The muted reaction to Katy Perry's performance at the Australian Football League Grand Final in Melbourne this week might be in keeping with the reviews of her new album (it's the least well-received release in more than a decade, according to review aggregator Metacritic, with describing as "a career nosedive from which her reputation might not survive"), but the beleaguered pop star can take some comfort from an unlikely source: Meat Loaf. The great man wasn't someone who did things by halves, his glorious successes matched only by equally stellar failures. Who can forget Knebworth 1986, when, with his leg in plaster and struggling to maintain balance on a wet stage, his plea to the audience to "stop throwing things or I'll stop singing" was greeted by a barrage of incoming bottles? Or the infamous show in rural Ireland, when Meat's threat to flee a chaotic set was answered by ? Both these legendary events pale into insignificance when compared with Meat's own appearance at the 2011 AFL Grand Final, a booking that set a new gold standard for debacles.
It was always a risky booking, as Meat's voice was a surprisingly fragile tool (just ask , who was famously forced to abandon the follow-up to and release it under his own name because Meat's voice had completely collapsed). "I asked Meat Loaf to come up and start just rehearsing, just so I could hear what shape his voice was in," Steinman told the BBC. "And he opened his mouth and we both like just looked at each other in sho.
