There is the inevitable Noel Gallagher, who as ever sounds like somebody fed the Bumper Book of Bad Clichés into a random text generator.

“Sitting upside a high chair/The devil’s refugee is gonna be blinded by the light that follows me”

But I have to defend the late, great Ronnie James Dio. They quote this line from “Holy Diver” and rather miss the point of what Dio was about.

Ride the tiger/You can see his stripes but you know he’s clean/Oh don’t you see what I mean?

I’ve always seen Dio as the Jon Anderson of metal; he plays with evocative imagery even when they don’t make any literal sense.

And this one from Krokus’ “Down the Drain” is a work of comic genius along with Queen’s classic “Told my girl I gotta forget her/Cost I gotta buy me a new carburettor”

“My mother was a B-girl/My old man was a tramp/Some say they conceived me/On a loading ramp”

Some of the others are hilarious, though the Great White lyric is too crass to post here. That appalling piece of macho drivel is actually credited to five authors, presumably so each of them could deny all responsibility and blame the others.

We lost another one, with Metal Hammer reporting the death of Jimmy Bain. Best remembered as the bassist for Rainbow and later with Dio.  He played on what many consider to be Rainbow’s best album, “Rainbow Rising”, as well as the classic live album “On Stage”. He played on seven Dio album including the classic début “Holy Diver”. Between Dio and Rainbow he was also part of the short-lived Wild Horses with former Thin Lizzy guitarist Brian Robertson.