Wig Wam: Wall Street

Hair-metallers dumb it down – to brilliant effect.

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Have Norway’s retro hair metalistas Wig Wam entered their long-awaited Warrant phase? One can only hope so, and judging by the album cover and title track of Wall Street, here is their Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich.

It’s catchy, slick, funny and above all, gloriously, deliberately, sensationally dumb. Wig Wam brilliantly inhabit the sensibilities of the era they ape.

The entendres are not so much double as unavoidable (‘Everything has got to be king size’ goes The Bigger The Better), the riffs lurch between nudge-and-a-wink GN’R pastiches (OMG - Wish I Had A Gun)and Bret Michaels’s bathetic balladry (Tides Will Turn), and the performances are as excessive as an attention-seeking bottom-of-the-bill outfit on a Tuesday night at the Cathouse.

Not Steel Panther, but also not guileless enough to ignore the genre conventions they’re celebrating, with Wall Street, Wig Wam walk a fine line in extremely high heels.

Jon Hotten

Jon Hotten is an English author and journalist. He is best known for the books Muscle: A Writer's Trip Through a Sport with No Boundaries and The Years of the Locust. In June 2015 he published a novel, My Life And The Beautiful Music (Cape), based on his time in LA in the late 80s reporting on the heavy metal scene. He was a contributor to Kerrang! magazine from 1987–92 and currently contributes to Classic Rock. Hotten is the author of the popular cricket blog, The Old Batsman, and since February 2013 is a frequent contributor to The Cordon cricket blog at Cricinfo. His most recent book, Bat, Ball & Field, was published in 2022.