Love Gun by KISS (1977)

Paul Stanley wrote Love Gun alone, sang it, and has called it his favourite KISS song. The narrator has a "love gun"; he would like the listener to pull the "trigger"; the song builds from a chugging verse into a chorus that is essentially an instruction manual for a weapon with one setting. It does all of this with the total sincerity that made KISS the biggest band in America in 1977, a band in full face paint asking to be taken seriously.

That sincerity is the key. Where AC/DC's Big Balls is a comedy performance and Aerosmith's Big Ten Inch Record is a nudge and a wink, Love Gun is delivered as a straight-ahead anthem. Stanley is not joking; he is bragging, in the honoured tradition of the seventies hard-rock frontman, and the crowd is expected to sing along without irony, which, being a KISS crowd, it does.

Its afterlife is the setlist. The album of the same name, the band's sixth, went Platinum quickly, and the song has been played on nearly every tour since 1977. The same record carries Gene Simmons' Plaster Caster, which makes Love Gun the most phallic album KISS made, and this from a band that painted its faces to be looked at and spat blood for the encore.