Summerland

The long summer holiday was just too long. Friends were back at school and living in the excitement of a new academic year, leaves starting to fall, nights drawing in. I was left waiting for the inevitable separation of being thrown back into rural England, to a grey world of rules and uniformity.

We spent part of each summer at my maternal grandparents’ a sprawling semi ex council-house on a Halesowen hill on the southern fringes of the Black Country. There wasn’t very much for a boy on the cusp of 14 to do; the park and playground were for kids by day and cut-throat delinquents by night. There were times when we were dragged up Clent Hill and back, a thousand feet of hell pockmarked with cagoules and nasal-voiced misery, but for the most part we were left to our own devices. We could walk up over the hill to hang around The Precinct, a semi-subterranean shopping centre built to the specifications of a banal frustrated Stalinist. We could walk down the hill, and back up another hill to Cradley bloody Heath if we felt masochistic enough. My brother could play with his toys, I could play my uncle’s records or, more excitingly his drum kit.

An eternity is a long time in boredom. Mum and dad might venture up to The Huntingtree of an evening for a pint or few, promising to bring us back a packet of crisps. One night they stayed up late playing Pontoon whilst a Channel 4 Red Triangle film flickered in the background. My presence had been overlooked somewhat, and I played my hands with my back to the screen whilst trying to block out the light-breathy sighs emanating from over my shoulder.

Of course there were Friday nights, and this late summer saw me jumping for joy when the old wireless broadcast Tommy Vance announce that the new Iron Maiden single would be played on the show. The old bastard mugged the moment for its last fluff-coated penny though by not spinning the disc in question till well into the second hour. He also exercised his habit of not introducing tracks, knowing what fickle feebs we were about making our minds up about bands before hearing a single note, so we would let new songs steep in the ears and the mind before being told that we’d been listening to a group we’d dismissed on image alone.

This was somewhat counterproductive in this case. I’d listen with passionate intensity for the first few bars of each song before losing concentration as soon as the singer’s voice proved not to be Dickinson’s. Vance could have played a record of Angie Watts from Eastenders performing a throat-gargled solo on the pink oboe and I’d have paid it no mind.

But Wasted Years turned up, later rather than earlier, and I was enraptured by the fiddly guitar intro and the massive chorus. I was even more delighted a couple weeks later when the magnificently-sleeved 12” was in my trembling hands. This was in the Classic Riggs Artwork era and there was enough fascinating detail in the fromt cover to belay me from turning it over for a little while.

I was with my mother, who was funding this day of adventure, and her sense of terror was palpable when we both realised simultaneously that Iron Maiden would be playing the Ipswich Gaumont, just a few measly miles from my school, on a Saturday night in term time. I noted I was now taller than my mother as I turned to face her, the question “will you come up to school and take me to Iron Maiden” on my lips, the answer “No, they’ll bloody eat you alive you silly boy” on hers...

Coming Home

The other trouble with coming home was that I kept trying to return to the place I’d left behind, like an army conscript coming back to post-War Britain expecting 1939 only to find bomb damage, poverty, and three children he couldn’t possibly have fathered, whereas I would leave a local scene where dayglo socks were de rigeur and comeback to the widespread wearing of American Football jackets. I only ever saw Frankie Goes To Hollywood t-shirts for a week; by the time I’d been parcelled off to school and posted home again Frankie was out and Aha was in. Entire tv series came and went before I could become aware of their existence. Massive events like ‘V’ were a nystery to me yet part of the cultural DNA of everyone around me. Every boy in my school was literally marching around a parade ground in full Navy uniform while the rest of the whole bloody planet was watching Live Aid. And things unwitnessed don’t ever really happen, not in any visceral sense, despite the evidence of the millions who saw it unfold on the tv screen.

But fringe events, the kind of item that might make the BBC news on a really slow day, they were different. You could only follow County cricket in the back pages or on Ceefax, unless there was an all-too-rare live broadcast back in the days when satellite dishes were confined to the top of the Post Office Tower. It seems strange to relate that snooker and Test Cricket were far more accessible thab football to viewers in the mid 80’s, but these were the days when the reality of the new Fourth Channel was exciting.

It was a shock then to discover, one August Saturday, that the tabloid’s entertainment pages were crawling with Ozzy and Scorpions. We were off to Wemberlee to see Liverpool and Everton contest the Charity Shield, and had stocked up on papers for the journey. I knew about Castle Donington’s Monsters of Rock festival from Kerrang!, but there was no way I’d ever be allowed to go, so I filed it next to ‘alcohol’ and ‘naked heaving breasts’ and carried on with my little boy’s life. Yet here, in the same newspapers that provided my only opportunity to see gazongas, was a full double page spread on the biggest annual event in Metal.

