Kiss characters will outlive us all, says Stanley

Paul Stanley says it was a mistake to introduce the Fox and Warrior characters and insists the band's four classic personas will continue long after he is gone.

When Peter Criss and Ace Frehley left the band in the early 1980s, their Catman and Spaceman characters were retired and replaced by Eric Carr as The Fox and Vinnie Vincent as The Wiz, or The Egyptian Warrior.

But current members Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer have reclaimed the Spaceman and Catman personas, and Stanley says Kiss were in danger of verging into ever more ridiculous territory.

He tells The Joe Rogan Experience: “I think where we went astray is when we first replaced Peter and we decided we needed a new character. And the problem with that kind of stuff is that it started to become — interestingly, I think — disingenuous. It took an air of fake in the sense that it became a menagerie.

“I mean, we had a Fox and an Egyptian Warrior. Next we would have the Turtle Boy and The Frog Man. So I think once we brought Ace and Peter back for the reunion tour, which I hoped would go on forever – in other words, I hoped that everybody would get back together, everybody would see the error in their ways and we would move forward and stay together forever.

“But when that wasn’t to be, I thought, we really built these four images. And, arguably, you can go anywhere in the world and people know who Kiss is, regardless of whether they know who those people are.

“So to give up that because we found that those guys were no longer either capable or wanted to give it 100%, well, then who loses out? The fans. So, no. Those images are the images that will continue when I’m not here either.”

Frehley said last month that Kiss should have come up with a new make-up idea for Thayler, adding that he is irritated by the new guy “copying” him.

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.