Kiss promoted their Oct. 2, 1979, live performance at St. Louis’ Checkerdome in a novel approach, showing on a dwell tv interview with their backs to the digicam.

With solely their lengthy curly hair seen, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons (the latter sporting backward sun shades) seem like doing their greatest impressions of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family whereas speaking to Dick Ford and John Auble of KSD’s Newsbeat.

“What we’re doing on stage is so theatrical, and the image that we’re creating has such a tremendous amount of mystique,” Stanley explains when requested why the band had all the time refused to be filmed or photographed with out their onstage make-up. “We’d really rather leave our fans with that image… there’s a lot of people who look like this, but there’s not a lot of people who can look the way we do on stage.”

At one level Stanley notes that he and Simmons appear to be they could possibly be in a Doublemint gum business, whereas Simmons assures the hosts that offstage Kiss have been simply regular guys: “We eat french fries, we play racquetball.”

In his 2001 ebook Kiss and Make-Up, Simmons explains that protecting his face hidden turned way more tough when he was courting Cher: “I was used to the idea that photographers tried to capture me without my Kiss makeup, this kicked it up tremendously. We were constantly hounded by paparazzi, night and day. I started covering my face with handkerchiefs, like a bandit.”

According to Ace Frehley, many followers wished to protect the thriller. “In 1978 a photographer saw Michael Corby of the Babys in Studio 54 and thought it was Paul Stanley,” he recalled in Kiss: Behind the Mask. “The New York Daily News printed the photo. They had to correct themselves a few days later. Fans wrote in and said, ‘Please don’t print pictures of Paul like that.’ Everybody asks if we’ll unmask ourselves before we quit. It guess it’s inevitably going to happen… once we do it, it’s going to damage the myth.”

Read More: The Day Kiss Finally Removed Their Makeup

Four years later, with Frehley and founding drummer Peter Criss gone and their profession in determined want of a leap begin, Kiss eliminated their make-up simply earlier than releasing 1983’s Lick It Up, revealing their actual faces dwell on MTV. The transfer helped revive the band’s fortunes, and so they launched a number of platinum promoting albums earlier than placing the greasepaint again on for a massively profitable authentic lineup reunion tour in 1996.

Watch Kiss’s 1979 ‘Newsbeat’ Interview