MAKING LEGS AKIMBO SEEM LIKE A POPULAR DISTRACTION

You'd have thought that the youth of today would be excited - possibly even thrilled - at getting proper music lessons from a bona fide rock god. Not so, at least when Gene Simmons turned up at Christ's Hospital School in Sussex, the response was a slew of now-deleted, less-than-impressed blog entries:

n an entry, called the Barrel is Duly Scraped, a student critic treated the rocker as if he were 450 years old. "His tired looking face spoke volumes of his burnt out career and his desperation for some limelight." His trademark dark glasses were less a fashion accessory than an attempt to "hide the aged, wizened holes that used to be eyes."

"Yevgeni" goes on: "Poor Gene. In a school debate, he extolled the virtues of money worship and boasted of his '4,136 sexual conquests', and you could tell that even his PA hated his saggy chin and implanted hair. His own mother probably doesn't even like him. Thanks to the cast-iron self belief that the man actually had something interesting to preach from Stateside, the posturing continued for hours in a constant stream of verbose twaddle. Yes Gene, we have people like you in Britain too. They are locked away and given a healthy dose of medication."

The ranter lays into the RDF Media team making the film [Of course, this is going to turn up as a 'real life School of Rock']. "The most irritating of them all was the camerawoman, her hair a worrying shade of puce, jabbering incessantly into her mobile and getting in the way of anything meaningful at Christ's Hospital."

The blogger adds: "Even the lucky young people done the favour of getting to meet old Gene seemed to hate him by the end of their stint. 'The Class', as they were dubbed, were nothing more than 'puppets for the TV peeps'. This escalated matters to a head at the Motorhead concert The Class supported. The whole 10 of them rebelled after Gene Simmons, preposterous clown extraordinaire, made one of the girls cry by telling her how deficient her swagger was, and why couldn't she just emulate Mr Simmons?"

It concludes: "You have to wonder about the sorts of oafs who drive the market for this drivel. Which braying, wide-eyed simpletons watch this stuff, and who finds it entertaining except for the bosses of RDF media, watching the money tot up? The peoples of Christ's Hospital should be outraged. The school have whored our good name to the media, and it only remains to count the cost to our dignity when the show airs over this summer."

[This is another one of those things that has been sitting in my inbox for ages - thanks and apologies to Adnan]

music tv gene simmons