The Bards Of War And Vengeance

Summerland

2011-07-06T19:51:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-04T19:53:00.000+01:00

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

2011-07-01T19:56:00.000+01:00

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.

Home Sweet Home

2011-06-30T19:48:00.001+01:00

It wasn’t easy living a schizophrenic life, especially when I was living under the rule of Maggie Thatcher, trying to grow some pubes, and thinking very hard about What It All Means, My first life was at the barren and strict artificial reality of school, the second was the bright and brief time at home during the holidays, and the two worlds were becoming harder and harder to reconcile.

Coming home for half term was most disturbing; the coach journey home on a Saturday morning, followed by the casual discard of the school uniform and the not-so casual melting away of school discipline. I’d often spend the first couple of days calling my Dad ‘Sir, and then the first few days at school calling the Sirs ‘Dad’. We’d have consulted Freud but we were too busy masturbating frenetically and missing our mothers.

The institutional assumption that all activities were banned unless expressly permitted kept me in a state of social paralysis in the technicolour world of home life; while all the local 14 year olds were vandalising old ladies and terrorising phone boxes I was gasping in wonder at staying up late and having the telly on. Even using the kettle was a tremendous novelty and an enormous privilege. Integration was made more troublesome by the underlap in term times, which would lead to the strange situation of waiting outside the local school gates for friends to finish their classes, and the solemn emptiness of long, long days with nothing at all to do.

I had discarded my toys, or donated them to my brother, in a fit of socially-enforced maturity; entire cardboard boxes of Matchbox Cars and Action Men were out of bounds or beneath me. Daytime tv consisted of educational programmes, Pebble Mill at One, and the white static of The State staring at you through the one-eyed goggle box. Other schoolfriends were in the same stretch of ennui, but lived longer than a bike ride away. I suppose we could have spent time yapping on the phone, but then none of us were teenage girls.

I listened to a lot of radio, back when Simon Bates and Steve Wright were dominating wunnerful wadio one. The music was pretty much wall-to-wall ratshit, (well it was the mid-80’s), but there might be the odd Kerrang!-friendly AOR splash of guitar music. Just like the crotchety old pensioner I was training to become, I was comforted by the voices, a bit of company while I waited for human contact when the local comp kicked out.

But things started to get interesting in 1986, where previously the only audible guitar noise on Top Of The Pops was Mark King’s fantastically wanky bass-playing. All of a sudden there was an undeniable soft-rock revolution going on. T’Pau were on heavy rotation, and they were just a bit too rock to be just another pop band especially if it meant Kerrang! could put a woman on their cover. Then there was the proper hairspray brigade, such as Nob Jovi and the suddenly ubiquitous Europe to contend with. It was two of the oldies that grabbed the most attention though, Aerosmith’s career-reviving collaboration with Run DMC, and Van Heln’s life-after-Roth hit single “Why Can’t This Be Love”.

I spent one half-term waiting to hear Ronnie James Dio’s ‘Hear n’Aid” charity single on Radio One but, despite the fact it was for Starving Africa, ‘Stars’ got played only once or twice during the daytime, whereas Sammy Hagar’s voice rattled the speakers at least once an hour. There was a definite delineation between the synthy bubblegum rock that was allowed onto daytime radio, and the harder metal that RJD was touting. Radio rock had to sit comfortably alongside Falco’s ’Rock Me Amadeus’ and Berlin’s ‘Take My Breath Away’, and even though some metal bands tried to soften up for this new frilly, lacy, chick-friendly market it was obvious they didn’t understand what the punters wanted.

Even Kerrang!’s review of ‘The Final Countdown’ was a masterclass in missing the point. It was a lovely song, they thought, excellently delivered, but it was K!’s considered opinion that the tide was flowing in the opposite direction to Europe’s pomp-filled pop-rock. The single went to number one in every country in the bloody world...

Issues

2010-03-02T14:18:00.002Z

It was all very well having a heavy metal uncle, but he was a hundred and fifty three million miles away in a western suburb of Birmingham while I was either stuck at home being a thirteen year old bratty older brother, or being packed off to school to be infuriatingly insolent.

I was excused elder brother duties for a couple of years, until my brother eventually joined the school, and now that the debilitating homesickness had slowly ebbed away over the course of my first year I was starting to find out who I was. It helped that we had a crop of New Jacks to victimise, but the thrill of all that bullying had worn off by the Christmas break. Besides, it didn’t work so well at home where my long-suffering brother could just complain to my parents if I tried to exercise my Older Boy rights back at home.

However I was noticeably freer now that I had started doing some growing up at school. My toys were put away or passed down, and I was happier to go off and do my own thing rather than submit to parental supervision. The boarding school holidays were longer than the local comp’s vacation schedule, and so I could usually rely on an extra week to mooch around the local village when I got bored of playing records or telephoning school friends who were equally tired of being home alone. One day I had cycled up to the village shop to indulge my sweet-fetish, and I noticed a magazine on the racks.

It had a heavy metal band on the cover.

I was aware of music mags; some of the boys read Smash Hits and I had been bought a copy of Melody Maker by my well-meaning mother when I was in bed with ‘flu the previous winter, but I never realised there was a heavy metal magazine. Obviously Melody Maker and Smash Hits hated metal. Melody Maker’s hatred was intellectual, Smash Hits was more borne of tribal xenophobia. There was a pen-pal section in the small ads for Smash Hits, and almost every single advert said “I’m into all types of music EXCEPT HEAVY METAL!!!!” with the same kind of emphasis that one might use to underline ones’ disgust at genocide.

But this mag was unashamedly metal. Even the name, in red spiky capitals complete with exclamation mark, was Marshall-stack loud; KERRANG! I had to buy it, even though that meant rushing back home for more money. Ninety pee got the magazine into my shaky hands, and I flicked through the pages with the flustered excitement of a Victorian porn addict transported through time to the Internet age. It was issue 109, and Stryper were the band on page one.

It wasn’t a classic issue, if truth be told. Alongside the Stryper feature there were interviews with Jon Anderson and Mr Mister, as well as Springsteen’s guitarist Nils Lofgren. The next one was a bit more like it, with Van Halen on the cover and an Anthrax piece to boot, and not a broken wing in sight. Of course I was disappointed not to see Iron Maiden get a single mention in either issue, especially as Smash Hits seemed to have a policy of plastering the Pet Shop Boys or Aha all over their cover no matter what was happening in the real world, but this was still the Holy Grail; a gritty heavy metal magazine in a shiny pop world.

