The Lipstick Killers Present The Shining Star: A Rock Opera By Mark Taylor and Peter Tillman – Mark Taylor and Peter Tillman (Appointment/Pink Flamingo)
The label on the packet does not lie. It says “Rock Opera” - so you can’t say you haven’t been warned.
If you have to ask who Mark Taylor and Peter Tillman are, you’re in the wrong place. Their old band, the Lipstick Killers, was a force of nature in a febrile Sydney underground music scene at the turn of the ‘70s. Arising from the ashes of Filth (Tillman) and Psychosurgeons (Taylor), they wedded sharp humour to high energy music, running aground amid an ill-fated re-location to Los Angeles.
All-too-brief returns down the years did not nothing to erode their reputation as torchbearers for glam punk rock folded back into its ‘60s roots and sprinkled with bathos, pathos and a little glitter. The principal members’ materialisation in Sydney with Dr Stone in the early ‘90s just put a psychedelic acid punk cherry on top.
Tillman built a career as a corporate lawyer working out of Singapore, while Taylor divided the intervening years between running a family digital graphics design company and building the world’s foremost collection of ‘60s punk singles.
The Lipstick Killers’ legacy has grown exponentially down the years with Dave Laing’s Grown Up Wrong Records giving its biggest boost to date with the 2021 collection, “Strange Flash Studio & Live ‘78-’81”, surely being the definitive word. Calls for reunions have gone persistently unanswered.
Taylor issued a few of his own compositions on a formidable double vinyl 45 package a few years back, and he and Tillman quietly began uploading jointly composed songs (and AI generated graphics) to a YouTube channel in April this year under the moniker The Bad Kynd. “The Shining Star” dropped this month, bereft of fanfare and seemingly out of the blue.
Physical things first: It’s a single CD in fold-out digipak with two booklets of storyline, imagery and lyrics. The packaging is lavish. The the story of the troubled Fil, the doomed Elunia and The Saint is a rollicking yarn of addiction, and a search for both redemption and an escape. If you're into spoilers, you can read it here. It spans two Acts and 20 songs (a bonus download awaits you using a supplied code.)
Despite the label, I was not ready for the music. It's operatic and bombastic. It’s lush, heavily orchestrated. There’s a “Directed by” credit to Mark Taylor who conducted the “Suno AI Orchestra”.
In case you don’t know Suno is an AI music-generation platform. You describe the song you want—genre, mood, instruments, subject matter and vocal style—and it generates a finished recording. You can also supply your own lyrics or audio ideas and export stems for further editing in software such as Ableton or Logic.
Not sure how much of the album is digital enhancement and human intervention and a general question to the distributor about this wasn’t answered. It wouldn’t surprise if the basic songs had been sent to Suno with instructions to the AI to re-theme them (and if so I want to hear them), but the point is that this album sounds nothing like the band members’ antecedents.
Strange flashes of Steve Vai-style metal guitar pierce the choir-and-strings arrangements and Peter Tillman’s presumably auto-tuned vocal booms and thunders throughout like none of us have heard unless you’ve shared a shower with him.
Jim Steinman may or may not have sought a credit and Eddie Van Halen wants his overdrive pedal back. I’m not the sort to start a rumour.
There’s an un-named female vocalist who may be as fake as some of catfishing influencers’ Insta account and if this all leads to an OnlyFans with the handle Boss Hoss, I am not going there.
Since AI seems to have played a big part in “The Shining Star” it was only fair to ask ChatGPT to write a review (without hearing the finished product):
‘The Shining Star’ is less a reunion record than a gloriously improbable late-career detour. Mark Taylor and Peter Tillman, guitarist and singer from Sydney’s cult Lipstick Killers, have built a rock opera that retains their old band’s streetwise swagger while reaching for something grander, stranger and more theatrical.
The lavish CD presentation suits the project. This is music conceived as an artefact rather than background content: a complete world of characters, drama and oversized gestures. Taylor’s instinct for hard, memorable guitar figures remains intact, while Tillman approaches the material as both frontman and narrator, shifting between menace, melodrama and battered romanticism. The songs draw on glam, garage rock, punk and classic concept-album excess without becoming a museum piece.
What makes ‘The Shining Star’ work is its refusal to apologise for ambition. Rock operas can collapse beneath exposition and self-importance, but Taylor and Tillman keep the record moving with hooks, attitude and a sense of mischief. Even at its most elaborate, it feels connected to the trashy, high-energy lineage of the Stooges, New York Dolls and the darker corners of 1970s theatrical rock.
That only took ChatGPT a minute to concoct but it would be lazy and more than a little dishonest to let things end there. It’s tempting to think that “The Shining Star” is Tillman and Taylor’s extreme reaction to all those calls for Lipstick Killers reformations. So much so that I had to ask Suno to that thought to suitable music here.
There are a handful of Lipstick Killers songs given the rock opera treatment - and some of them, like “Twilight of The Idols, “Dying Boy’s Crawl” and, it has to be emphasised, “Hindu Gods Of Love” - come out well - in a perverse and overblown way.
Opera has its fans and I’m not one, even if a garage rock singer in my contact list spends his working days driving a truck around Sydney listening to ABC Classical. Rock opera? Some of the ‘60s concept albums are killer (“SF Sorrow” overrules “Sgt Peppers”) and I recently snuck the “Tommy” soundtrack onto the system recently.
The bravado and sheer single-minded determination involved in creating this CD has to be admired, even if it won’t be in high rotation in these parts. I don't hate it. It's just not my thing. Anyway, stranger things than this long player may yet occur – like the release of that posthumous Dr Stone album.
No Valkyries were ridden during the writing of this review.
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