Meat Loaf: I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)

It was the power ballad to end all power ballads, and 30 years later people still ponder what the it’ is that the singer wouldn't do.

- Dave Everley

There's a special circle in hell reserved for people who ask the question: "What is it that Meat Loaf wouldn't do for love?" The man himself spent 30 years politely and impolitely dealing with the query every time some smirking journalist threw it his way in an interview, like no one had ever thought to ask him before. Following the singer's death on January 20, 2022, a new generation of numbskulls took to Twitter to trot it out all over again: "So, what was it that Meat Loaf wouldn't do for love?" As anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature could tell you, the answer is right there within the song in question, I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That). Yet this enduring non-mystery is integral to the mythos of the singer's gargantuan 1993 mega-hit, a 12-minute rock opera that barrelled through grunge's pity party like a juggernaut in a frilly shirt as it yelled out a prayer to the god of sex and drums and rock'n'roll.

That song, too knowing to take itself seriously yet too OTT to be a joke, restored Meat and songwriter/musical soulmate/ sometime antagonist Jim Steinman to their rightful place at rock'n'roll's top table in the process.

The story goes that Meat Loaf was on the ropes for most of the 80s, reduced to threatening to push members of the British royal family into moats on cheesy TV gameshows and having to dodge flying wheelchairs at gigs in the backwaters of Ireland. And it's true, the glory days of Bat Out Of Hell were a speck in the rearview mirror. But whatever Meat Loaf was, he wasn't a quitter. "I didn't go anywhere," he said a few years later. "I've never stopped playing, I've never stopped performing, I've always been here. You guys are just now recognising that." Jim Steinman wasn't a quitter either.