It’s hard to say what was so intriguing about Kerrang! Obviously it wasn’t written for kids; there were asterisks splattered all over the text and it was universally acknowledged that each K! scribe spent the vast majority of his or (occasionally) her time at the bar. It was obviously for a male-dominated market; for the first few years there was a regular feature called Ladykillers, which was a photo of a female band or musician alongside some patronising copy intended to make it not look like fap fodder, and there was also the comic strip featuring Pandora Peroxide, a cartoon woman with cartoon tits that were completely bereft of cartoon nipples.

Each writer was allowed to develop their own style, so Xavier Russell never used a ‘c’ when a ‘k’ would do, and would occasionally CAPITALISE words for added EMPHASIS even though this HINTED at a DEEP personal PSYCHOSIS. Mick Wall was knowingly cool, which made him come across like a bit of a tosser, whereas The Dome and Deaf Barton were people you trusted instantly and implicitly. View from The Bar was done anonymously, and was often the best bit of the mag.

I carried on with Kerrang!, not missing an issue for year after year until... Well, that’s another story for another time but, over sixteen years and eight hundred and ninety three copies, Kerrang! was the most reliable thing in my life.

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Now playing: AC/DC - High Voltage
via FoxyTunes

The Spirit Of Radio

2010-02-08T21:09:00.004Z

Three things brought the world of heavy metal much closer to me over the Christmas holiday in ’85; and two of them were introduced to me by my uncle. He was only a few years older than me and was a drummer in a proper band. Those eight years between us were a colossal chasm however. He was in the Boys Brigade when I was in nappies, in work when I reached puberty, and living a grown-up life while I was still able to reach high C above the stave.

Still, as a 21 year old rocker living in the suburbs of Birmingham, the home of heavy metal, he was as heroic and formidable a role model as any young rock fan could wish for. It wasn’t just the lifestyle of Friday nights down the pub, or his flame-haired girlfriend who wore astonishingly tight leather trousers, although both were very impressive, there was also the massive drum kit in the granny-flat extension as well as his fabulous record collection to drool over.

The nearest my parents got to guitar rock was a mono copy of Sgt Peppers, but Dave had some absolute classics hidden in the hi-fi cabinet. There was a Deep Purple best of, (on purple vinyl of course), and a couple of Lizzy albums too. I particularly liked the double-albums in his collection, Live and Dangerous, On Stage, and the ponderous Song Remains the Same. I got a bit confused with the Rainbow albums though, as the same singer seemed to be on one of his Black Sabbath records, Heaven and Hell. I was yet to realise just how complicated band membership had been in the previous decade, and just how many of these bands had revolving memberships and tortured family trees. There were a couple of Rush albums there too, 2112 and Fly By Night, the latter of which I dismissed because the cover was so terrible. Surely if they were going be so lazy as to put a crappy owl on the front of the album then the contents couldn’t be that good? It would be a while before I understood Rush...

But the rest of the records were just bloody fantastic as far as I was concerned, although I was a bit troubled by the fact there was nothing post-1980 in the racks. I used to put Moby Dick on the record player and bash away on Dave’s drum kit, convinced it couldn’t be that difficult. I asked Dave why there wasn’t any Iron Maiden in his collection and he made a snorting derisory sound that knocked me for a while, Maiden were the best band in the world, weren’t they?

Dave said to wait until I saw his band, Target UK, in action. They had produced their own single with help from Budgie’s guitarist, John Thomas, and every member of the family had received their own signed copy for Christmas that year. I wasn’t sure who Budgie was, but Dave assured me that they had headlined big festivals like Reading in the past. Big JT might even be able to get me into an Iron Maiden rehearsal if the timing was right. But anyway, I should be excited about seeing Target UK, not some new-fangled NWOBHM chancers.

Dave was also going on about getting the single played on the radio, which left me perplexed. They didn’t play Metal on the radio did they? So Dave told me about the BBC Rock Show, which he didn’t listen to because (a) it was on at night when he was down the pub and (b) it played modern crap instead of good honest Rock.

That evening I scanned the airwaves for the BBC, and was severely disappointed to find No Heavy Metal being played. But then as I was turning the dial I heard a familiar sound; Iron Maiden! It was the local radio station, BRMB, and they had a rock show of their own. I was so excited I taped the damned thing and listened to it over and over. They played Metallica, Crue, Twisted Sister, Accept, and many names that were new to me, but they didn’t play Target UK. Dave accepted this phlegmatically, as he did for most things in life.

We drove home after New Year’s Day had been and gone, without me having seen Target UK but happily loaded down with taped copies of all Dave’s records. When we got home I discovered the Radio One Rock Show was on a Friday, and I started to listen to it religiously. My view of the world had suddenly become panoramic, Technicolor, bigger, brighter, louder. I had a grounding in rock history now, passed down half a generation and cherished, and I had the keys to the future thanks to Tommy Vance. The Friday Rock Show was more important than any other thing an adolescent male should be doing, or thinking about doing, at that time of the week, although I could only listen to it in school holidays.

And months later, one Friday night when I was sat in the lounge with headphones , I suddenly jumped up and started gibbering with incoherent excitement. A sharp look from my father didn’t calm me, despite the fact my parents were busy watching TV, and I managed to gasp out “Dave’s on the radio! Target UK are on Radio One!” I pulled out the headphone jack so they could hear the evidence and we all gaped in amazement, unable to process the information for a moment.

Then Mum ran off to phone her little brother, to tell him he was famous now...

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Now playing: Rush - The Spirit of Radio
via FoxyTunes

(Sing If You're) Glad To Be Gay

2010-01-26T18:07:00.007Z

Three of the commonly held beliefs about metal were that the genre was homophobic, sexist and racist. This was thought to be self-evident and absolute truth. Of course all metal fans were obviously low in intelligence, poorly educated and found largely in the industrial wastelands of The North and thus bound to hold un-reconstructed Neanderthal views of society.

