(Credits: Far Out / Casablanca Records)
Thu 21 August 2025 4:00, UK
When you listen to Kiss, which band do you immediately think of? Yes, of course, The Beatles.
Well, at least that’s the case if you believe what Paul Stanley says. The band who are most renowned for their stadium rock, live show and facepaint credited the Beatles with being their inspiration. It wasn’t anything necessarily about their sound or how they acted throughout their career, but it was instead the fact that the Beatles (and other 1960s bands around them) all looked like unified musical outfits.
While The Beatles might have hated wearing their suits and having to cut their hair shorter, the look made it so they were clearly from the same band. Paul Stanley has previously said that it was their unity which inspired Kiss to paint their faces. They didn’t feel like bands in the ‘70s had as iconic images as those from the decade prior, and he wanted to reintroduce the unique element of individual bands.
While the original idea that the band had makes perfect sense, it also helped them channel the two best aspects of Kiss: their ability to be versatile and their live show. Gene Simmons once spoke about the fact that by painting their faces, they channelled The Beatles in a way that expanded beyond their look, as they were given permission to explore different styles in the same way the Beatles did.
“We also took pride in having the same freedom The Beatles had,” said Simmons. “Their philosophy was, ‘No matter what kind of music we do, it’s still The Beatles.’ That’s what was amazing about them… The Beatles were not trapped in that way. They could do music hall, psychedelia – anything – and they did. Yet somehow it always sounded like The Beatles.”
If you take an album like Dynasty, for example, this record came during a period of friction within Kiss. Peter Criss was at the end of his tether with the band and wanted to leave, and each band member had different ideas about the direction they should go in. The result is a pretty haphazard offering, but one that remains one of Kiss’s most commercially successful albums. They could get away with having an album which was mixed in tone, because their image is what held it all together.
With blends of disco, funk and rock all mixed into one, there is no denying the fact that the versatility on Dynasty makes it a pretty great album; however, it’s not Gene Simmons’ favourite. Kiss have been able to continue selling out stadiums around the world for decades because they’re one of the greatest live bands in the world. Starting their gigs with the proclamation that the audience “Wanted the best” and subsequently “Got the best” would seem big-headed coming from any other musical outfit, but when Kiss take to the stage and deliver their unrelenting heap of pyro, rock and energy, they give crowds something they’ve never experienced before.
Geezer Butler once recalled the time Black Sabbath had Kiss as their support act and worried about following them every night because of the high bar they set. “It was a completely new direction for people,” recalled Butler. “People had to start thinking about stage production after Kiss. It was tough to follow them. We went on just as an ordinary band, no effects or anything, and everybody else still had their mouths wide open from seeing Kiss.”
A lot of bands struggle to condense the energy of their live show into an album, but Kiss managed it with their record Alive!. Fans were transported from their living rooms to the front row of one of the greatest gigs in the world, and as such, the record became one of Kiss’s most commercially successful. Alive! Is Gene Simmons’ favourite Kiss album for that very reason, as what they prided themselves on the most was now a tangible piece of music.
“We were at the peak of our career when we recorded Alive!, and we knew it,” Simmons concluded. “Alive! was real, and was very much a product of its time – it wasn’t just Kiss, it was the mid-70s. People had had enough of the hippie, political thing and just wanted to rock out and have a good time.”
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