The dots are back in W.A.S.P. and for all that time-honoured girl-whipping, chainsaw-wielding meat throwing onstage mania has also made a welcome return. So how come the bad dropped the OTT stuff in the first place? What's the scam on the new live LP? And why has mainman Blackie Lawless still got a bee in his bloodstained bonnet about the moralistic PMRC? Acrid answers by Mick Wall.

It's a rare Summer morning in London, outside the sun is actually shining, the heat of the pavement burns through the soles of my boots, and girls everywhere bare their teeth and legs, gliding past me, grabbing my attention like cheap perfume.

Inside the Montcalm Hotel the air-conditioning hums like a wire. It's 11.00 am and I'm the first face in the bar. And bare-assed show of manners and a punch-drunk social conscience trying to make another comeback mean I only order a Perrier. But the day is young, so I keep the tab open all the same.

Blackie Lawless arrives at the same time as the water, bounding from the elevator and through the lobby towards the bar in a straight, fast line, making a bee for the first item on a cramped day-long agenda of smooth-talking promotional work, a long-toothed smile already working its way across from one side of his mouth to the other.

For Blackie Lawless, business today involves talking to the press about the new WASP. album, Live... In The Raw, and the accompanying single from that album, Scream Until You Like It, plus savoury topics like why, after ditching the more outré aspects of their live show around the time of the release of their last album, Inside The Electric Circus, a year ago, Blackie says W.A.S.P. are about to put together a new show that will not only feature a return to the halcyon early days of girl-whipping, chainsaw-wielding, meat-throwing onstage mania, but will, in the singer's own words, make everything we ever did before look like schoolboys playing in the yard...

I begin, though, by asking Blackie about the public scuffle he's led his band into recently with the monstrous blue-rinses of the PMRC. Right. Those fuckers The fuss started when one of the PMRC's leading lights, a dangerous, vicious-mouthed all-American mumsie called Tipper Gore, published a book called Raising PG Kids In An X-Rated Society - PG, in case you don't know, stands for Parental Guidance.

According to Tipper Gore and the rest of the storm troopers at the PMRC, it seems it's no longer enough to feed, clothe, educate and love your children to be considered a Good Parent these days. If the PMRC are to be taken at their word, a Good Parent will even have to accompany you to your favourite record shop and try and dissuade you from falling prey to the unbelievably decadent delights of, say, buying and listening to and actually making your own mind up about the new... Ozzy Osbourne album; or the new Iron Maiden; or the new Metallica: or the new...

WA.S.P. ARE singled out for an especially vitriolic attack in this farcical and disturbing book Tipper Gore has written.

She devoted the whole third chapter to me and the band! cackles Blackie, then stops mid-laugh and hisses, The asshole.... I tell ya, I could not believe that piece of shit when I read it! She accuses us of being perverse and more or less advises parents that if they don't want the minds of their teenage sons and daughters totally Fucked up and ruined then they shouldn't let them within a hundred miles of one of our gigs! It' s incredible stuff.

And the book contains photographs of us, and a reproduction of the Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) single sleeve, and a whole bunch of our lyrics - none of which they got permission from us to use. On top of that, she even changed some of our original lyrics around to make them seem worse! My question is, if our lyrics are supposed to be so bad in the first place, then why did she have to change them around to suit her?

I was furious when I saw that ugly book Tipper Gore had written, and I decided we shouldn't have to stand still for that crap. As a consequence, were now suing the shit out of Tipper Gore and the people behind her. What I'm demanding is a written public apology from her to be handed over to me personally on nationwide TV in America. I won't be satisfied until I get at least that! He shakes his head with disgust.

I mean, when this whole PMRC thing started rearing its ugly, hypocritical head two or three years ago, I didn't buy it then. All along, I kept telling people, there's got to be something more going on here than the misguided desire to have censorship labels on rock and roll records. Well, when this whole issue about the Tipper Gore book came up, I started looking into what these assholes on the PMRC are actually up to, and it turns out that this PMRC deal is a front for an even bigger can of worms than I imagined...

What Blackie is referring to is the revelation a couple of months ago that a certain Albert Gore - brooding Tipper's honest-to-God husband, no less - was about to announce his intention to run for the Democratic Presidential candidate nomination in America.