If only they’d listen to The Smiths, visit their local library, vote Labour, they could be enlightened. After all, anyone with an ounce of political awareness or a sense of social injustice would immediately renounce metal for what it was; white men bellowing about white men’s things. Metal fans were symptomatic of a small section of the public that revelled in being backwards, anti-intellectual, boorish, bullying....

Bollocks.

Well, partial bollocks anyway. When you became a metal fan you didn’t receive a club card instructing you to keep your backs to the wall, your women in the kitchen and the blacks back where they belonged. The assumption that bigotry was an integral part of the identity of metal fans demonstrates, ironically, the same levels of casual stereotyping and ignorance that those metal fans were being accused of harbouring.

The issues of race and sexism can be covered elsewhere, as the reality was so complicated as to warrant a post on each. The homophobia accusation is the one that has the least evidence going for it, and throws the most light on the motives of the accusers.

The initial problem is the assumption that metal fans were a throwback island of bigotry in a progressive sea of anti-discrimination. Eighties Britain was intensely and institutionally homophobic, and the only visible gay men on television could only express themselves in high camp personas and coarse innuendo. Larry Grayson, Kenny Everett, Russell Harty, Kenneth Williams, Russell Grant, they all conformed to what the British public needed its homosexual men to be; safely identifiable, and flamboyantly gay at all times. They were forced to act like a different species of man, twisted, lonely, never even being able to ‘admit’ to being gay in some cases, and never being able to talk about it in all others. A secret society doing deeply shameful things under the cover of darkness on Clapham Common, or in that most iniquitous of dens, the Gay Bar, forever under the threat of being exposed.

Homosexuality (which had only been legalised 12 years before Maggie took power), was still seen as a form of perversion by many. I remember one of my father’s friends telling me, in all seriousness, that the reason Jimmy Somerville had such a high singing voice was because he always had eight inches of wooden broomstick up his arse, and that Culture Club’s Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? was about how gay men would ask to be buggered. He also reckoned AIDS stood for Arse Injected Death Sentence. It took a Tory MP to raise the issue of equalising the age of consent at 16 in 1994; the amendment was defeated in parliament by a small margin, including future Labour Home Minister David Blunkett. Even as late as 1998 The Sun carried a headline “ARE WE BEING RUN BY A GAY MAFIA?” The age of consent for homosexuality was only lowered to 16 in the last year of the second millennium, after the House of Lords had rejected the Bill twice.

The problem for people who don’t like metal fans wasn’t overt homophobia, more the issue that homosexuality wasn’t being talked about. There was certainly no more bigotry than in any other area of the entertainment industry; although I recall Bad Brains being overtly homophobic. There was a mid-eighties Ozzy Osbourne interview where he threatened to name all the gay men in metal, and this seemed to be the crux of the issue for those homophobia accusations; who could believe there were no homosexuals in heavy metal bands?

The whole genre was deemed to be deeply homoerotic; concert halls filled with almost-entirely male audiences excitedly watching male musicians posing and emoting, everyone with long hair and black leather.Take a look at the Accept album Balls To The Wall, featuring the track London Leatherboys and a front cover portraying a partial image of a man in a leather jacket and black underpants, for some evidence. The emergence of glam metal seemed to underline this, now it was all about men wearing make-up and hairspray. All these confused boy-men playing with gender identities, what was running through their subconsciousness? However this ignores the fact that growing long hair had merely been a symbol of rebellion since the fifties, and Twisted Sister, Alice Cooper and Kiss had all used make-up as part of their act for years, (as well as the seventies Glam Rockers like T Rex et al) without sexuality being an issue. This innuendo-laden assumption that metal fans were self-loathing in their homophobia is a lazy cul-de-sac of vapid stereotyping, reinforcing traditional images rather than shattering them.

Especially when compared to the analysis of the machismo element strongly apparent in the image of heavy metal bands; when Roddy Bottum, keyboard player for Faith No More came out in the early Nineties, he noted that when growing up he never thought a gay man could be in a metal band. It’s true that Metal was all about manliness; power, strength, brutality, war and Boy’s Own adventure. The stereotypical gay, the stereotypical heavy metal band, the two could not be reconciled...

Yet they were when ex-Judas Priest singer Rob Halford revealed he was gay in 1998, yet the critics of heavy metal were far more upset than the fans were. There were the taunting sneers that stupid repressed metal fans had been unwittingly worshipping a gay man, the reinterpretation of the lyrics to Priest’s Grinder, the assumption that Halford’s audience would simply melt away. But most metal fans already had some kind of inkling, despite the fact that Halford had posed with a topless model back in the ‘80’s. The idea that Halford would come onstage to find an audience nudging each other and chanting “watch your backs, boys, bender in the house!” was totally ridiculous. After all, no-one had blinked about Freddie Mercury’s bisexuality. The world of metal got back to headbanging with nary a murmur, the naysayers, bemused, chalked it up to yet another hopeless case of denial rather than re-evaluate why a group of people that suffered bullying and ridicule for their life-choices might not care to abuse someone for being ‘different’. It was very telling to note those who handled the ‘revelation’ with maturity and empathy and those who did not.

However the reaction to Doug Pinnick, singer and bassist for King’s X was the most revelatory (pun intended). Pinnick came out in the same year as Rob Halford, and yet was subject to discrimination that had a huge effect upon him and his band. It wasn’t the metal fans who were shocked and disgusted though. King’s X were Christians, although they never really wanted to be seen as a Christian band, and had their albums distributed in Christian bookstores until Pinnick’s interview confirmed his sexuality. And it wasn’t just the Christians who had a problem with homosexuality, when Gogoroth vocalist Gaahl revealed he was gay his partner received threats from Satanists in the Black Metal scene. However the average metal fan was more likely to be receiving homophobic taunts instead of doling them out; Korn’s Faget is explicit in detailing the abuse singer Jonathan Davis was subject to for being ‘different’.

In all, despite the relatively low numbers of openly gay Metal musicians, the scene has proved itself to be more tolerant in reality than society at large. There is no hiding from the fact that the macho image led many within the genre to joke about homosexual stereotypes; even Kerrang couldn’t refrain from terming the Glam Metallers as fillies with willies or chicks with dicks, (but when they had the chance they didn’t hesitate in putting RPLA on their front cover in the early nineties).

