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First time around, in the hairy-scary 80s, Kix exhausted all of their original thought on their splendid nicknames, which included Jimmy ‘Chocolate’ Chalfant and Brian ‘Damage’ Forsythe – but selling a million wasn’t that tough back then.

Stripped of the context of those years and with Kix having faded in the memory, Rock Your Face Off is a pleasant surprise. The band are in still in thrall to AC/DC but they’re rather good at it too – witness Can’t Stop The Show, for example, an almost perfect summation of party-hardy riffing to a thumping rhythm.

Fittingly for a band that once cut a song titled simply Sex, Dirty Girls, Love Me With Your Top Down and Tail On The Wag show that Kix are still hard in all of the right places. After all, what’s wrong with being sexy?

Jon Hotten is an English author and journalist. He is best known for the books Muscle: A Writer's Trip Through a Sport with No Boundaries and The Years of the Locust. In June 2015 he published a novel, My Life And The Beautiful Music (Cape), based on his time in LA in the late 80s reporting on the heavy metal scene. He was a contributor to Kerrang! magazine from 1987–92 and currently contributes to Classic Rock. Hotten is the author of the popular cricket blog, The Old Batsman, and since February 2013 is a frequent contributor to The Cordon cricket blog at Cricinfo. His most recent book, Bat, Ball & Field, was published in 2022.