This guy, Gore, represents a real threat to the basic Liberties and freedoms which people have come to recognise as their right to enjoy. He has every known kind of prejudice bottled up inside of him and he's just itching to get his finger on the right buttons to sort the whole Goddamned mess out with. If you think modem America, or even modern Britain, has become more and more conservative-minded in the '80s, believe me, you haven't seen anything compared to what it will be like in the '9Os if this man gets elected as the next President of America.

And what makes everything even more sinister is that this guy really has a chance of making it, too. Nobody, as in anybody, is going to vote the Reagan administration back in, no matter who's leading it. Not after the Iran-Contra scandal... Then Gore's wife comes out with this book to add fuel to the fire of his campaign, financially, and I'll just be Goddamned if I'm going to let her help put him in the White House by selling a product with me and the band in it!

So the reason we're now suing these people is all to do with my outrage at what Tipper Gore and the rest of her cohorts on the PMRC are really up to, and to draw as much attention as possible to what people like her and her husband are ultimately seeking.

And don't forget, these people are religious fanatics, they actually believe in the principle of Armageddon! I'm just afraid that in their rush to do all these gallant things they want to do to save the world from itself they'll end up pulling the Goddamned plug on all of us!

Clearly, Blackie Lawless takes the whole business of drawing attention to this ghastly affair very seriously.

I'm not a paranoid kind of guy, he says, and I've never really gone for the inflated idea that politics and rock arid roll should cross over. I've never thought they made a good mix. Mostly, I still don't. But this whole PMRC thing has really stirred my blood. In a way, I've been dragged into this thing through no fault of my own. My only crime was playing rock and roll and keeping thousands of kids a night happy and entertained. But now I'm involved I'm going to make an issue of spreading the word. I feel like my life's at stake here.

I mean, I've never been political in my entire life, but I'm seeing some things going on in American politics right now, which includes the PMRC, and it scares the shit out of me! Now I'm saying it's time somebody stood up to these folks, gave them a dose of their own medicine and let the public became truly aware of what these people stand for.

Dragging the conversation kicking and screaming into a more Kerrang! - like sphere of reference, Blackie and I agree to leave the politics smouldering under the coffee-table for a moment, and I ask him why he thinks now is a good time to release a live W.A.S.P. album?

Largely because when we came over and played Hammersmith last time, we recorded the show for the BBC. I went and mixed the tapes a couple of days later, and it was really good, I mean hot. And I thought, damn, this is good enough to release, this is a quality recording! And that's what really planted the seed in our minds. If it hadn't been for that we'd probably be in the studio right now laying down tracks for the next studio album. So we recorded some shows and decided we had enough really good material to put together one totally solid live album, which is exactly what we've done.

We recorded the last three shows on our last tour of the US, down in California - San Bernadino, San Diego and Long Beach Arena. The vast majority of the tracks we included on the album, though, came from Long Beach Arena. The crowd were just primed that night! They were something else, really. It was the last night of the tour arid they saw all the trucks carrying the mobile recording studio parked out the back, and they knew that if they made enough noise they were gonna be famous, and so they went for it! he laughs.

The first single from the album, however, is not a live track. Recorded in a studio in LA earlier this summer,Scream Until You Like It was written by Blackie specifically as the main song of the new 'Ghoulies II' movie, the sequel to the original 1985 Ghoulies feature, which reportedly grossed its producers, Empire Pictures, something in the region of 35 million dollars. Blackie openly admits it was that fact more than any other which initially motivated him to accept the offer to write the song.

I'd seen the first Ghoulies movie and hadn't been very impressed, he confesses. So when Empire Pictures asked me if W.A.S.P. would be interested in writing a track for the follow-up movie, I wasn't exactly leaping out of my seat... But then, he chuckles, the producer told me exactly how much money the first picture made and I had a sudden change of heart! And so we ended up putting something together, and now that we've done it and put so much time and effort into it, I look at what we've done and I'm pretty pleased with the results. I think we sound pretty Goddamned animated on that track.

Until we'd finished it, though, I never thought of it as anything more than the title track to a new film. But now that it's done, I see it as another W.A.S.P. song, and I'm proud of it!

