Lita Ford – Kiss Me Deadly (Live at Wembley 1989)

She was born in London and taken to California as a child, and it took an American hard rock hit to get her back on a British stage.

The guitarist on the Wembley stage in 1989 was English. Lita Rossana Ford was born in London to a British father and an Italian mother, and her family moved to the United States while she was small, settling in Long Beach, California. She picked up a guitar at 11 because of what Ritchie Blackmore was doing in Deep Purple. Everything that made her famous happened in America, and it took fourteen years and a hit single to put her in front of a crowd in the city where she was born.

Keep watching: Lita Ford – Kiss Me Deadly · The Runaways – Cherry Bomb

The road there was longer than the chart position suggests. Ford played lead guitar in the Runaways from 1975 until the band folded in 1979, then spent the first half of the eighties making records that respect found before radio did. Out for Blood arrived in 1983 and Dancin’ on the Edge in 1984, and her single Gotta Let Go reached No.51 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, which was as close as she got. Musicians knew exactly how good she was. The Hot 100 had never heard of her.

RCA released Lita on February 2, 1988, with Mike Chapman producing, and it changed the arithmetic. Kiss Me Deadly came out as the first single that April and reached No.12 on the Hot 100, her first appearance in the Top 20. The album went to No.29 on the Billboard 200 and turned platinum. Then Close My Eyes Forever, her duet with Ozzy Osbourne, went to No.8 in 1989 and became the biggest hit of her career. Two singles from one album had done what five years of touring could not.

The country that never bought the records

Britain was a different story. Kiss Me Deadly stopped at No.75 on the UK chart, and even Close My Eyes Forever only reached No.47 there. Ford was a significant American rock star and a minor British one, in the country of her birth, which is what makes this footage worth watching. RCA filmed her at Wembley in 1989 and released the performance as a video, and the crowd in it is not the crowd the British chart would predict. Her records had barely registered. The room had shown up anyway.

The song itself was never hers on paper. Ford wrote seven of the nine tracks on Lita, and this was one of the two she didn’t, written by Mick Smiley, a former Billy Idol bassist whose best-known credit until then was a song on the Ghostbusters soundtrack. That story belongs to the studio page. What the Wembley film adds is the proof that she could carry somebody else’s song as though she had written it, in front of ten thousand people, playing the guitar parts herself.

The song has kept finding new rooms. The New York Times put its studio video on a list of the fifteen essential hair-metal videos. VH1 ranked the song the 76th greatest hard rock song. It turned up in Captain Marvel in 2019 and brought a wave of new listeners thirty years after the fact, and it surfaced again in a lip-sync round on RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2025.

Ford turns 68 on September 19, 2026, and she is still touring. The 1989 film is the clearest surviving document of the year everything she had worked toward arrived at once, in the one country that had never quite bought it.