They strode out of the desert, dayglo sex-warriors with flash metal guitars and songs about fucking while the bombs dropped. Back then, bands just didn’t come from sun-baked dust-bowls like Phoenix, Arizona (they still don’t, really), so there was a glint of the exotic and alien in these hairsprayed he-harlots, spreading from their oddly mangled bright-red fishnets (hastily acquired and destroyed just minutes before their debut album’s photoshoot, if the legend is to be believed) to their sorta-familiar, yet highly idiosyncratic approach to Sunset Strip ass-rock.
It’s like they were outsider artists emulating Mötley Crüe, escapees from the local psychiatric hospital with twisted, fevered visions of their own private LA. Of course, they were snapped up by a major label – how could they not be? Who wouldn’t want to present this gorgeous lunacy to the world?
Icon’s self-titled debut was released on Capitol Records in 1984. The cover boasts a new-wavey painting of an Elvis-type trapped in a vacuum. The back cover features a photo of the band in tatters, looking suitably freaked-out. The music inside zooms along like a crazy motorcycle, every song a slight variation of the one before it, all of them sounding like no one else except Icon, despite Icon’s clearly desperate attempts to sound like everyone else.
The themes are self-empowerment, hardcore fucking, and the end of the world. There’s a highly unnecessary instrumental and a woeful, waltzing closer. It is bizarre and mundane in equal measure, and when it hit stores in the mid-80s, it became an instant cult classic. Too heavy and weird for the glamsters, Icon were the token glam-metal band for the Slayer kids.
Given the benefit of several decades, Icon’s deficits have become screamingly obvious. It was produced by Shrapnel Records’ head honcho/ guitar-wank champ Mike Varney and, like most of the records he handled in the 80s, the album sounds thin, reedy and weightless. The songs feel rushed and unfinished, the stun-gun guitars are laughably lazy, the lyrics are ridiculous (‘I’m a rock’n’roll maniac/With a six string gun I’m about to attack’) and Steve Clifford’s off-key catewauling on the album’s obligatory ballad, It’s Up to You… well, it has to be heard to be believed.
Clearly, this was all obvious to Icon themselves, who paused, regrouped, abandoned metal completely, and returned a year later with Night Of The Crime, a scandalously lightweight album that became a minor AOR classic, and their finest moment. Well, at least that’s the standard narrative at this point. In 1985, there was hell to pay. If there’s one thing that heavy metal kids hated in the 1980s, it was keyboards. And Night Of The Crime is awash in tinkling synths.
It also has one of the most bare-faced grabs at commerciality anyone’s ever heard, the shameless, feckless Rock My Radio, a ludicrous Slade pastiche that makes Metal Health-era Quiet Riot sound like King Crimson.
The Slayer kids hated it, and the Giuffria fans it was clearly aimed for had no idea who Icon were. So finding their niche was clearly an issue for Icon in 1985, and the band subsequently panicked, blinked, and spiralled into obscurity.
Still, for gooey, goofy, metal-tinged AOR kicks, you can’t beat Night Of The Crime. Produced by bazillion-selling starmaker Eddie Kramer, Night Of The Crime’s sound is bigger and beefier than Icon’s debut, although the approach is a million miles away. Opener Naked Eyes sounds like Bon Jovi’s Runaway, complete with pumping, state-fair keyboards, letting you know right off the bat that this is not your little brother’s Icon.
It’s a shock to the system, like running into an ex-girlfriend who’s had an extreme nose job over the summer – it’s still the same girl, just with a radically different presentation. Dokkenesque harmonies and chugging guitars reign as the band steer their formerly punk-y bash’n’crash into strange new waters. Clanging metal gives way to silk-shirted pomp, teenage lust to suburban adultery, whiskey to white wine spritzers.
At first, you assume the tempo change will be brief and temporary, that the sizzling flash-metal kicks of ’84 will come roaring back into focus by track two, but relief never arrives, as Night Of The Crime continues its descent into radio-ready dad-rock.
Frozen Tears is an hilariously overwrought bit of power-balladry so saccharine that it should come with a reminder to see your dentist; Raise The Hammer is like Iron Maiden attempting a Journey make-over; Out For Blood spends a good minute noodling away like Uli Jon Roth before crash-landing into Queensrÿche’s stuffy proto-prog metal; Danger Calling sounds like John Waite’s never-was followup to Missing You; Take Another Shot At My Heart is unmasked Kiss at their most ludicrous; and Missing is so unapologetically cheeseball you could make fondue out of it.
Perhaps sensing that they needed to at least acknowledge their former selves, the band do include one fairly straight-ahead headbanger, The Whites Of Their Eyes, which is basically every song from the first album smooshed into three-and-a-half minutes. And it all ends with Rock My Radio, the aforementioned would-be cash-grab that collapsed under its own brazen chicanery.
Like the first album, …Crime is fatally flawed, but also so plucky and fun that it’s almost impossible to dislike. If AOR fans want a long-lost cult-classic, Night Of The Crime most certainly fits the bill.
Shortly before the tour scheduled to promote Night Of The Crime kicked off, Icon frontman Steve Clifford quit the band, leaving them to struggle on for two further albums. Various attempts to regroup/reunite have occurred ever since, to varying degrees of success, but today Icon are still active, with the lineup that recorded their first two albums firmly back in place. A new album is reportedly on the way.
And why not? Planet Rock needs bands like Icon, bizzaro semi-metal puffballs from cactus country with majestic keyboards and smears of lipstick, and tales of lust and ruin in the nuclear age. Literally one of a kind, these shapeshifting oddballs deserve a second listen, if only to hear what it might sound like if Angel were stranded in the desert in 1985 with nothing but a couple of Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P. cassettes to find their way home.