There is also a special video that's been put together by the film's producers to help promotion.. Blackie on his throne surrounded by little blue-green Ghoulies, all of them licking their lips and grinning from ear to pointed ear.

Those little guys in the video are totally amazing, he laughs. 'There's one little green guy, in particular, that it takes, like, five guys to operate, and this little green guy can do anything you can do, maybe better...

In the opening scene, I'm sitting on this throne, suspended in this kind of black limbo, with four or five of these creatures all sitting on my lap. And I'm just talking to them and kidding around with them like they're my children. Only unlike a movie like, say, Gremlins, where the little guys are soft and furry and lovable, these characters go out and eat people's fucking legs! The blood flies! And me being the type of character I am on-stage, the two elements really do conspire to make a perfect marriage in the video. Really, I gotta tell you, the end result is magic! The whole concept is perfect.

As already reported in Kerranq! 153, Blackie Lawless has been putting it around in no uncertain terms that the live W.A.S.P. show is about to undergo a sudden transformation from the slick arena-friendly mainstream showcase the band were peddling while touring America last year with Kiss into what Blackie now says will be a real return to the hoary, gory days of yore!

This, let me tell you, is a relief to hear. There was a time, a little over a year ago now, when W.A.S.P. temporarily and inexplicably became W.A.S.P. thereby shamefully dropping the We Are Sexual Perverts angle from their extant public image. And in the Fifth Anniversary issue of Kerrang! (Issue 120) Blackie himself was quoted as saying that whipping women onstage every night just bored me to death...

Hand on heart, there was a time when I interpreted these signs as a positive indication that the erstwhile W.A.S.P. boys had finally given in to their jealousy of Ratt and Motley One, and gone in search of the BUCKS. Still W.A.S.P. of course, but without the old sting.

A lot of this, again, is tangled up in our chain of reactions to the presence of organisations like the PMIRC, explains Blackie. Touring America between the The Last Command and the Inside The Electric Circus albums, we really started to suffer from the pressure people like that can now actually wield in America. The whole censorship deal was raging at the time, and in a lot of states groups like the PMRC and their affiliates were able to bring pressure to bear on local civic groups, who in turn put pressure on local promoters to ban certain rock and roll bands from performing in those states. We seemed to suffer more than most. In fact, we lost a third of our entire date sheet because they just wouldn't let us in through the gates. We'd have been arrested and thrown in jail!

Do you know, he suddenly becomes more animated, that to this day we've never been allowed to play in Las Vegas? Can you believe that? Las Vegas? The Sodom and Gomorrah of the western world! Here's a town where a 12-year-old can walk down the street and buy any hooker he wants to, but they won't let a rock and roll band in there to play! It's insane!

So, anyway, as you can imagine, this was causing us a lot of problems. To cut a long story short, I was put into a room, and I ended up clawing the walls when we came to these conclusions, but I had it spelled out to me that something had to be done because this shit was seriously starting to damage the band's career in America. So, we figured, to get along, you go along with what everybody wants. We were in a I corner and we did what we could to get out of it. And so we lost a lot of our so-called rough edges...

But it had nothing to do with the desire to go commercial, he says, adamant. For us to try arid commercialise our music just to make it bigger in America would be a complete mistake. Think of all the fans we'd lose, all the things we worked for and stood for all these years. Well, we knew that then, and we know that now; more than ever.

But I understand why some people might have seen what we did as in indication that we were going straight. It had nothing to do with that, though. We had a problem that we didn't know existed until the PMRC caine along. We're still sorting it out. It's just at first we simply didn't know how deep this whole thing went.

By the end of the last tour we were sick to the teeth of trying to play reasonable with these people. It was getting us strictly nowhere. You'll hear one of the raps I got into doing about the vanities and the hypocrisies of the PMRC onstage every night on the new album. That was the indication that things were gonna change for this band. We decided to get back to doing what originally made us famous. We thought, to hell with these people, well, let's just go out there and do it, and if they kill us for it then at least well go out the same way as we came in - with an almighty fucking bang!

W A.S.P. ARE currently on a six-week tour of America, where, if Blackies claims for the new stageshow are accurate, the band should be in for an interesting ride indeed from those righteous hairdos and bleeding gashes that populate the PMRC.

If they survive that, the band will be back in the recording studio putting together the next studio album in time for a spring 88 release.