Jim Steinham (Image: Facebook) There’s thunder in the sky, and a killer’s in the bloodshot streets, and Jim Steinman has passed on, taking much of the ’70s with him. The writer of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, of Bad For Good, of … er … Bat Out of Hell Two, and numerous other classics — including the insane Total Eclipse of the Heart — has gone, at the age of 73. Who dies at 73 these days. It’s almost gauche. Twenty seven or 52 or 90, please. But how do you memorialise a man, the bulk of whose work was done in bubblegum pop turned into mini-operas, like Bayreuth done out of spun sugar? From one angle the man’s work was ridiculous. Yet from another it’s a triumph, wringing from mainstream American popular culture one last triumph, the culmination of a culture of self-confidence and continuity, the point at which the country, the empire, was still revelling in its own capacity to create a culture that conquered the world, but only through a parodic version of it, a portent in a convex mirror.