Jizzy Pearl has a fairly simple rule about getting old. “You can go one of two ways,” says the Love/Hate singer. “You can be Billy Idol or Billy Joel. I’m going the Billy Idol route.”
The 67-year-old made his name at the dawn of the 90s with inelegantly wasted Sunset Strip livewires Love/Hate, whose brilliance was never matched by their record sales. He’s resurrected the band several times over the years, sometimes billed as Jizzy Pearl’s Love/Hate, but for 2022’s Hell, CA and blazing new album Punk Rock Fiesta!, regular, undiluted Love/Hate.
What’s the difference between Jizzy Pearl’s Love/Hate and plain old Love/Hate?
To all intents and purposes, I’m Love/ Hate now. All the other old guys have retired. The bass player, Skid, lives in the Philippines, he doesn’t do music any more. The drummer, Joey, has a really amazing job and doesn’t do music any more either. But there’s been a pantheon of Love/Hate music coming out, whether it’s solo Jizzy, Jizzy’s Love/Hate or Love/Hate. They really are interchangeable.
What does a punk rock fiesta involve?
I would say sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but at my age one out of three ain’t bad.
How is making a record in 2025 different to making a record in 1990?
I think we spent two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on [1990 debut album] Blackout In The Red Room, back when studios were a thousand dollars a day. Who has that kind of money now? There’s so many fucked up things going on in music now, but one of the good things is that you can do it yourself with a good mic and some knowledge.
As well as Love/Hate, you’ve sung for Ratt, L.A. Guns and, currently, Quiet Riot. Do you do that for the love of the music or for the money?
Well, I could tell you it’s for the love of the music, but it’s for the same fundamental reason that everyone works a job. Not to say I don’t enjoy being in those bands, because I do. There was a time in the nineties when everybody got married and started having kids and suddenly the gypsy lifestyle wasn’t happening. But the rock gods gave me gifts: why don’t you join L.A. Guns and make records with them? Or go join Ratt and play arenas again. I think the only band I haven’t sung in yet is Warrant, but hey, there’s still time.
Love/Hate are a classic example of a band who should have been huge but weren’t. What went wrong?
Nothing went wrong. That’s a glass-half-empty way of looking at it. Most bands never get anything – no record deal, no money, no Hammer Of The Gods awesomeness. They don’t know what it’s like to be Fonzie and snap your fingers and jump on the magic carpet ride. That’s what we got.
Have promoters dangled big cheques in front of you to try to persuade you to reunite the original line-up?
You’d have to find Skid. He’s in the jungle! We broke up [in 1997] and briefly got back together [in 2007], but as time goes by you have to accept that when someone says they’ve retired a hundred times, they’ve retired. It’s just not meant to be.
If you were twenty years old now, would you still join a rock’n’roll band?
Oh yeah. Rock’n’roll still matters. Writing about partying and chicks and getting fucked up – it never goes away
