So this episode is all about the albums you bought and lisened to and thought, fuck me that's a great album! Or possibly, fuck me, that's terrible! And then, 30 years later, you discovered your opinion had done a 180 degree turn.   In this episode, Mark revisits he much maligned Black Sabbath experiment that saw Ian Gillan step up to the mic, Steve discovers that Ratt's Detonator tickles his ears a little differently to he wya it did in 1990, and Richard recalls he moment Van Hagar suddenly made sense ....     ..read more

Yes, Sadfans, we're giving over our 75th episode to the unsung heroes of every band that ever set foot in a recording studio or onto a stage - those apparently indefatigable timekeepers without whom there would be little or no momentum. Stuck behind the kit at the back of the stage, these are the artisans of the hard rock and heavy metal engine room. Whether it's a sense of rhythm combined with a diver's boot (h/t to Gillan's Mick Underwood), the professorial science of Neil Peart, or the tour de force blunt trauma approach of Bonzo, these are the men and women who provide the metronome w ..read more

Episode 74 sees the lads tackling the subject of inventions. If ever there was scope to push the envelope on a theme this, surely, is it. And so it proved, as Mark fishes out a set of what can only be described as 15th Century blueprints to qualify Dokken's 1981 debut, Breakin' The Chains. (Don't get antsy, America - we know the better known version of the album was released in Amercia in 1983 with a title tweak - Breaking The Chains rather than Breakin' The Chains - and a very different running order, but where there's a reissue the Sadmen always take the original release for the re ..read more

The latest episode of the Enter Sadmen podcast finds the boys in more familiar territory as the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes serves up 'Death' as the theme for Episode 73. End of life certainly offers up a wealth of stuff to go at in the world of hard rock and heavy metal, which makes it even more bewildering that Steve and Rich didn't follow Mark's lead and go with something completly literal. As it was, Mark arrived at the Sadmen party with an album in another one of those covers that, much like the Scorpions Lovedrive, had post-pubescent teenagers nursing a boner in the re ..read more

Sometimes artists feel the need to escape the confines of the environment in which they made their name and give voice to the individuality of their art. Or some such bollocks. In any event, whether going solo or, in the case of Doro Pesch, being forced by a legal ruling to cease and desist using the name of the band which made her famous, rock and roll's highways and byways are crisscrossed by the tracks of musicians who have wandered off the well-beaten track. We meet three of them in this edition of Enter Sadmen - an episode in which the lads were sent off to find famous rock musos who, for ..read more

So, a question. How maqny albums can you name where the title track is worthy of its status? And of those, how many eclipse even that honour to be classed asd truly epic? That was also the question that was asked of our hardy rock and roll adventurers by the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes for this, the latest leg of the marathon attempt to review the greatest hard rock, heavy metal, prog (etcetera, etcetera) albums of all time (well, of 1970 to 1995, at least). It's worth saying from the outset that Steve managed to misinterpret the brief as incorporating title tracks that he simply ..read more

And on we go to Episode 70, in which the lads work to a brief that shouldn't have been too challenging to meet, even for men of singular taste and discernment. Yes, in this run through another three albums from hard rock and heavy metal's golden era (that's 1970 to 1995, for the uninitiated) the boys were tasked by the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes to find examples of 'Power'. Whether electrical, nuclear, steam, wind, strength or gas was up to them to decide. And so we end up slap bang in the middle of the 1980s with a trio of offerings spanning six years between 1983 and 1989. Firs ..read more

And so following the previous episode, which - according to Rich - featured Diet Cult and Diet Marillion, the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes rumbled ever on  and this time spat out a topic which challenged the boys to find albums that had a 'white' theme. After they all studiously avoided the apparently 'obvious' Whitesnake, they each entered the Sadmen Sound Studio with more white stuff than you'd find at a mid-Eighties Motley Crue after show party. First up for discussion was Steve's personal comfort blanket - the 1984 debut effort from the crown princes of melodic hard rock ..read more

And so to an episode in which Richard, Steve and Mark were tasked with marking important life moments. Mark and Steve opted for a broadly similar seam to mine - that of parenthood. Rich, on the other hand, eschewed the opportunity to reflect on bringing new life into the world, or discovering love for the first time. He spat in the face of death and pooh-poohed the notions of age, friends and work. No, it seems that Richard's most notable moment in life is, in fact, stowing a lilo under his arm and heading off to the Mediterranean. And so it came to be that the lads ended up spending a week o ..read more

Good parenting requires that learning doesn't just take place in the classroom. To really give your kids a rounded view of the world, any self-respecting parent should ensure they take a hands-on roll in continuing their children's education out of school.   The Sadmen are united by their love of rock and metal, but another thing they have in common is that they each also have one daughter, and one day they discovered those daughters have all been subjected to many attempts at rock and roll conversion therapy in the car.   So, for this episode the boys decided to let their daughters ..read more