’t take it back. It happened and I am truly sorry. I have learned one lesson from now on, no matter what happens or when it happens there is only one person to blame and that is myself.
“Stand like a man and say I am sorry. I may never see you again and I can never repay what the people of Australia have given to me. I betrayed your trust, I apologise for any feelings that I have hurt.”
He needn’t have apologised. People will celebrate Meat Loaf’s 2011 performance long after the result of the game (Geelong beat Collingwood) has become something they need to look up on Wikipedia. And long after Katy Perry’s set has been similarly forgotten.
