"Jaw-dropping from start to finish, Offering is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of album." A heartfelt salute to Axe's forgotten blue-collar gruntrock party classic

The more you think about it, the more it becomes obvious that Billy Idol invented the 80s. The whole thing – plastic pants, guyliner, cocaine, abandoning political convictions for monetary gain, motorcycle crashes, all of it was his doing. He was still pretty late getting the party started: Dancing With Myself didn’t really kick in until 1984. Until then, the prevailing culture in the US was geared to a now-extinct creature, the Regular Slob.

Too young for Vietnam, too dumb for college, and not nearly ambitious enough to own a Trans Am, the Regular Slob spent his days playing pinball, sleeping late, and fantasising about Farrah Fawcett. He liked Star Wars and Deep Throat in equal measure, and slept mostly on sofas. The Regular Slob had never even heard of punk rock, thought disco was for pussies, and was terrified of heavy metal. The Regular Slob loved Styx, REO Speedwagon, ELO and Boston. Stuff that spoke directly to him, and his idle, apolitical, moustache-farming lifestyle.

The Regular Slob’s days were numbered when Billy Idol roared into town – there’s no way he could’ve competed for chicks with that high-cheekboned fucker, certainly not with a mullet and a beer gut – but from ’76 to ’83, the Regular Slob was king. And kings need epic soundtracks. And so it was written.

Axe’s 1982 masterstroke Offering was the ultimate party album for Regular Slobs everywhere. It solidified Axe’s aesthetic – blue-collar gruntrock dappled with starry-eyed arena flourishes – and nearly landed them at the top of the rock heap, thanks to a likeable, lunk-headed opener and a sound that borrowed liberally from nearly every popular rock outfit of the early 80s. But it should be noted that Offering was the culmination of a decade’s worth of blood, sweat and beers, slurped and shed mostly by Axe’s frontman, Midwestern rock rambler Bobby Barth.

Axe began life as Babyface, a meat’n’taters bar-rock band that a young Barth formed at the dawn of the 70s in Colorado. The band snagged a label contract and recorded their first album in 1977, bashing out a fistful of tunes that, in their purest form, would probably have sounded a lot like the kind of riffola-lite Axe peddled a few years later. Unfortunately, we’ll never know, since the band’s producer, Dan Holmes, added horns, a schmaltzy set of strings, and other soft rock instrumentation over the band’s paunchy hard rock when they weren’t looking.

The results were decidedly weird. Babyface’s ’77 self-titled debut sounds absolutely exotic in comparison to everything else that happened in music that year. The almost absurdly limp album sounds as if disco, punk, heavy metal, funk, power-pop, glam or any other form of then-popular music never even existed. It lives in a lonesome vacuum where only a really slumming Doobie would even think of visiting. It sounds like Axe trapped in a mid-70s polyester purgatory, forced to plink violins while Thin Lizzy make off with their women and gold doubloons. It’s a very sad record, in other words.

Naturally, it spawned a surprise hit, the eye-rolling FM pop single Never In My Life. Legend has it that Barth and company hadn’t even heard their sugar-sweetened album until the single suddenly appeared on transistor radios all over the Midwest. They were appalled and alarmed, but a hit’s a hit, so they toured, sorely disappointing brandy-sipping yacht-rock fans across the US when Babyface played their much gnarlier live set.

By 1978, Barth had had enough. He took some key players and relocated to Gainesville, Florida – ground zero for the Regular Slob – and formed a new band, one where hard-rock guitars and Barth’s songs about drinking and fighting in the streets and watching porn on VHS tapes would be appreciated. The band opted for the sturdy moniker Axe, and away they went. Based on the success – one way or the other – of Babyface, the band managed to score a major-label deal with MCA and cut a couple of forgettable albums before switching to Atco and unleashing the head-chopping Offering upon the world.

Offering opens with Rock’n’Roll Party In The Streets, an infectious, hand-clapping, bootstomping, southern-rock tinged ode to mindless self-indulgence that is virtually impossible to get out of your head – even with therapy and/or designer drugs – once you’ve heard it. Hilariously repetitive – it’s basically just a chugging bar-band riff and a chorus, chanted like a war cry, for three minutes straight – the song hits you directly in the still-reptile bit of your brains, the same spot that encourages you to shoot guns at road signs or attend Jello wrestling night at the local titty bar. It is a sterling example of Dumb Fun, and it’s just as effective, more than 40 years later.

The rest of the album is a gleeful mish-mosh of everything Axe can come up with – a clunky new wave/hard rock cocktail about the alluring magic and madness of watching a VCR (Video Inspiration), a redneck-y riff on Rick Springfield’s hook-heavy power-pop (Jennifer), a goofy pomp-metal sequel to Rock’n’Roll Party (Burn the City Down), a goddamn Montrose cover (I Got the Fire), and even an epic proto-power metal closer, the seriously astounding Silent Soldiers.

Jaw-dropping from start to finish, Offering is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of album, a gleeful mess that straddles everything from Styx to ZZ Top, The Knack to Manowar, without showing a trace of irony or self-doubt. Whatever Axe were up to on Offering, they really meant it, man.

Offering did brisk business. Axe toured the US with Ozzy Osbourne and Scorpions, the UK with Iron Maiden, and they released a couple more increasingly metallic records. Sadly, Axe guitarist Michael Osborne died in a car crash in 1984, effectively ending the band’s career as burgeoning AOR stars. Barth never stopped punching the clock with Axe, and he's done time with Blackfoot and many other bands over the decades. Offering, however, still stands as Barth’s greatest rock moment.

If there is even a sliver of a cheap stuff-swilling, denim cut-offs-wearing, sleep-til-noon underachiever in you, then you’ll want to revisit Offering. It’s still amazing, in every possible way. And if you hate it, well, thank Billy Idol. Without him, the entire decade of the 80s would have sounded just like it.