Flying In For The Fun Of It

It's like going back and being in a pub band again,” vocalist/guitarist John Corabi explains of new covers project, Lost Angels. “It's a no-brainer; you're not sitting worrying about ticket sales, T-Shirt sales and all this other stuff. I live in Nashville right now and it's hilarious. There's all these little places around here where these just, insane musicians, they jam in this little pub, if it holds 80 people, that would be extremely crowded. They just go in there on Tuesday nights, all these cats… Robert Plant will show up. They just belly up to a bar, you sit there and you drink Guinness all night and just jam.”

Corabi, who fronted Mötley Crüe on their ill-fated, albeit under-rated 1994 self-titled album before being unceremoniously ousted and whose other musical ventures include Ratt, The Scream, ESP, Union and his solo band will bring Lost Angels to Australia for the first time. The band features a star-studded list of seasoned hard rockers; guitarist/vocalist Eric Dover (Slash's Snakepit, Alice Cooper), drummer Troy Patrick Farrell (White Lion, Pretty Boy Floyd, Gilby Clarke) and bassist Eric Brittingham (Cinderella).

“I can't explain it any other way,” Corabi continues. “It's just a no-brainer, no pressure gig; we're just going out to have some fun. Once you start recording records, then you're worried about writing songs, what the artwork looks like on the album, how many records did we sell this week and I've got interviews to do for this or that. There's just so much more involved in doing an original project; so these things, it's just fun to do. We'll probably do a few things from Dover's catalogue [during their Australian tour]; a couple of Cinderella songs, couple of mine, some stuff from White Lion and then some classic covers that we all get off on hearing and playing. We don't take ourselves that serious and we're all in other bands and other projects. This is just a way for us to get out and have some fun, kick up our heels and have a couple of drinks with the audience.”

Corabi's schedule is far too jam-packed for Lost Angels to morph into anything other than its current form anyway. He has a laundry list of projects on his résumé, including a new solo acoustic album. Aside from a new solo electric record, what else is in the pipeline? “I'm hoping I can maybe take my medicine for my ADD and actually finish this book that I've been talking about since the beginning of time,” he laughs. “It's not like a tell-all Mötley book. It's an autobiography from the very beginning. It encompasses my time with The Scream, Mötley, ex-wives, just all the different crap throughout my life. I've written it like three times, but I kinda co-wrote it with someone else. All three times, I co-wrote it with somebody else and I just kinda got frustrated. So I thought, 'You know what? Nobody can actually tell my story better than me'. So I'm just gonna write it, have somebody go through the grammar and make sure it's all proper. So I'm rewriting it on my own right now.”

Corabi's tenure with the Crüe was detailed in the notorious, highly successful and wildly entertaining Neil Strauss co-authored autobiography on the band, The Dirt. The question is posed as to whether the axeman feels he was inaccurately portrayed in said work and was therefore compelled to tell his story. “I thought The Dirt was a really well-written book, but I can honestly say some of my parts were, they were a little coloured,” he says. “They were maybe enhanced a bit. But I guess that's just the business, you know what I mean?”

Lost Angels will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 20 December - The Governor Hindmarsh, Adelaide SA
Friday 21 December - The Hi-Fi, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 22 December - The Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW