Way past his sell-by date

If an actor plays the same part for too long, there's a fair chance it will send him round the twist. For three decades, across three albums all called Bat out of Hell, Marvin Lee Aday has played the part of Meat Loaf: forever the beast to someone else's beauty, the phantom in the rock opera, the pantomime villain for whom you have a soft spot.

It's not surprising, then, that he can't resist messing around with the script. The trouble comes when he begins to sing. "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth" starts well but it's a song Meat Loaf has performed so many times that he can no longer face doing it straight, interpolating his own classic like it's going out of style.

It doesn't help that his voice is shot to pieces. He fails to hit the high notes. And the low ones. What he hasn't lost is his bellow. He does, of course, have good will on his side. This is the guy who defeated the humour vacuum Avid Merrion by taking him on at his own game, and who was enough of a sport to appear in Fight Club with prosthetic man-boobs. And unlike other rock stars, for Meat Loaf, 59, age shouldn't matter because so much of his material is about looking back on his youth ("We were barely 17 and we were barely dressed").

So we wish him to do well. And with material like that written for him by Jim Steinman, he can hardly fail, but with "Dead Ringer for Love" and "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" still unsung, hopes are pinned on the encores. Instead, we get superfluous covers of Ram Jam's "Black Betty" and the Stones' "Gimme Shelter".

What on earth was he thinking? If it was, "Where have my best days gone?" , it's a good thing he didn't say so out loud. Like any pantomime audience, we'd have shouted, "Behind you! Behind you!"

Further browsingLearn about the Loaf's lyricist, www.jimsteinman.com

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