I heard the sad news today that Meatloaf had passed away. I do have one of "their" albums. A decade or so ago, he was invited to the sofa of the SkySports' Saturday morning show, SOCCER AM. Meatloaf knew nothing about football (soccer) but like all performers he "prepared". He decided he would need to support a club, so rather than go for United or Liverpool in the top tier, he chose Hartlepool and read through their history, including the Monkey Hangers episode. He claims he knew everything about the club and the unlikeliest of rock stars became "Pool's" unlikeliest of fans. Luckily we still have this to remind us of him....
Michael Lee Aday was an American singer and actor, who was noted for his powerful, wide-ranging voice and theatrical live shows. His Bat Out of Hell trilogy has sold more than 65 million albums worldwide. More than four decades after its release, the first album still sells an estimated 200,000 copies annually and stayed in the charts for over nine years, making it one of the best LPs in history.
The closest I can get HIM to "our football" is that at the 2011 Aussie Rules Football Grand Final, the pre-match entertainment was headlined by a 12-minute medley performed by Meat Loaf. The performance was panned as the worst in the 34-year history of AFL Grand Final pre-game entertainment in a multitude of online reviews by football fans and Australian sport commentators. Meat Loaf responded by calling online critics "butt-smellers", and the AFL "jerks", saying "I will go out of my way to tell any artist, 'Do not play for them.' In response to this criticism, the AFL changed the format of the entertainment, effective from the 2012 Grand Final, to have a small pre-match show, a larger half-time show, and, for the first time, a free concert open to the public at the Melbourne Cricket Ground after the match.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QGMCSCFoKA imagine what this is!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ES7ueI7p0 just in case you need another one....
AND IF YOU HAVE TIME TO BE EDUCATED ABOUT MONKEY HANGERS...here we go.
During the Napoleonic War, a French warship was found wrecked off the Hartlepool coast (north-east England) and when it was boarded by the locals, there were no Frenchmen alive apart from one individual that the locals assumed to be an French sailor. The individual was wearing a French naval uniform and didn't speak English, so he must have been a Frenchman. It was the ship's pet monkey, a mascot on the boat!! The poor beast was taken ashore and because it didn't speak English, it couldn't defend itself and so was found guilty and hung as a French spy. The club and town now have a team mascot called "H'Angus" and there are also various children's books, adult novels, songs and films with the Hartlepool monkey as the central theme. I wonder how that gets received in this delicate, woke "decade".
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