Richard Hell (born Richard Lester Meyers; October 2, 1949) is a singer, songwriter, bass guitarist, and writer.
Richard Hell was an innovator of punk music and fashion. He was one of the first to spike his hair and wear torn, cut and drawn-on shirts, often held together with safety pins. Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, has credited Hell as a source of inspiration for the Sex Pistols' look and attitude, as well as the safety-pin and graphics accessorized clothing that McLaren sold in his London shop, Sex. Hell was in several important, early punk bands, including Neon Boys, Television, and The Heartbreakers, after which he formed Richard Hell & The Voidoids. Their 1977 album, Blank Generation, influenced many other punk bands. Its title song was named "One of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock" by music writers in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listing and is ranked as one of the all-time top-ten punk songs by a 2006 poll of original British punk figures, as reported in the Rough Guide to Punk.
Since the late 1980s Hell has devoted himself primarily to writing, publishing two novels and several other books. He was the film critic for BlackBook magazine from 2004 to 2006.
Read more about Richard Hell: Discography, Books
Famous quotes containing the words richard and/or hell:
“I’m beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death among Americans. What you don’t know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“O my dear Candide! You knew Paquette, that pretty attendant of our august baroness; I tasted in her arms the delights of paradise, which produced these torments of hell by which you see me devoured; she was infected and may have died of it.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)