BITTEN BY THE HANDS THEY FED
When White Lion arrived in London in January 1988 to play their first ever European shows, the New York band seemed to have the world at their feet, and their incendiary second album, Pride, had set the rock press in a right old tizz. “If White Lion didn’t exist we’d have to invent them,” Derek Oliver purred in his five-out-offive review in Kerrang!, adding that Vito Bratta, the band’s guitar whizz kid, was “probably better than Eddie Van Halen himself”, and Danish-born frontman Mike Tramp was “blessed with a far better voice” than David Lee Roth.
Over the band’s three-night residency at London’s Marquee club, some claim that White Lion outperformed Guns N’ Roses, who had blown hot and cold on the same stage the previous summer. After the European dates, Tramp, Bratta, bassist James LoMenzo and drummer Greg D’Angelo flew back to the US, where they then toured with Aerosmith, Ozzy and AC/DC. Thanks in a big way to the support of MTV, who got behind the singles from the album – Wait, Tell Me and the plaintive When The Children Cry – Pride went on to sell two million copies in the US alone.
And yet within five years this Lion was extinct. Stranger still, following the group’s hasty dissolution the music world
