Meatloaf

Meatloaf was born Michael Lee Aday. He was the first child of police officer father Orvis and school teacher mother, Wilma.

Orvis was a renowned alcoholic who would often slumber into drinking binges which lasted several days. As Meat Loaf would inevitably end up driving round town with his mother, looking in bars for Orvis, he would often instead stay with his grandmother Charlsee Norrod.

After completing college, Meat Loaf enrolled at North Texas State University where he was called for an army physical. Meat Loaf was so determined not to pass the fitness test that he deliberately gained sixty-eight pounds in just over a month. Yet despite being colour blind and overweight, his draft notice arrived two weeks later - which he ignored.

In 1967, Meat Loaf left Texas and moved to Los Angeles where he started working as a bouncer at a nightclub. It was in LA that Meat Loaf formed his first band, Meat Loaf Soul. It was during the recording of their first song that Meat Loaf hit a note so high that he managed to blow a fuse on the recording monitor which immediately led to an offer of three separate recording contracts- which he turned down all of.

The band underwent several line-up changes on lead guitar, each time culminating in a new band name, including Floating Circus and Popcorn Blizard.

After Floating Circus split, Meat Loaf took on several low-key jobs, one of which would inadvertently lead to his breakthrough in the media. While working as a parking lot attendant he had a chance meeting with a man who asked what Meat Loaf did when he wasn’t on the lot. After mentioning that he was a singer in his spare time, the man suggested he should audition for the stage musical, Hair. The audition was a success and led to Meat Loaf starring in a six month run in Detroit.

Meat Loaf’s role in Hair was the kickstart he needed, as the publicity generated led to an invite from Motown to record a duet album with Stoney Murphy. The album entitled Stoney and M

BetaSeries' opinion

Secrets d'histoire Season 20 Finale: Stéphane Bern's Messalina Episode Ends a Season About Reputations on Trial

Twenty seasons in, "Secrets d'histoire" can still surprise its audience. The Season 20 finale aired on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:10 p.m. on France 3, and Stéphane Bern closed the season with one of the most notorious women of antiquity: Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius. If you watched it, you already know it was more than a parade of Roman scandal. It was a careful re-examination of a woman whose name has been shorthand for depravity for almost two thousand years. If you haven't caught up yet, this debrief shows why the episode, and the whole season, deserves a place in your watchlist.

A finale that puts history's verdict on trial

The question at the centre of the finale was simple: does Messalina deserve the brutal nickname history gave her? Roman writers handed down a woman driven by insatiable desire and a hunger for power. Bern's team took that portrait apart piece by piece. They asked who wrote the story, why they wrote it, and what they gained from it. This is the series at its best. It doesn't simply retell a legend. It looks into how the legend was made. Messalina's world gave the episode plenty of drama: Caligula, Nero, Agrippina and the freedman Narcissus all appear, each with their own agenda in the deadly politics of the Julio-Claudian court. Without spoiling anything for latecomers, the finale's real emotional pull comes from the gap between the caricature and the young woman caught up in a machine much bigger than she was.

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