The tour finished and the album kept selling. There was immediately record company pressure for a follow-up. But Loaf wasn’t in a position to record. So Steinman recorded the intended Bat Out of Hell follow-up, called Bad For Good, as a solo album. Within months of its April 1981 release, Loaf released his own follow-up, Dead Ringer, also written by Steinman. Impact diluted, neither record sold nearly as many copies as Bat.

Momentum continued to wither. Loaf’s follow-up to Dead Ringer was called Midnight at the Lost and Found. It was meant to include a Steinman song called Total Eclipse of the Heart. But Loaf’s record company refused to pay for Steinman so the song went to Bonnie Tyler. While she sold an estimated six million copies, Loaf’s shifted just 700,000 copies worldwide. Over the next 17 years Loaf continued recording but became involved — as is so often the case after a mega-smash — in lawsuit and counter lawsuit with Steinman and related parties. By 1983, he had declared bankruptcy.

A decade later the duo got back together to make Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, spawning the global hit I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That). It was followed – somewhat inevitably – by even more legal wrangling, this time about unpaid royalties and name rights. Steinman had nothing to do with 2006’s Bat Out of Hell III.

But the original Bat Out of Hell remains a classic of its type. It’s still derided in some circles as being pantomime, but it combines epic energy and theatre with undeniably great tunes. It evokes memories of your first love: always doomed but unforgettable. This is why Paradise is said to be the world’s most played jukebox song ever. As Bob Stanley says in his excellent pop music anthology Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: “On Bat Out of Hell… you got your money’s worth. It was a real-life rocky horror, a musical theme park dreamed up by American rock’s own Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

It kicked open the door for epic, emotionally-swollen, bombastic rock. Without the album the likes of Van Halen, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi would not have dominated the early-Eighties charts like they did.

Before Steinman’s passing, Sonenberg hoped that he and Loaf might do one last record together. Bat Out of Hell: The Final Act “could be poignant, reflective and human.” Sadly, it was not to be. But the Bat legend lives on.

This piece was first published in April, 2021