Sebastian Bach’s enthusiasm for life in general and music in particular is permanently off the scale. Within the first 10 minutes of our conversation today he has already excitedly namechecked Kiss, Van Halen, Twisted Sister, Rush, Queensrÿche and, most surprisingly, 80s UK glam tarts Wrathchild.
“I fucking loved that band,” he says of the latter, then launches into their song Trash Queen. “‘Trash queen, trash queen… she’ll suck you clean!’ Man, I have that album on red vinyl.”
Right now, though, he’s most excited by his own music. And rightly so. His new solo album, Child Within The Man, is his first in a decade, and only his third studio album since he was fired from his former band, New Jersey hellions Skid Row, in 1996. It’s a terrific record, a souped-up version of the kind of hard rock with which he originally made his name, with Bach’s powerhouse voice and megawatt charisma the neutron star powering it.
But then he was always one of rock’n’roll’s great frontman: six-feet-three of poster-boy good lucks and unfiltered attitude. The son of the late artist David Bierk, whose work adorned the sleeves of Skid Row’s Slave To The Grind and Subhuman Race albums, as well as every Bach solo album up to and including Child Within The Man, he was born in the Bahamas and raised the town of Peterborough, Canada. He may have been educated at the private Lakefield College (other notable alumni: Prince Andrew, and Arrested Development star Will Arnett), but rock’n’roll got its claws in him early – he was playing clubs with his first band, Kid Wikkid, at the age of 14.
It was as frontman with Skid Row that he made his name. With Jon Bon Jovi and his management company in their corner, their vertiginous rise saw Bach become one of rock’s most recognisable faces when he was barely out of his teens. Their first two albums, 1989’s self-titled debut and 1991’s Slave To The Grind, were huge hits – the latter even reached No.1 in the US. But it was always a fractious union between the punk kid from Canada and his New Jersey bandmates, and Bach was fired from Skid Row in 1996. When they returned a few years later, it was without him.
His own path has been marked by some dizzying highs and soulscraping lows. He’s done TV, films and, famously, a stint on Broadway, and he counts the likes of Rob Halford and Axl Rose as friends. But then there were the lean post-Skid Row years, which found him struggling to recapture past
