Is there any other band like Kiss? When you look at many modern artists who use theatrics in their shows, dress in loud outfits and have ambitious set designs, it all started with Kiss. They understood being in a band didn’t have to stop at the music. They wanted to put on a show for all those who bought tickets, which meant pulling no punches in every aspect of their gigs.
Their amps were dialled up to 11, but so were their makeup, outfits, pyrotechnics, and lighting. It was tough for other bands to ever hold a candle to Kiss, as how they put themselves out there with every single aspect of their show meant that people liked them before they had even played a note.
Geezer Butler once admitted that Black Sabbath regretted taking Kiss on tour because they were such a tough band to follow. Sabbath were always a band that let their music (and Ozzy Osbourne’s eccentricity) do the talking, so they never had big, ambitious sets to play with.
“Kiss was the first one to use pyro. You’ve never seen that. I mean, the shock of that. And they were supporting us, so they weren’t even headlining,” he said, “I went out and watched them. There were all these flames coming out the stage and everything. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on here?’”
Kiss pioneered how they embraced their sets and ensured the crowd got more than just a simple rock show. As Butler said, “People had to start thinking about stage production after Kiss. It was tough to follow them.” One of the biggest strokes of genius came from Paul Stanley, who added a broken mirror effect to his guitar so that when the lights hit it, they bounced off into the crowd in multiple directions.
While many of Kiss’s ideas were completely original, this one came from a band that he described as their “English counterpart”. Slade was a prominent force in 1970s rock, and their hard-hitting shows inspired Kiss in multiple ways.
“My mirror Iceman guitar was actually not a unique or original idea. Noddy Holder from Slade had a top hat with these huge circular mirrors on it. So when they hit Noddy’s top hat with the lights, these beams seemed to come out of his head,” said Stanley, “It was such a cool idea, and that’s where the idea for the mirrored guitar came from.”
Stanley continued to talk about how he saw a lot of what Kiss became in Slade. While Slade might not have had pyrotechnics like Kiss did, they certainly put on shows of similar energy. “In many ways, Slade was the English counterpart to us,” he said, “They wrote these great anthems. Live, they were simple, but, boy, did they put their boot up your ass!”
