ROXUS: Nightstreet

Released: 1991

The Australian music industry is typically about five years behind the rest of the world so naturally just as glam metal was about to be virtually wiped out at a mainstream level across the globe, a Melbourne leather and hair band exploded onto the national chart with an exasperating power ballad called "Where Are You Now?". It cruised into the Top 20 and seemed to hang around for months. The band responsible for it was Roxus, a five-piece that had existed since 1987 and had been fortunate enough to release a reasonably-well received self-financed single around the same time Molly Meldrum had been scouting talent for his new label Melodian, a development arm of Festival, the country's largest independent record company.

By 1991 Melodian obviously decided they were ready and after the success of the single, Roxus unleashed Nightstreet onto the world. It would be fair to argue that many people probably wish they hadn't, and fifteen years later it's a barely memorable blip on the Australian music radar. If it's memorable at all, it's probably for all the wrong reasons.

From the outset, it was clear Roxus had moulded itself after Bon Jovi. There was the same personnel arrangement, same musical outlook and like the New Jersey superstars, the band had been named after its singer, in this case Juno Roxas. The difference between the two groups however is rather like the difference between 10 year olds playing armies in the backyard and Operation Desert Storm, and in the end Nightstreet aimed to be Slippery When Wet but ended up as 7800° Farenheit.

Nightstreet combines lightweight keyboard-drenched melodic pop-metal with high-cheese factor lyrics like few bands in history, resplendent with the type of corny innuendo that even Warrant would have left alone. Seriously, check out this foolishness from the title track: "I've got a hard hat, full sack, shining like a Cadillac/C'mon and loosen my load/I got a bomb tickin', lookin' for a lickin'/Feel like I'm about to explode".

The album is just as musically vapid. Even the tamest American hair band usually had some degree of bite, whether it be a scorching-hot guitar player or a kick-ass drummer. Here, the rhythm section is so buried in the mix that the bass and drums virtually don't exist and Dragan Stanic's guitar work is some of the most unspectacular ever recorded. For a band of its nature too, "Bad Boys" is the only song on which Roxus comes anywhere close to really rocking out but with truly hilarious lines like "Life can taste so sweet when you are down on your knees" it's impossible to take seriously. The less said about the awful "Jimi G" the better, but no song about a man should ever be sung by another man the way Roxas sings this gem. For all its irksomeness, "Where Are You Now?" is far and away the best song on the album and probably best illustrates where Roxus wanted to be instead of where they actually were.

After about a week on the charts, Nightstreet nosedived into oblivion and the title of its big first single quickly became an ironic epitaph for Roxus. After this, most of the band left or were fired and Roxus was never heard from again.

1. Rock N Roll Nights
2. My Way
3. Bad Boys
4. Midnight Love
5. Where Are You Now?
6. Nightstreet
7. This Time
8. First Break of the Heart
9. Stand Back
10. Jimi G

Rating: 37%