Blame Kiss, the Who, Elton John, the Quo or a dozen more, but nobody takes a farewell tour seriously any more. Unless they die, they all come back. It’s standard practice: as soon as ticket sales dip, you announce a high-profile bow-out jaunt, then reform once the money offers get insane. Right, One Direction? Yet, arguably for the first time in their career, there’s nothing superficial about Mötley Crüe’s intentions. Their All Bad Things Must Come to an End tour is no underhand au revoir; LA’s legendarily hedonistic hairspray rockers have signed an agreement banning them from ever re-forming. It’s a move that has roused their fanbase and cheered their critics. To some, this is a bit like Katie Hopkins, Piers Morgan and George Osborne agreeing on legally binding, lifelong vows of silence.
The bang they go out on upstages bonfire night. As giant spikes spew flumes of fire to the chainsaw riffs of Girls, Girls, Girls, they take to a stage that looks like the sort of thing Mad Max might drive. Tommy Lee beats fireworks out of his bass drum. Back-from-the-dead bassist Nikki Sixx torches a hanging dreamcatcher with a flamethrower mounted on his bass, looking like a pansexual biker gang leader made entirely of diesel and methadone. Singer Vince Neil, essentially LA’s Rainbow Bar in human form, squeals the multitracked chant choruses of Wild Side and Dr Feelgood – the story of a Hollywood cocaine dealer – flanked by writhing backing singers in leather leotards. It’s like the 80s never took a long, hard look at themselves, got a haircut and found themselves being berated on chat shows by Germaine Greer.
Which is why there’s good reason to welcome the end of Mötley Crüe’s machismo-drenched era. Decades past its sell-by date, they still epitomise the gurning excess and archaic attitude of 80s soft metal, where men are horny, gangfighting street trash wielding elemental power and women are provocative she-devils or strippers, “best when they’re off their feet”. Near-fatal heroin overdoses, celebrity sex tapes and superhuman achievements in the art of groupie-servicing might be 20-odd years behind them, but Mötley Crüe’s ravenous rampage of self-gratification through a gagging-for-it 80s – possibly to be replayed in a film version of their ultimate rock’n’roll biography, The Dirt – still overshadows any musical legacy.
True, you can hear The Manics being conceived behind the bins at the Whiskey a Go Go during 1981’s punk-metal Live Wire, but otherwise theirs is a hewn-in-rock brand of grindhouse glam liberally sprinkled with brimstone.
Besides a section of tongue-in-cheek satanism during which they set fire to everything (Shout at the Devil, Louder Than Hell), their stand-out moment is a cover of the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK, complete with stage-invading anarchists firing water rifles into the crowd. We’re not exactly on the last bus to Hitsville.
For their dedication to all-out rock ridiculousness, though, we’ll miss them. Sixx gives a heartfelt speech about how the knife he carries in his boot should inspire us to follow our dreams. For the motorboat rock of Kickstart My Heart, he and Neil sweep over the stands on cranes that spurt fire and ticker tape. And the highlight of the show is the Crüecifly: Tommy Lee’s spinning drum riser taking off along a rail weaving 50 feet over the audience, like a version of Alton Towers’ Air ride that you can paradiddle on. A lifelong ambition for this drum stunt freak, it seems to legally seal the end of glam metal’s age of excess, but don’t speak too soon. There’s a get-out clause.
