“I’ve been dreaming up a storm lately. I’ve been dreaming up a storm lately, and the entire city is burning. Look, you can see the colours dancing around the flames like the inside of a mad jukebox. Horny angels stalk the streets, looking for a little damnation and wearing nothing but the red badge of love. Motorcycles reproduce in nocturnal alleys, groaning with greasy pleasure, and they’ve blown up the YWCA like a giant balloon and sent it out to sea, full of screaming, lovely, lonely girls.
“And if I fall asleep here tonight. You better give me some asbestos sheets, ’cause I’ve been sweating gasoline. My dreams are highly flammable, and there are parts of my body that just won’t stop giving off sparks. Stop me before I dream again.
“Why must I be a teenager in love?“
With this wild fever dream intro to the seven-and-a-half minutes video for their debut single, the world was introduced in 1989 to gothic girl group Pandora’s Box, a New York quartet featuring only three actual flesh-and-blood humans.
The band might be unfamiliar to you: the song, however, you’ll know… just not this version of it. Or the epic story behind it all, encompassing an angry Meat Loaf, a disgraced nun, Wuthering Heights, English film-maker Ken Russell, one member of Bruce Springsteen‘s E Street Band, and er, “an erotic motorcycle”.
Strap in, it’s a wild ride.
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On his website, Jim Steinman described It’s All Coming Back To Me Now, written “while under the influence of Wuthering Heights” as “my attempt to write the most passionate, romantic song I could ever write.”
“I was trying to write a song about dead things coming to life,” he revealed. “I was trying to write a song about being enslaved and obsessed by love, not just enchanted and happy with it. It was about the dark side of love and about the extraordinary ability to be resurrected by it once dead.
“It’s about obsession, and that can be scary because you’re not in control and you don’t know where it’s going to stop.
“It’s like Heathcliff digging up Cathy’s corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight. You can’t get more extreme, operatic or passionate than that.”
By the late ’80s, Steinman had a reputation in the music industry: exactly what that reputation was depended on you asked. To some he was a visionary genius, to others an unhinged maniac. Steinman believed that anything worth doing was worth over-doing, that boundaries were for the weak, that truth could only be found in excess. Raised on classical music and ’50s rock ‘n’ roll, he knowingly self-defined as ‘Little Richard Wagner’, a composite character who desired everything louder than everything else, long before the phrase became associated with Motorhead.
“I never really saw classical music and rock ‘n’ roll as different,” he told Kerrang! magazine in 1989. “I still don’t. I grew up liking extremes in music – big gothic textures. I never have much regard for more subtle stuff… I was attracted to William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, I couldn’t see the point in writing songs about ordinary, real-life stuff… I always wanted to sweep in, speaking in German, with a bat on my shoulder.”
Bat Out Of Hell made Steinman a music business legend. Composed by Steinman, produced by Todd Rundgren, and sung by Meat Loaf, it has sold over 43 million copies worldwide, and vindicated and amplified Steinman’s belief that everyone else was doing rock ‘n’ roll wrong. This, unsurprisingly, also made Steinman a lot of enemies within the music industry.
Even Meat Loaf, who first met Steinman in 1973, and loved him dearly – “We belonged heart and soul to each other” he told Rolling Stone in 2021 – sometimes found his friend exasperating. Not least when Steinman refused to let him record what he called his “erotic motorcycle” – It’s All Coming Back To Me Now – insisting that he always envisaged it being performed by a woman. While Meat Loaf seethed on the sidelines, Steinman, seeking an ’80s version of his favourite 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las, began to assemble an all-female band that could do justice to his magnum opus.
I wanted this project as though Clockwork Orange was about girls
Jim Steinman
He didn’t cast the net too wide when recruiting for Pandora’s Box. Ellen Foley was Meat Loaf’s girlfriend, who’d dazzled with her performance on Paradise by the Dashboard Light alongside her man on Bat Out Of Hell. Elaine Caswell was found singing in a New York bar, where Steinman was “blown away” by her voice and “the looks of an avenging angel.” Gina Taylor was performing in NYC as Tina Turner in ’60s musical Beehive. And Deliria Wilde – talked up in the media as a former nun thrown out of a convent for a “shocking” transgression, didn’t actually exist, except in Steinman’s imagination.
Together, with musical assistance from E Street Band keyboard player Roy Bittan, Pandora’s Box recorded the 1989 concept album Original Sin, featuring the singles It’s All Coming Back To Me Now, Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere), and Safe Sex (When It Comes 2 Loving U).
“I wanted this project as though Clockwork Orange was about girls,” he explained to Kerrang! “I wanted to write an album that sums up the last 10 years. What I saw coming out of the AIDS epidemic, as with all plagues, was a plus side. This one is that it’s restored sex as something dark and magical and terrible.”
Steinman recruited English film director Ken Russell – Tommy, Women In Love, The Devils – to direct a video for It’s All Coming Back To Me Now in London. It was not subtle. Reporting from the video shoot, music writer Sylvie Simmons noted, “There’s leather and snakes and tombstones and cockrings with shrunken heads on, and a glorious, erotic ceremony on the fantasies of a girl near death from a motorcycle crash being ministered to by paramedics.”
“My manager saw it and goes, ‘It’s a porno movie!’,” Steinman admitted.
Despite all the hype, all the headlines, the saucy video, and Steinman’s obvious songwriting talents, the single – and indeed the Original Sin album – was a total flop. But the song didn’t die.
In the summer of 1996 it was resurrected by Steinman for Celine Dion, who released it as the third single from her 14th studio album, Falling Into You. The single reached number one in Canada, and number two in the US, and is fondly remembered as one of the Quebec singer’s most powerful anthems.
Reflecting on the themes of the song on his website, Steinman wrote, “It says that, at any point in somebody’s life, when they loved somebody strongly enough and that person returns, a certain touch, a certain physical gesture can turn them from being defiant and disgusted with this person to being subservient again. And it’s not just a pleasurable feeling that comes back, it’s the complete terror and loss of control that comes back. And I think that’s ultimately a great weapon.”
Broadway legend Andrew Lloyd Webber reportedly told Steinman that he believed the song was “the greatest love song ever written”, and after hearing Dion’s version he predicted, “This will be the record of the millennium.”
Finally, in 2006, Meat Loaf recorded the song as a duet on Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose.
“I believe that the version that Marion Raven and myself did on this album is the definitive version,” Meat Loaf regularly declared while promoting the record, but the record-buying public had already decided otherwise.
