Simmons' life as loud as ever

LONDON - Gene Simmons is dressed to impress. Or so he reckons. Encased in black trousers and sweatshirt, with sunglasses to match (yes, it's November and, yes, we are indoors), the 54-year-old Kiss front man's look is between panto villain and pimp, though in his mind he's irresistible.

If there's another thing Simmons loves, it's the sound of his own voice.

He barely pauses for breath as he embarks on a series of well-rehearsed lectures revolving around his twin passions: women and money.

Kiss still have the distinction of making the most money of any band out of merchandise.

And the band isn't Simmons' only source of income. He's tried films. He's written two autobiographies and is the publisher of the monthly entertainment magazine Gene Simmons Tongue. Earlier this year, he released Asshole, his second solo album.

Even with £100 million ($264 million) in the bank, Simmons believes that wealth is relative and there's always more to be made.

He's in a long-term relationship with the ex-Playboy model Shannon Tweed (previous girlfriends include Cher and Diana Ross), with whom he has two teenage children, but he rejects monogamy and claims to come out in hives at the mention of marriage. By his reckoning he has slept with more than 4600 women.

"My autobiography was going to be called Women are from Mars, Men have a Penis. Men and women have nothing in common; we're not built the same," he says.

"We have testosterone, you don't. You make one or two eggs a month, we make millions of sperm every day. The problem is this: that the female of the species has deluded herself into thinking that all those billions of sperm that he makes are just for her. Why not let us have a few hundred million to play with? I'll just take a million. But no, you want them all."

As he drones on, I wonder to myself why anyone would want to go near the Simmons seed.

Still, 32 years into his career, the women still queue up.

In our interview, he takes every chance to assert his manhood. He reads sexual tension into my body language (a twitching ankle is a come-on), making sleazy remarks about my clothes (I'm wearing too many) and two bone-crushing handshakes. A psychologist would have a field day.

Simmons now sees himself as an all-round entertainer. He was born Chaim Witz in Haifa, Israel in 1949. His father left the family when he was 9, after which his mother Flora moved with her son to Brooklyn in New York.

His musical epiphany arrived when, aged 13, he saw The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show. "They had long hair, they talked strange and yet everybody loved them. I saw that it was OK to be different."

- INDEPENDENT