Lips and Robb Reiner - The Story Of Anvil

Having seen the Anvil film I didn't expect to garner much new information from its sister book - "Anvil": The Story of "Anvil".

In truth the film doesn't much give the impression that Anvil were ever that close to 'making it'. Sure it opens up with footage from Super Rock '84 showing Anvil alongside their now far-more-successful peers (Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Scorpions, Michael Schenker Group) but you only need to take a look at any old festival line-up (say, Monsters Of Rock) to find names of bands you've either forgotten about or never heard of in the first place. Indeed if you click the link above you'll see Anvil opened up the festival in 1982; their predecessors in that slot ('Touch' in 1980 and 'More' in 1981) mean precisely zilch to me.

What sets Anvil apart is the various talking heads that line up to talk about how much they were influenced by the Canadian rockers. Maybe if there was a 'Story Of Touch' movie, Messrs Ulrich, Ian and Kilmister would gladly wax lyrical about them too, but I very much doubt it.

Written by Anvil's two ever-presents, the book details a relationship that although clearly shown to be a close one in the movie is at times over-shadowed by the Spinal Tap-esque moments (the 10,000 capacity festival that attracted an audience of 172; the Croatian bar manager that allows them to play and then refuses to pay them as they were late). Lips and Robb could both at times have bailed out of Anvil (most notably when Lips was approached by Motorhead) but chose to stick together in the belief that the world would one day realise the 'majesty' of their music.

Along the way they make one mistake after another. They sign in perpetuity to a label than would never be able to offer them global success. When they eventually attract a high-profile manager, David Krebs, he succeeds in extracting them from that contract but fails to get them an alternative (and then drops them). Krebs did get them onto the afore-mentioned Super Rock bill, but the net effect of this is that two band members, Reiner being one of them, observe the success that the likes of Bon Jovi have achieved and take Anvil off in a very short-lived commercial direction, losing them both existing fans and a potential new manager in Jonny Z.

From this point on Anvil spent twenty years releasing albums at their own expense and gigging where possible, often to small audiences, sometimes of the 'two men and a dog' variety. A few band members come and go. The occasional light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be another false dawn - until one Sacha Gervasi comes back into their lives. The rest is now (celluloid) history.

Possibly more enjoyable than Gervasi's film, "Anvil": The Story of "Anvil" is an essential read for anyone thinking of forming a band, if for no other reason than to avoid making the same mistakes.

Now reading: Stephen Davis - Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns n' Roses