Ace Frehley was the last of the quartet to join Kiss, and when he left, the band were beginning their slow descent through the 80s. By the time Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley wrestled the brand back to the big stages, Frehley – who has died aged 74 – was little more than a face-painted pattern to the generations of new fans who came to gawp at the fireworks.
But one shouldn’t underestimate his contribution to Kiss: almost all of Kiss’s setlist to the end was made up of songs he had played on. And though he was not a prolific writer, one of his compositions – Cold Gin – remained in their setlist until Stanley and Simmons quit in 2023, more than 40 years after Frehley left the band (the less said about the 1998 reunion album, Psycho Circus, the better).
His solo career didn’t begin until five years after he left Kiss, and then after three records in three years he fell silent until 2009. However, in 2006 he got sober, and the last two decades of his career were his most productive since the early days of Kiss, with six albums in 15 years. He wasn’t just productive in volume, too – he finally sounded like he was making music for pleasure, rather than to fulfil a brief. It was old-fashioned hard rock, but once again he sounded hungry, for the first time in an age.
His first sober album – Anomaly, from 2009 – might well be the best album from Kiss or any of their members since the 1970s. And on 2018’s Spaceman he patched things up with Simmons long enough for them to write two songs together: those, in effect, are the last ever studio recordings of the Monster Plod.
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