Song Lore: Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue
Hello, welcome, step inside my office. Do take a seat, and please, help yourself to a cigar. There you go. Here, I’ll light it for you. Enjoy that. It cost me a fortune. Do you want an enormous flagon of bewilderingly strong wine? No? Oh. Well do you mind if I have one? Excellent.
Now, I presume you’ve fought your way through my boobytrapped castle to this very office because you heard rumour of my Song Lore knowledge. Yes, my reputation precedes me; I do, indeed, know a lot of wild shit. Well, look sharp sir or madame (my eyesight is not what it was). For which song would you care to learn the sacred Lore?
Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue, you say?
What a curious choice. You are indeed an oddity. But very well.
Kickstart My Heart, released in 1989, was written by the band’s bassist, the hard-partying consonant-hog Nikki Sixx. The band were infamous in 80’s Los Angeles for being, quite frankly, fucking bonkers. They brawled, they shagged, they set objects aflame. That sounds quite glamourous, doesn’t it? Ha ha ha, oh heavens no.
Past antics included:
- a mosh pit punch up between Sixx, frontman Vince Neil, and several gig-attendees, after somebody in the crowd snorted an enormous bogie onto Neil’s lovely white trousers mid-song.
- brawling with a drag queen when $20 worth of cocaine purchased from the afore-mentioned monarch turned out to be baby powder.
- shagging one another’s mums.
- growing tired of a tedious man at a house party, grabbing him and nailing his ear to a nearby table [OUCH RATING: 6.5/10].
- urinating onto Ozzy Osbourne.
- bassist Sixx shagging a strange woman who scaled his home and climbed in through the bathroom window.
- being pelted with sausages while touring in England (YES land of hope and glory).
Now, to the matter at hand.
Kickstart my heart was penned after the 1987 heroin overdose of our friend Nikki Sixx. He was taken to hospital and fully died. Then a kindly doctor rammed an adrenaline needle into his heart. That didn’t work [shrug emoji], so the doctor just rammed another one in. That did the trick. Young Sixx reanimated, saved from death’s bony grope, and went home to do more heroin. Kids these days!
Then he wrote a song about it, and there you go: loadsa money.
Well, that concludes your Song Lore. Thank you for visiting me in my Tower of Musical Knowledge. It’s been a hoot. Now kindly get out, and leave me to dance around in my underpants. It’s Saturday night, for heaven’s sake.