But then the same is true of the indie guitar bands of the nineties and noughties, who had a similarly male-skewed audience and virtually no gay men on the stage. Of course Kurt Cobain said he was gay, but it was a special sort of gay that had nothing to do with other mens’ penises, and that’s still the nearest the alternative/indie lot got to having a genuine openly gay member of a hugely popular guitar band until Michael Stipe was hounded into finally answering the question he’d been asked constantly for twenty years.

And sadly now society seems to be turning back on itself, especially with openly homophobic rap and reggae lyrics poisoning the minds of a younger generation. I see far more anti-gay language in internet message boards and comment pages now than I ever heard at gigs and record shops in my youth, but these are the days when everyone is looking for superiority over each other rather than equality and freedom...

As a child in an all-male boarding school where homophobia was completely rife, where certain teachers were rumoured to slip a hand, (should the opportunity arise), where it shouldn’t ever slip on a teenage boy’s body, and where the very idea of caring about hairstyle or even personal grooming was the sign of poofterism, I couldn’t even keep up the pretence when I got out in the real world. Scared of Teh Ghey? What on earth was there to be scared of? Women on the other hand, now that was another matter....

Back To The Future

2010-01-20T22:05:00.001Z

The other form of trouble, other than the measurable drop in standards, for the Old Guard in the mid '80's was, as always in the generationally-driven world of rock music, keeping up with the New Guard. Accept and Dio, much as The Scorpions and Judas Priest, were simply doing variations on the same decade-old theme, and it was the younger bands, the ones who were brought up in a post-Beatles world, who knew it wasn’t enough anymore to simply turn the amps to eleven and wear a herd of black leather. But for the Old Geezers of Metal, catching up would be almost impossible, as it meant crossing a tightly-policed generation barrier.

To get some real perspective on the influences of a rock musician you must check up on what they listened to as a child; to dig deeper you must also find out what their parents listened to in their formative years. Nowadays it is perfectly acceptable to normal adults, (and some women too), to be ‘into’ popular music even as a grandparent, but way back in the Twentieth Century this wasn’t the case. You listened to the music of your own generation, and despised all others. No matter what music you preferred you knew the kids listened to meaningless noise, while the oldies listened to outdated, unsophisticated claptrap.

For instance Bruce Dickinson, born self-reverentially and accidentally in a mining town in 1958 buys She Loves You, and then gets exposed to Deep Purple in his late teens, whereas Jimmy Page, born 1944, is fired up by Elvis. Dickinson, however, was brought up in part by his grandparents, so both men are raised by cultural aliens from a pre-war Britain, men and women who matured to the sounds of marching men and air raid sirens.

On paper it goes in generations; the teens and twentysomethings who heard Chamberlain read from his piece of paper raise the Teddy Boys and their pointy-breasted girlfriends, who in turn give birth to the Punks and New Wavers, whereas those whose conception dates luckily coincide with their father’s return from Europe or the Far East become the Beatles generation, whose offspring listen to bleeps and pings for pleasure. And then there are those who fall between the gaping chasms between these convenient generational blocks.

Kerry King’s parents give him a girls name in 1964, and should have no reason to wonder why their son is so goddamned angry; however the parents of other founder members of thrash metal bands couldn’t forsee what their boys, who toddle happily through the Summer Of Love, would grow up to do.

James Hetfield (‘63) is born to a light opera singer, and is driven by the sound of Aerosmith into playing guitar. Scott Ian (‘63) is born in Queens, and is converted by seeing Kiss when aged 13. Dave Mustaine (‘61) is raised by his mother, is involved with drug dealing at an early age, and develops a taste for heavy metal in the late Seventies when he picks up his first electric six-string. Jeff Hanneman (‘64), whose father is a Normandy veteran, grew up listening first to his brothers talk about Vietnam, and then to angry punk bands.

The musicians who started the thrash metal boom were the first generation to be brought up solely on heavy rock, rather than the older guitar heroes like The Beatles, Chuck Berry, or even Lonnie Donegan. They started off on Kiss and Aerosmith, and moved on to Rush, UFO, Motorhead and the Scorpions, and graduated on Maiden, Venom and Judas Priest. Underpinning it always, the unholy trinity of Purple, Sabbath and Zeppelin, the legacy of older brothers and cool uncles laid down in times before the Big Four founders could string a sentence together. If the Old Guard were the cast iron of the early industrial age then the thrash bands were crucible steel, molten liquid with the impurities removed, literally metal made of metals.

Not that the first results were all that sophisticated. The tumescent aggression of the Big Four led to acne’d clichés of a self-professed headbanger elite, banging bleeding heads, their own and others, against the stage. There were fistfulls of metal, metal blades and even the metal militia thrusting metal up your ass. Then there were the death threats; Metallica wanted to kill them all, while Megadeth argued that killing was in fact their business. Slayer promised death by the sword, while Anthrax were armed and dangerous. And while the metal mainstream was slowly thawing to the brutal charm of the Big Four, mutant copies, in the benevolent year of Live Aid and away from the spotlight, were spawning like Gremlins. Dark Angel, Possessed, Destruction, Exodus, S.O.D., Helloween, Metal Church, Overkill, and Sodom, all offered furious speed and fatal aggression far removed from the heavy blues-based, British dominated, rock of the Seventies.

Other than the generation gap, there was the question of nationality. Indeed the UK, a spent husk after the NWOBHM surge and increasingly preferring the seductive danger of the Americans to the contemptuous familiarity of local acts, came late to the thrash metal party and had a limited impact in comparison to the American and Mittel-European scenes. Only Onslaught managed to get out of the traps in 1985, and only a few acts like Sabbat and Xentrix followed them with any conviction. Dig any deeper and you’re left with Acid Reign and Lawnmower Deth, who’d both be the first to admit they weren’t capable of a Master Of Puppets.

This was partly due to the independent labels that were driving the thrash revolution. Germany’s Noise Records, and Metal Blade in the US, provided budgets, however tight, and distribution, however limited, for bands wanting to head butt down the doors opened by the likes of Metallica. Earache records didn’t really get going until 1987, but by that time major labels had the most popular thrash bands on their rosters and there was a second wave of sophisticated new bands competing for the attention of the hundreds of thousands of fans who had sent Master Of Puppets gold in a mere six months after its release.