Usually Metal bands only made the papers when suicide or vomit-induced choking was concerned. Of course this year’s headliner was Ozzy Osbourne but he was no media celbrity at this point in history. In fact the General Public knew only two hazy facts about Ozzy; he bit the head off a bat (or was it a dove?), and he was a crazy Satanist singer. In reality ‘career ‘ was more verb than noun when it came to Ozzy’s progress, these were the Jake E Lee years and Ozzy looked like a thirsty middle-aged secretary after half a bottle of Pernod at a provincial works Christmas Do. The undercard was no less of its’ time, Scorpions at the peak of their powers and Motorhead on the cusp of leaving relevance for veteran status. The show was opened by Warlock, a band destined to be dwarfed by their over-exposed singer (in fact Kerrang!’s ‘80’s nadir was probably when a Mega Metal cover proclaimed ‘Doro! Topless!’ to advertise a poster of her much-anticipated wardrobe malfunction), and they were followed by Bad News, the second-or-third-best spoof ban in metal. The real news, and a story that was not really featured among the tabloid nonsense about satanic bat munching, was the return of Def Leppard to the stage after two years of tragedy and enforced inertia.

And there was I, on the day that tens of thousands of metal fans were getting frantically hammered and emotionally applauding Rick Allen for his impossible return to the music biz, stuck on a train on the way to see a poxy football match. Dalglish and Souness be damned, I wanted to be with my People.

I eventually managed to catch some of Live Aid on a friend’s video recorder, but it was nowhere as real to me as the pictures in Kerrang! of metal heaven at a motorcycle racetrack in the East Midlands...

Thrash Till Death

It’s tempting to see 1986 as the year that Thrash Metal broke through into mainstream metal, and while it is true that Metallica managed to climb out of the mosh pit and into the Odeons (with Megadeth nipping at their heels or riding on their coat-tails depending on your point of view) many of the other major thrash bands were stuck on the periphery in the media and on the airwaves. Even Slayer, dogged by distribution problems due to lyrical content, had difficulty in broadening their appeal to traditional metal fans who ridiculed them for masking ineptness with needless speed and sensationalist song titles. Thrash had its own little corner in Kerrang! where it could remain undiluted and ignored in equal measure while the front covers went to the hard rock heroes, old and new, that were making seven inch dents in the pop charts week in, week out.

The truth is that even Master of Puppets took time to cross over to the Maidenites and the Motorheadbangers. Peace Sells fared no better despite the relatively catchy commercialism of the title track (certainly when compared to Wake Up Dead and Devil’s Island). Albums that would go on to influence wave after wave of bands remained unheralded at the time. Death Angel, Metal Church, Candlemass, Nuclear Assault et al, all tarred with the same ‘mindless rubbish played by thickos’ tag, produced genre classics in ’86.

But that was the trouble; thrash was perceived as a separate genre to metal, with a dividing line more tightly policed than that between heavy metal and hard rock. The image was as much of a problem as the musical content; the average Kerrang! Reader may get to see a track listing, song length and an advert or two, they might even see a one page interview, but would take one look at the accompanying photo and abandon all hope. An album of two minute songs about death, satanic death, Nazi death, the undead, the dead? Just a step too far for your average Dio fan.

And how many girls were going to fall in love with the 4 or 5 zitty munters with fascinatingly bad hair peering out of the band photos in thrash features? There seemed to be two types of thrash musician; the short fat ugly one, and the tall thin ugly one. There was generally a lot of hair, curly, bedraggled and shot through with split ends and grease, or devoutly straight, centre parted and flecked with dandruff. There was an unofficial rule that thrash bands had to be photographed holding their instruments in order to be differentiated from their equally average-looking metal fan. This was an anti-elite at work, actively despising the sellout rock star principle of having no principles, and hungrily defending their unbridled independence. If someone had said to Slayer, (and I’m sure that several did) Drop the dodgy lyrics, drop the dodgy image, drop the dodgy cover art and you’ll triple your sales then Slayer would have said Fuck you, we don’t want those people buying our records...

And that, to varying degrees, was the attitude of most thrash bands. Indeed that lack of compromise was what kept so many of them from the recognition they deserved. 1986 was actually the year that Thrash Metal resolutely refused to break through to the mainstream and the year that their resolute purity yielded so many rich fruits.