Restless And Wild turned forty four on 2 October, and Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffmann used the anniversary to take the weight off the song that record is remembered for. Speaking to BraveWords, he said Fast As A Shark was not built as a blueprint for anything.
"It was just born out of fun and a little bit of shock value," Hoffmann said. "We wanted to shock parents and we wanted to have a little bit of shock value in everything we did. Our drummer Stefan Kaufmann he was all into that, at the time. The more extreme the better, and he actually came up with that idea for that double, that song initially, and then we finished writing it together. I contributed the intro and the chorus."
He was equally plain about what the band thought they had at the time. "We didn't think to was going to be anything that special as it later on turned out to be. We kind of left it alone after that. It wasn't until years later that people told us what a huge influence that song had on their career or on the music scene, in general."
And then the line that answers the question the anniversary keeps raising: "We didn't really want to start a whole genre or anything. We didn't want to take it to more extremes. But it's a huge honour to find out later that it influenced so many people."