Thrash, like Glam, was a foreign product and it would prove to be as difficult for the British to do as R&B or C&W. Earache records would go on to have a massive influence on extreme and less commercially-acceptable forms of metal in the UK, however Thrash by that time had matured into the cutting edge of an ever-developing and ever-more mainstream genre, catering to a generation who had Metallica as their Beatles and whose parents saw Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in the flesh. The UK would have to try something different in this harsh new world dominated by foreign imports...

Necrophobic

2010-01-19T13:12:00.008Z

It may seem strange now, looking back a quarter century from this point in a new millennium dominated by bands in their third or fourth decade of existence, but there was a definite sense that the old guard were on their last legs by '86. Of course Sabbath was a going concern only because Tony Iommi wasn't felt to have enough clout as a solo name, Zep had joined the choir invisible, and Purple despite selling a million Perfect Strangers were happily rehashing Made In Japan to huge audiences across the States.

Then there was the obvious feeling the old guard were expanding their numbers with the Seventies-formed bands, drained of vitality and inventiveness by the relentless passing of time. The evidence is clear in some of the mid-eighties releases for many of the biggest names in rock, hardly their finest roundabout-an-hour-or-so by any means;

Acca Dacca - Fly On The Wall

Kiss - Asylum (although to single out one Kiss album ignores the daft naffness of all their others from the '80's)

Aerosmith - Done With Mirrors

Judas Priest - Turbo

Black Sabbath - Seventh Star

Accept - Russian Roulette

Twisted Sister - Come Out And Play

Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin

Not to mention the weakness of releases by the English rock legends; Pink Floyd (The Final Cut), The Who (It's Hard), The Rolling Stones (Undercover), Genesis (Invisible Touch), Queen (Hot Space), and even The Clash (Cut The Crap).

All this po-faced mediocrity left a supermassive vacuum at the heart of guitar music on both sides of the Atlantic, a howling vortex that dragged thrash towards the centre ground, sucked indie up from the basements and garages, and, somehow, managed to plaster make-up all over the faces of grown men from Soho, England, to the Sunset Strip. For those that thought thrash was unpalatable throaty garbage, and there were many who couldn't stomach the savagery, there was the glitzy polish of Glam Rock. Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Britney Fox, Poison, Cinderella, and Ratt had the kind of look that MTV wanted; pouty, pretty, framed by big hair and, best of all, blessed by youth. The Old Guard could emulate the primped-up hair and the pyro, and could hire as many slutty-look models as they could for their promo videos, but there was no denying the ravages of aging.

There would be no Year-Zero refutation of history by the Glam acts, no desire to kill off the aged idols, (Kingdome Come were actually thought to be a mooted Zep reunion), so their mere existence shouldn't have been enough to push the feeble old geezers of rock ever faster towards their bus pass, and their impending, inevitable, irrelevance. The problem was quality. Just as Glam and Thrash would eventually run out of steam while a new wave found favour with MTV, mainstream dinosaur acts from the first half of the decade found competing with their own legacy was even harder than competing with these fast, lithe, exciting young things on the radio, tv, not to mention the record store and the box office.

Misplaced Childhood

2010-01-18T21:58:00.005Z

1985 was a year of renewal for heavy metal; the old guard looked increasingly vulnerable to the effects of aging while the young pretenders were still far below the waterline of household name recognition. Neither of them got much of a look-in as far as cultural respect was concerned; only nostalgic reincarnations of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin made it onto the Live Aid stage alongside Judas Priest, the single contemporary metal act to be involved. However the genre was incredibly healthy even as older acts like Kiss and Twisted Sister started showing signs of metal fatigue; the poppier cock-rock acts were carving out a niche on MTV while the more radical bands like Dark Angel, Anthrax, Possessed, Onslaught and S.O.D. were breaking new ground out on the fringes.

1 Misplaced Childhood Marillion
 Power Windows Rush
 Sacred Heart Dio
 Metal Heart Accept
 To Mega Therion Celtic Frost
 Bonded By Blood Exodus
 Walls Of Jericho Helloween
 Endless Pain Kreator
 Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good! Megadeth
 Hell Awaits Slayer

Power Windows Rush

If Grace Under Pressure had been about sensible adults, then Power Windows was about the mad world sensible adults inhabit. Atomic bombs, territorial ambitions, and the rapacious nature of capitalism were the horrific headline realities whilst the suburbs were a cage for closet alcoholics and the artistically thwarted. Neil Peart rages, to a soundtrack of steely mirrored modernity, against childish attention seekers, compromised thinking and the lazy acceptance of the status quo when Herculean efforts are needed for reform. This album really is his finest hour lyrically, managing to put a vital meaning to the music just as the decline in song writing quality starts to become apparent. Peart uses Rush to state his point with grim gravity rather than impotent hysteria, with sober force rather than psychotic violence.

Anyway it had been a few albums since Geddy Lee would shriek verse after verse, and he sings here without needless drama and ensures there are no literal or figurative false notes. Unusually for a protest album it is entirely concentrated on the message rather than on the fevered egos behind the song writing credits, and although this robs Power Windows of some personality it creates an atmosphere of intellectual rigour. This creates a terrible bind for Alex Lifeson’s heavily processed guitar, but he uses the constricted space allotted to him for perfect bursts of tasteful chords and precision-whammied lead lines that save Power Windows from being an anonymous pop album. His solo on Marathon is the beating heart of the album, still pumping adrenalised blood around Rush’s increasingly synthesised body politic.

However Rush would never be as potent again; future albums would be icily bland and creatively barren for the most part. Power Windows was the last time Rush really mattered.

Misplaced Childhood Marillion

Marillion’s idea of adulthood seemed to be defined by the child in the man’s past. Misplaced Childhood was pathetically self-reverential, swathed in unnecessary verbosity and tiresome teenage angst, and was horribly gauche in its attempts to mask insecurities with boastful, attention seeking, demonstrations of grown-up behaviour.

It was also utterly brilliant.

