In the documentary Anvil: the Story of Anvil, Steve “Lips” Kudlow never let pessimism get the better of him. Even as his band careened from one disaster to another, including playing to 174 people in a 10,000-seater arena, Kudlow was always convinced his moment of metallic greatness was just around the corner. Now, though, he appears to have lost the will to rock – and has warned young bands that “you might as well not bother” and that “maybe rock is dead”. And when metal’s most optimistic man takes that view, then times must truly be bad.
In an interview with Horns Up Rocks!, Kudlow struck a decidedly downbeat note. “You know, there is no music industry as such, so it’s a completely different … I mean, starting out today, you might as well not bother. There’s no industry. How can you start? I don’t even know. I wouldn’t even know how to begin tackling that problem today … If I had to start again today all over without anybody knowing? Forget it. How do you do it? How do you do it? Someone tell me. I don’t know. I have no idea.”
Kudlow said bands opening for Anvil were probably not being paid by promoters, and had to hope to make money from merchandise sales. He bemoaned the lack of radio airplay for rock, and the shortage of record company marketing for rock bands.
Certainly, Kudlow would be likely to look at last year’s rock sales and feel it didn’t represent his vision. Though the album Billboard deemed the bestselling rock album of 2104 in the US sold a healthy 1.5m copies, it was not by a guitar-wielding, monitor-straddling bunch of reprobates, but by Lorde. The second and third bestselling rock albums were the similarly unrocktastic Imagine Dragons and Coldplay.
