★★☆☆☆
Heavy metal may be ripe for parody — all those histrionic vocals, crotch-squeezing trousers and puerile sexuality — but its best bands parodied themselves anyway. AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie is an ode to an overweight groupie; Mötley Crüe surely knew that a song about strippers called Girls, Girls, Girls was never going to evoke deep contemplation in the listener.
Steel Panther’s send-up of 1980s hair metal, with an effeminate bassist, a bullying guitarist and a dumb, vain lead singer squealing his way through songs such as Fat Girl (Thar She Blows) and Party All Day (F*** All Night) showed affection for their subject, which was clearly appreciated by the die-hard metal fans in the crowd. You couldn’t help but feel, however, that the joke was stretched as thin as the spandex on the singer Michael Starr’s chunky thighs.
As they played their less-than-classic 2009 album Feel the Steel in full, the best humour lay in Steel Panther’s thwarted dreams of glory. “Management told us that if we get the crowd riled up enough, we’ll get an extra case of Guinness. You need to step it up, people!” shouted the guitarist Satchel. Playing a snatch of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit as an example of all that went wrong in rock, Satchel announced: “You’ll never see Dave Lee Roth commit suicide. Unless he goes completely bald.” These were the comedic high points of an evening that quickly ran out of steam.
All the “bitches and sluts” in the crowd were invited to the stage for a rendition of Stripper Girl (“your lips were red and your skin was pale/ You were the one that I wanted to nail”), while the lack of sophistication in the humour was revealed when there was a technical hitch with a guitar. Nobody knew how to ride it out and Steel Panther just seemed like a poor man’s Mötley Crüe. As David St Hubbins of the far superior heavy metal send-up Spinal Tap once sagely observed, it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
O2 Apollo Manchester, January 24; Eventim Apollo, W6, January 26; O2 Academy Bristol, January 27