The album had been tried and tested on tour, the sixth form concept driving the inspired music to flow from start to finish in a way that the story itself partially failed to match. The thinly veiled misogyny of previous works was somewhat offset by the hit single Kayleigh with the line “Is is too late to say I’m sorry?” delivered with the knowing fear that the question might be rhetorical. There is so much to say about Misplaced Childhood, how the polish accentuates the flaws and how those flaws are part of the dramatic brilliance, how the melodic leitmotifs create an atmospheric depth unmatched in previous records, and how the band, hiding in the Fish-shaped shadows, finally assumed an identity all their own.

But the glorious heartbeats of the album were in the passionate vocals, fuelled by the total and utter self belief of the deeply conflicted singer who seemed partially to believe the conceit that this was a story about someone else.

Sacred Heart Dio/ Metal Heart Accept

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that metal was concentrating on Heart as all its soul had been sold to the Devil long, long ago. Ronnie James Dio was a witness to all that, and he even brought an old pal from those times, named Denzil, out on the Sacred Heart Tour. Easily Dio’s biggest commercial success, with the title track, Rock N Roll Children and Hungry For Heaven standing out, Sacred Heart was a triumph for mid-paced rock, soaring vocals and solid rifferamic vision. But hearts, be they broken, sacred or merely beating, unreasonably dominate the lyrics to the point of obscuring the metaphoric meaning, as do dreams, rock n roll, mystical magic and all the other RJD clichés that had been repeated once too often. There was another Achilles heel apart from the fact there didn’t seem to be anything new here; weak songs like the consistently awful Shoot Shoot did not bode well for the band’s future.

Accept were still trying to move forward though, albeit with a neo-luddite concept of artificiality. Metal Heart’s cover art was even cheesier than Dio’s, and their sound was typical of the mid-eighties metal mainstream, moulding the shiny hooks of Judas Priest with angry Teutonic Bon Scott-alike vocals, but Accept managed to generate enough charisma to ensure their own identity was clear. Up To The Limit rumbles along with an honest menace, the title track, even with its classical pretensions, has its moments, and Teach Us To Survive is edgy, even thrashy in places. But the lazy commercialism in Living For Tonite and Screaming For A Love Bite cheapens and weakens the album. Just as metal got heavier and faster Dio and Accept decided to go for the lighter polished radio-friendly approach that got Quiet Riot to the top three long years earlier.

To Mega Therion Celtic Frost/ Walls Of Jericho Helloween

The revolution was at the gates though, in the shape of bands of young men whose parents had listened to The Beatles, young men who came of age with hard rock legends on their turntables. Celtic Frost had already established themselves with their debut album, but To Mega Therion was something special in comparison. Sinister brass and gothic backing vocals vied with astonishing tempo changes and finger-blistering chord progressions to unsettle the listener. And whereas Dio and Sabbath sought to use evil to create theatric fear, Celtic Frost worshipped evil for the purpose of authenticity. To Mega Therion was angrier, faster, more vital than all the old bands and, despite being marginalised by a backwards-looking mainstream; it was obvious Celtic Frost were the future. Astonishingly, even in comparison to the new generation breaking through in the mid-Eighties, the band were the best part of a decade ahead of their time.

Helloween were more traditional in comparison, favouring evolution over revolution, but these Priest-worshipping Deutschers couldn’t stop from pushing the boundaries of what trad metal could do. Riffs were delivered at plectrum-shredding speed and nonchalantly virtuoso solos littered the album like Berlin Wall graffitti. Kai Hansen’s clear operatic voice was the secret weapon for Walls Of Jericho though; there couldn’t be any complaints from the metal purists about indecipherable grunting. However it was the more orthodox moments that let Helloween down. Lyrics on songs like Heavy Metal (Is The Law) were terrifyingly weak and there was a silly streak to the band that would go on to be a bigger problem later on in their career. The album was proof that Helloween were heading in the right direction, and it became increasingly obvious during ‘85 that they were not the only Germans doing so.

Endless Pain Kreator / Bonded By Blood Exodus

If Kreator had been American they might have stamped a larger footprint on the face of music history, but they would also been subject to the buffeting winds of fashion, something that would hardly ever trouble any group from Germany throughout the thrash revolution. Endless Pain was perfect for its time, morbidly aggressive, gloriously self-absorbed, and somehow all the more brilliant for its naïve flaws. Freed from the tyranny of American trend, Kreator and the other European thrash bands could develop (or not, in some cases,) at their own speed (pun intended).

Exodus had already lost their lead guitarist to Metallica, and now Bonded By Blood had been delayed by months, which was one hell of a handicap in a genre that placed such a high value on being faster and harder than the competition. The vocals were amateurish, which was itself something of an issue for many thrash bands in the first few years, but the music was state-of-the-art for the year it was recorded. If they could have continued evolving with the same level if inventiveness they might have had a chance at replacing Anthrax as part of the Big Four. Despite its late entry in 1985 Bonded By Blood was a better album than Spreading The Disease, but Exodus would go on to tread water while Anthrax… well that’s another story.

Killing Is My Business Megadeth / Hell Awaits Slayer

Talking of the Big Four, Megadeth’s genesis was also influenced by Metallica, and would be Dave Mustaine’s vehicle for proving his sacking from Hetfield-Ulrich Overdrive had been a hideous mistake. Killing Is My Business is a furious, cerebral crie de couer, as well as the first step in the Thrash arms race to be more brutal, more complex and more intelligent than the rest of the pack. There was no doubting Mustaine’s desire to prove he was the best, especially on Mechanix….

But Slayer were perhaps the fastest of the lot, especially as the likes of Metallica were now setting a trend of sacrificing speed for dynamic space, and they also neatly sidestepped the whole credibility-through-cleverness trend in favour of having the nastiest lyrics around. Slayer utilized shock tactics, just like Sabbath had in the Seventies, a desire to go where no other would to mark out their own territory. For both Megadeth and Slayer the desire to go one better would be the key to continued success.

Bad Boys Running Wild

2009-10-27T13:35:00.004Z

I was frustratingly isolated from all the goings on of 1985. No heavy metal festivals, no collective cultural bosom of denim n’ leather, and certainly no dirty rock n’ roll women. My mother had little reason to warn me about girls like that; not when I was firmly ensconced in an educational gulag that shuddered nightly as seven hundred boys masturbated to the confused mental images of Matron and Other Boys’ Mummies.

