SEBASTIAN BACH

He was the youth gone wild: played clubs and guzzled beer at 14; fronted Skid Row and got hit records, star friends, a taste for coke, and the sack; drank more beer; toured with musical theatre productions; has a solo career... "I've had a pretty fucking extraordinary life," he says.

- Dave Everley

Sebastian Bach’s enthusiasm for life in general and music in particular is permanently off the scale. Within the first 10 minutes of our conversation today he has already excitedly name checked Kiss, Van Halen, Twisted Sister, Rush, Queensrÿche and, most surprisingly, 80s UK glam tarts Wrathchild.

“I fucking loved that band,” he says of the latter, then launches into their song Trash Queen. “‘Trash queen, trash queen… she’ll suck you clean!’ Man, I have that album on red vinyl.”

Right now, though, he’s most excited by his own music. And rightly so. His new solo album, Child Within The Man, is his first in a decade, and only his third studio album since he was fired from his former band, New Jersey hellions Skid Row, in 1996. It’s a terrific record, a souped-up version of the kind of hard rock with which he originally made his name, with Bach’s powerhouse voice and megawatt charisma the neutron star powering it.

But then he was always one of rock’n’roll’s great frontman: six-feet-three of poster-boy good lucks and unfiltered attitude. The son of the late artist David Bierk, whose work adorned the sleeves of Skid Row’s Slave To The Grind and Subhuman Race albums, as well as every Bach solo album up to and including Child Within The Man, he was born in the Bahamas and raised the town of Peterborough, Canada. He may have been educated at the private Lakefield College (other notable alumni: Prince Andrew, and Arrested Development star Will Arnett), but rock’n’roll got its claws in him early – he was playing clubs with his first band, Kid Wikkid, at the age of 14.