Lita Ford: Time Capsule

Former Runaway reheats her late-80s leftovers.

Lita Ford Time Capsule album cover

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Following an ill-advised flirtation with nu metal, Lita Ford has been in nostalgic mode for the last few years, revisiting her glam-metal glory days on her last album and in her recently published autobiography, both titled Living Like A Runaway.

Intended as a companion piece to the book, Time Capsule unearths various ‘lost’ recordings from the late 1980s and features starry cameos including Gene Simmons, Dave Navarro and Chris Holmes. These are pop-metal anthems from a pre-grunge age of innocence, and Ford embraces every spangle-riffed, big-haired cliché with an impressive lack of shame or irony: ‘The deeper the shock, the harder it rocks.’ Preach it, sister.

That said, these formulaic limitations start to grate over the long haul. It’s easy to see why generic blues-metal grunters like Black Leather Heart and the perfunctory Simmons duet Rotten To The Core finished up left on the shelf. But Ford has few rivals in the croaky-voiced, widescreen, ladymetal power-ballad league, as she proves with the Bonnie Tyler-sized Killing Kind and the brooding King Of The Wild Wind, which combines a Spinal Tap-worthy title with an epic Paradise City-style blow-out finale. Guilty pleasures all.

Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.

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