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When Mötley Crüe arrived in the UK in early 1986 for their first tour here, they seemed genuinely dangerous. Bassist Nikki Sixx was apparently on a heroin-assisted path to an early grave, drummer Tommy Lee was engaged in a tumultuous marriage to Hollywood star Heather Locklear, and guitarist Mick Mars was at the beginning of a decades-long battle to stay in the band. Singer Vince Neil, meanwhile, had been lucky to avoid prison after driving Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle to a tragic and violent death.
What they didn’t have was a very good record to promote. 1983’s Shout At The Devil was inspired, with Mars’s sleazy riffs and Lee’s thumping rhythms augmenting Sixx’s undoubted ear for the kind of tune that made the blood pump. By comparison, follow-up Theatre Of Pain sounded flaccid, and 40 years on, it’s still drooping. Sixx himself has called it “a pile of rubbish”.
The album’s two most famous songs – the bafflingly popular ballad Home Sweet Home and the rambunctious but ultimately throwaway cover of Brownsville Station’s Smokin’ In The Boy’s Room – are decent, but elsewhere the gruel is thin and frequently tasteless. There’s nothing on Theatre Of Pain that fizzes like Looks That Kill, or Too Young To Fall In Love, or Ten Seconds To Love, or Live Wire, or... you get the idea.
Instead, it’s a collection of half-idea dirges that suffer from a production so shrill you wish the loudness wars had arrived earlier. One brief moment of hope, provided by the faux-heartland rock verses of Raise Your Hands To Rock, suffers from a join-the-dots chorus that sounds like it was written by someone desperate to get out of the studio before the bars shut.
This reissue’s accompanying live album – originally recorded for radio in late 1985 at Long Beach Arena – rather emphasises the paucity of the studio recording, with scorching opener Looks That Kill sounding a thousand times more exciting than anything on Theatre Of Pain, despite bum notes and Vince Neil wailing like a harpooned cat.
A fourth disc contains “rare” demos (which have already been released elsewhere), while the accompanying 76-page book includes plenty of nice photos but no words. Both are entirely in keeping with the can’t-be-bothered spirit of the original album.
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