Unfortunately I was a bit of a late developer when it comes to KISS. My earliest memories are from visiting a cousin up in Scotland back in the early 80’s – he was a massive fan who used to draw his own covers for their albums, I'd love to try and get my hands on them now. It wasn’t until I went to see Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey that I really got into them. I loved the song ‘God Gave Rock & Roll To You II’ and waited for the next KISS album to come out. Since then Revenge has remained my favourite KISS album – and probably always will. It didn’t take long until I’d picked up all the classic albums and I was instantly hooked (much to the delight of my flatmates at uni!).

I didn’t get to meet a member of KISS until the London convention in 1994 where Peter Criss was the special guest. Unfortunately he didn’t leave a huge impression on me as he stormed off the stage in a mood when someone tried to film him talking (!). At the start of the reunion I met Bruce at the National Guitar Show in Brum, he was one of the coolest guys I've ever met - really laid back. At the time I was much more a fan of the non make-up era, although the reunion has kind of made me see things in a different light!

Although I’ve yet to meet the whole band (even though I did manage to get a small interview with Bruce last year which was great), I did once receive an E-mail from Gene Simmons. That was back in 1994 when it was supposedly Gene who answered mail sent to kissnation@aol.com  I wrote to them to tell them how listening to KISS helped me get through some health problems that I was having at the time, not only did I get an E-mail back but a couple of weeks later I received a package in the post…

The package contained a copy of Destroyer, 16 Bruce Kulick guitar picks, 4 photos (Paul, Gene, Bruce & Eric) and a small card that simply said ‘Compliments of KISS’!!! No matter how much KISS gets slagged off for being money grabbers, that parcel made me realise just how much they care about their fans – I got told that I’d grow out of them when I was 20 and here I am at 25 a bigger fan than ever.

I wanted some way of sharing my KISS addiction with other people (and let’s face it – it ain’t that easy finding other fans in the UK!) so rather than starting a fanzine I decided to have a go at building a website. The reason being that I could update it whenever I wanted – I don’t think I’d have the patience to produce a regular fanzine. The first version of KISSin’ UK went live in September 1996 (complete with dodgy html!), although it didn’t consist of much it didn’t take long to get it to it’s current state thanks to a lot of help from other fans. Obviously, I was well chuffed to get the site into The Mirror in 1998 - it's hard enough to find KISS in the press nowadays never mind opening the paper and seeing a picture of yourself and KISS!