“Do you know how you can tell who lives in my house when you come and visit?” You can’t.” Meat Loaf, 2006

Immediately after our rendez-vous in a Knightsbridge hotel, Meat Loaf will have to dash off. A limo will arrive to take him to the listening party for Bat Out Of Hell III – The Monster Is Loose – the final instalment in the trilogy that he and songwriter Jim Steinman started in 1977. When he arrives, lit from behind, he’ll be required to sit in a gothic throne for over an hour while record company employees attempt to locate canapé-wielding waiters through the dry ice. 

Such functions number among the more ignominious things that the modern recording artist is expected to do. Privately, Meat Loaf makes it clear he would rather be elsewhere. But across a misty function room – while freshly-minted pomp rock epics such as If It Ain’t Broke, Break It and The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be unfold – you really wouldn’t know it. “I don’t rebel against this stuff,” he says, “because, to be honest, I need the record company. And besides, a Bat Out Of Hell album is a big fucking deal. It’s bigger than Meat Loaf.” 

Although “bigger than Meat Loaf” is not as big as it once was (he’s a good 90lb lighter than he once was) it’s still pretty big. With sales of around 30 million, the first Bat Out Of Hell remains one of 30 best selling albums of all time. Even its 1993 successor – the one with I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) – chalked up a mighty 15 million. All those years spent making albums that weren’t called Bat Out Of Hell – have they seemed pointless at times?

The 57 year-old singer, christened Marvin Lee Aday is philosophical. Some have been good, he says, but something extraordinary happens when he sings songs written by Steinman. It was an effect he first noticed in 1972, when – as a jobbing actor and struggling recording artist – his agent sent him from Los Angeles to audition for an off-Broadway musical written by Steinman. “When I sang Jimmy’s songs, it was like nothing else that was going on at the time.” If nothing else, that might explain why Bat Out Of Hell was turned down by almost every record label for two years. 

Strip away the wisdom of hindsight and it’s probably not difficult to see why 70s record company execs were perplexed when a 22 stone Texan and his pianist friend walked into their offices and performed eight-minute Wagnerian narratives like Paradise By The Dashboard Light. One such executive was Clive Davis – the US music mogul who, at that point, had already discovered Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin and Santana. “He called me Ethel Merman and asked Jim if he had ever listened to rock ‘n’ roll,” remembers an aggrieved Meat Loaf, “I was angry for the longest time over that.”

By his own admission Meat Loaf takes criticism to heart. Almost three decades on, Melody Maker’s annihilation of his Hammersmith Odeon show still rankles. “The headline they used was Fat Out Of Hell and in the review, they called us ‘the worst rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.” It’s perhaps a little late to urge that he doesn’t take it to heart, but Meat – who was bullied as a schoolchild – momentarily looks as hurt by the brickbat as he was the first time around. I suggest that in the post-punk climate, Bat Out Of Hell was bound to receive a mixed critical reception. “Well, maybe,” he says, “But what has that got to do with the price of eggs?”

Meat Loaf says that the years following the release of Bat Out Of Hell should have been the happiest of his professional life, but success brought complications.  Pressurised to make a successor to their 1977 opus, the two entered the studio only for Meat to lose his voice. “It was psychosomatic,” he says now, “I had said all along that it was far too soon to be trying to follow up a record like Bat….” Having tried all sorts of treatments to restore his voice – at one point he was even prescribed his own distilled urine – Meat Loaf took a break. Steinman pressed on and made the album himself, calling it Bad For Good. According to Meat Loaf, “That was his way of getting the recognition that he felt he was owed for Bat Out Of Hell.” 

Indeed, despite working together on the album’s two successors, the issue of recognition has reared its head on more than one occasion. In 1983, Steinman and his manager bankrupted Meat Loaf after a legal dispute concerning profits. With a wife and two children, the singer moved into rented accommodation and bought a second-hand car. One of his biggest cheques in the 80s came from Slim Fast, who reportedly paid him $1m to promote their “meal replacement” shakes by using them to lose weight. “The Double Dutch Chocolate was especially good,” he recalls.  

If nothing else, the legal bickering that has continued between Steinman and Meat Loaf ensured they kept in touch. As recently as this year, the writer whose incredibly long song titles (and the brackets that go with them) have become something of a calling card, attempted to veto Meat’s use of what Mercury MD Jason Iley has shamelessly taken to calling “the Bat brand”. And yet, seven of his songs can be found on there. What’s all that about? “There’s a lot of love there, but I think Jim’s manager is the devil and he thinks my manager is the devil,” he exhales with a weariness that suggests a longer, far more internecine story. 

Still, a closure of sorts is afoot. The release of It’s All Coming Back To Me Now – the Steinman song memorably detonated by Celine Dion in 1996 –serves to end one of the more painful spats that have come to pass between the pair. Like so many of us, he was upset when he heard Dion’s version of the song – us because it featured Celine Dion and him “because we had deliberately left that song off Bat… II so we could do it next time around. No offence to Celine, but when it finally comes out, I’ll feel like the definitive version is finally out there.”

The short-haired, smartly-dressed occupant of Room 111 takes a slug from a bottle of mineral water, and rises to leave. These days, Meat Loaf looks and sounds more like a Texan businessman in town to discuss petroleum shares than a rock star. In fact, everything about him suggests a desire to blend in rather than stick out. “Oh God, absolutely!” he concurs, “Do you know how you can tell who lives in my house when you come and visit?” He leaves a suitably long pause, which I endeavour to fill. A door knocker shaped like a bat? “You can’t tell! All my gold discs are in the garage – and that’s the best place for them. I’m enough of a cartoon character as it is. I don’t need to be more of a cartoon.” And with that, reception calls to tell him that his limo is has arrived. To the Batmobile.