The Quiet Room Concerts continued after the summer that saw me advance to the Second Year. I was initially thought of as a Bright Boy due to my performance in the entrance exam, but I had been quickly sent down from the top stream in a matter of weeks. Academic performance was of little interest to me, and sporting prowess was laughably unreachable. Fuelled on a diet of apathetic catering and tuckshop gorges, I lived for the end of the day and headphone heaven, and for the end of the week and the Saturday night spent metalling in the quiet room.

A New Boy had joined the Second Year, which was somewhat unprecedented as new intake were only usually accommodated in the First and Third Year. But then Oli was nothing if not unconventional. He was a straightforward soul, friendly but also easily distracted and prone to destruction, particularly self-inflicted. However some kind-hearted liberal had decided to send him to boarding school, rather than a Young Offenders’ Institution, after an infamous incident involving a pint of petrol, an old car tyre, and a small town High Street at the bottom of a hill.

Somehow Oli gravitated towards us metallers, myself, Eggy and Buggy, and we would often eschew the dismal delights of the Saturday Night Movie in favour of using the only turntable in the place. This was borrowed from the Mods, two confident and stylish Third Year Boys who would go through life being one year older, wiser and cooler than me. One had sold me my precious Maiden vinyl, the other owned the once-terribly-modish mono record player we congregated around while the sheepish masses watched yet another movie from Ipswich’s limited rental stock of straight-to-video cassettes. Our useage was tolerated, often greased by the bribe of a mars bar, but it was a fair price for being able to listen to the albums we hadn’t home-taped already. Buggy sometimes joined us, but then he and Oli never seemed to get along. Eggy was nominally our leader, as he was a year older, but a kind of egalitarian respect existed between us when in the Quiet Room and away from the hierarchical rules of orthodoxy.

At first it was fairly simple; live albums only, no cassettes. So Maiden Japan would get a spin, followed by the sound of Saxon’s Eagle landing. I had an Acca Dacca seven-inch which had a weakly live version of Let There Be Rock on the b-side, and we might even have time for Remember Tomorrow off of the back of my red Number Of The Beast single before the herd dispersed from the day-room to be shepherded off for showers and bed so the senior years could watch a decent movie with a 15 certificate, swearing and, on a good day when the Housemaster hadn’t followed vetting procedure, actual ladies tits right there on the tv screen.

Our routine lasted for only half a term before cracks appeared. Firstly Buggy started to drift towards Mod, although if it was acceptance he sought he would be bitterly disappointed. Secondly an album was released that completely destroyed our innocent ideas of what a concert was about, an album that set a new standard from its luxurious packaging to its fearsome content, an album that bisected the Eighties into before and after for bands and fans alike.

Even the first single, released a month before the album, caused problems for us. Eggy’s parents were up to visit him for his birthday, and they had taken him to Ipswich to buy the new Iron Maiden 12”. I was struck with hysterical jealousy, not only as it was my thirteenth in a matter of days, but also as I had tried unsuccessfully to access my limited funds held by the Housemaster so I too could have a copy. Eggy had left with his parents before I had chance. The brittle friendships of teenagers were not designed to withstand such treachery, so Oli and I vowed eternal animosity to the Birthday Boy, and we cemeted our pact while listening to an older Di’anno version of the song in question.

Eggy returned some time later, unburdened by Iron Maiden products; the single was sold out, not a copy to be found across the whole of Ipswich. Eggy’s father apologised for not being able to obtain a copy for me as he had intended after Eggy’s fraternal plea that I should not be forgotten, but the Schadenfreudlich feelings aroused by Eggy’s failure remained unabashed. The horrid superiority of being part of two against one felt far too good to let honesty and fairness get in the way.

Mind you, it could have been worse for Eggy. We could all have been girls, vicious, spiteful and endlessly inventive. The squall of animosity blew over after a few days but there was an ever-shifting balance of power now where once there was innocent friendship.

I had to wait, a full agonising week after release, until the half-term break to pick up my first store-bought Iron Maiden album. My parents took me to Fareham, the nearest town to our slopover brickbelt village. It was so ponderously slow a journey that it is still occurring at some levels of my subconscious, but then aren’t all levels of teenage anticipation at least vaguely reminiscent of Zeno’s Paradox?

The tension would build yet further as, after the harsh anguish of Eggy’s failure to obtain the Running Free single I was convinced the album would be sold out too. We went first to WHSmiths, knowing there was only Woolworths and a piddly Our Price as backups. I rushed up to the Top Twenty racks to search, and there it was at Number 2. Live After Death. I carefully lifted the cover, in its pvc sleeve, with the edges of my fingertips.
“Right,” said my father, “we’d better get you to a bank then hadn’t we?”.
Oh, what hulking despair! It was literally right in my hands! I was too entranced to argue so we speedwalked to the Midland Bank so I could withdraw the six pounds and fifty pence I needed. I chattered nervously as I pocketed the cash from my Griffin Savers kiddy account, which prompted some punky young adult to sneer something at me. I merely grinned back at the cut-price Lydon wannabe, who melted at the sight of my enthusiasm. It’s nigh on impossible to be nihilistic in a small town bank queue, no matter how spiky your hair is.

I had other matters on my mind, including the worry that a horde of metal fans might have descended on Smiths and snapped up all the copies. Or, even more idiotically, that the price had gone up and I could no longer afford it. My mind was so flustered that it stopped recording memories, the next thing I remembered was being in the back of the car, sliding the cover out of the WHSmiths bag and staring at that iconic cover.

Those days are long gone now, when having a twelve by twelve piece of art adorning the sleeve of your record kept your excitement up until you got home. I couldn’t stop staring at the brilliant detail of Eddie bursting from his burial ground, the deep night time blues shattered by the golden flames emerging from the broken earth, the lightning bolts, the headstone engraving. Then opening the gatefold cover to see Steve Harris jumping in mid-air in front of a giant mummified Eddie shot fire from his eyes, framed by all the other pictures of the band onstage. The inner sleeves with the lyrics and credits, the eight page booklet with the tour dates, equipment lists and other trivia down to the number of drumsticks used by the boy McBrain. I didn’t realise how spoilt I was, and how every album after Live After Death would fail to create that level of sugar-rush anticipation.

