Even by the standards of the gonzo cartoon frat party that was 80s metal, W.A.S.P were the most gonzoid and cartoony of all. They were the shock rock stormtroopers of the Sunset Strip scene, detonating controversy bombs at every step. Their shows featured semi-naked women tied to onstage racks and frontman Blackie Lawless – a nine-foot giant with streaks in his hair and a sawblade codpiece – drinking blood from a skull and lobbing raw meat at the audience. Their debut single, 1984’s immortal Animal (Fuck Like A Beast), was machine-tooled for maximum provocation, something realised when even their own label refused to release it.
Yet Lawless was no whacked-out LA bozo. A childhood baseball hotshot who swapped the big stick for a guitar, he grew up in New York and spent a brief stint playing guitar in a late-period line-up of the New York Dolls. At the end of the 70s, he headed to LA, where he conspired to create a band who would reinvent Kiss and Alice Cooper’s shock rock schtick for the video nasty 80s.
With Chewbacca-like guitarist Chris Holmes at Lawless’ side, W.A.S.P’s impact was instant and brilliant. Their first three albums were an extended middle finger to straight America, sending the Washington Wives of the PMRC into fits of pearl-clutching apoplexy. It helped that their detractors insisted that the initials in their name stood for ‘We Are Sexual Perverts’ – they didn’t, though Lawless wasn’t about to deny it. But there was some killer songwriting behind the blood and raw meat. Few contemporaries could match the melodic brilliance of Lawless.
By the decade’s end, Lawless was tiring of easy controversy and made the pivot into the real world with 1989’s politically and socially aware The Headless Children. That was followed up by a full-fledged rock opera in 1992’s The Crimson Idol, a record that channelled The Who and Pink Floyd at their most conceptual.
Since then, W.A.S.P have plotted a more wayward course with Lawless the sole constant member, releasing some great albums and a few not-so-great ones. The 2000s saw the singer vigorously re-embracing the Christianity he’d grown up with as a child, and his faith is seared into the lyrics of the band’s most recent albums. It was an unexpected twist from this onetime heavy metal enfant terrible, but if nothing else, it proves that Blackie Lawless and W.A.S.P still have the power to shock.
...and one to avoid
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