I had my headphones at the ready but Dad had other ideas as I slid the vinyl of the first disc down onto the turntable.
“I suppose I’d better hear what this lot are all about then hadn’t I?”

Oh God! How embarrassing!

----------------
Now playing: Iron Maiden - Intro: Churchill's Speech
via FoxyTunes

And The Bands Played On

2009-10-07T19:43:00.001+01:00

Donington seems now to have been an annual orgy of classic rock bands, at the height of their powers, playing to the largest crowds the UK could offer, but it was really only in retrospect that the Monsters Of Rock festival cemented this reputation. In reality some years were much stronger than others, and there were always anomaly bands that crept into an unwarranted place on the bill thanks either to management or record company pressure or to sheer ignorance from the promoters.

‘85 may well have had ZZ Top and Fish-Era Marillion at the pinnacle of their chart success, but any observers impressed by the sight of future headliners Nob Jovi and Metallica in the line-up for that year’s festival should bear in mind both bands still had a lot of growing up to do at that point. Furthermore, they should think of all the bands that had albums out in 84/5 that didn’t play; Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, The Scorpions, Dio, Rush, and Whitesnake to name but a few that would have fitted right in.Castle Donington didn't ever have a monopoly on the best bands of the day.

Metallica’s set in particular demonstrated the odd nature of your average MOR day. The inebriated audience had seen some L.A. cock rock and a spot of English progressive parp before the spotty San Fran thrash band appeared on the giant stage. Afterwards the 80K crowd would then witness a shoddy amalgam of Springsteen and hairspray, the aforementioned angsty prog, and finally some no-nonsense Southern Boogie dusted down with the magic of MTV. Even the most whammied-out of lugholes could hear that the ‘Tallica were the odd men out. Indeed, as lead singer of the only metal band on the day, Hetfield was forced to point out their lyrical integrity and their lack of cosmetic enhancement while a barrage of missiles rained down upon him. The trouble with such a large crowd is that even if you have three quarters of them on your side that still leaves 20,000 people against you, more than a Wembley Arena of angry opposition armed with gallon bottles of lukewarm piss.

But although Metallica were a little out of place that day, their performance, available for free at Metallica.com’s Live Vault, was history in the making. Thrash metal was incredibly divisive at the time, even Kerrang! tried a short-lived sister publication to deal with the sub-genre, but the frighteningly skinny foursome did enough at the world’s most prestigious heavy rock festival for them and their kind to be taken a little more seriously by a whole lot more people. 1985 was the year that Thrash broke through into the mainstream, and heavy metal would never be the same again.

MCMLXXXIV

2009-09-15T15:20:00.007+01:00

I seriously worry about people who can differentiate between the seventh and eighth best albums of any given year, so I'm just going to go with a Number One and Nine Others approach...

Iron Maiden Powerslave

Rush Grace Under Pressure
Marillion Fugazi
Van Halen 1984
The Scorpions Love At First Sting
Voivod War And Pain
Dio The Last In Line
Celtic Frost Morbid Tales
Deep Purple Perfect Strangers
Metallica Ride The Lightning

1984 was a cusp year; the NWOBHM tide had largely ebbed away leaving only its most popular bands still afloat, and the American pincer attack of Glam and Thrash had yet to bite into the metal mainstream.

Powerslave Iron Maiden

This curate's egg should have been a disappointment after the strength of the previous two Maiden albums, but the fact that some parts of it are, indeed, excellent eclipses the pedestrian instrumental track and the two songs about swordfighting that close out side one. Despite the weaker efforts that mar the album, the duelling songwriting camps, (Smith and Dickinson versus Harris and his library of books and films), produced four top-notch classics, including the title track and the lengthy Coleridge adaptation that dominates Side Two. Powered by trademark twin guitars and commercially-sourced backing vocals on the choruses, Powerslave was the standard by which all others would, rightly or wrongly, be judged in this year.

Ride The Lightning Metallica.

If Iron Maiden were the Acme of heavy metal then Ride The Lightning proved that Metallica was its acne. Unsightly, no doubt, but also undeniable proof of the process of maturity. Kill 'Em All era Metallica was the annoying kid brother, the one that used to follow you around in semi-religious hero worship, that has now found his own cool places to hang and cool people to hang with. Ride The Lightning was the point when Metal realised this bratty kid brother was cooler than Metal itself.

Grace Under Pressure Rush/ Fugazi Marillion

Rush, of course, were too grown-up to care about teenage matters, and Grace Under Pressure proved it with a collecion of songs about relationships, loss and fears. The synth was strong with this one, yet Alex Lifeson's choppy chords and sublimely chorused melodies provided much of the substance on the more immediate first side of the record. Side Two suffered a little from the transparency of its influences and a potentially catastrophic lack of Rock in places, but Neil Peart's twisted rhythmic logic proved to be sufficient antidote to Geddy Lee's cod-reggae basslines. Grace Under Pressure is the tasteful, mature, state-of-the-art rock album that Signals had been the blueprint for, an album where passion and anger were replaced by a distant matter-of-fact assertion that the world is a place where bad things happen.

Fish-Era-Marillion, meanwhile, proved that rock could progress, if only from wallowing in an amniotic sac of retarded sexuality to wallowing in a bedsit of frustrated misogyny. No wonder all the alpha-females were queuing for the cock-rockers' mistreatment, they may well have been emotionally-stunted bastards but that was far more preferable to the emotionally-incontinent wimps who never understood that dumping a bloke was supposed to finally spare a poor girl from his superfluous dramas and turgid affections. So we, the listeners, get treated to the full bitter force of Fish's bile instead.

On the first hearing of the album a concept of broken-hearted rage is clear. Jigsaw demands he be dumped properly, She Chameleon complains of being seduced and discarded, Incubus sounds a whiny threat of revenge against the woman who moved on, Punch and Judy tastes the sour grapes of how catastrophic life with her would have been anyway. The more you look for it, the more you see, forever finding a would amongst the treason. Emerald Lies the two-timing slut, Assassing the man she's with now, and the title track about it all being part of a fucked-up world anyway.

Of course such explanations are a mere souring marriage of convenient interpretation, and anyone who saw him perform knew there was much greater depth to dear Derek Dick. The true meanings of the lyrics, obscured by pretentious thickets of clumsy metaphors, include former band members, groupies, nightmares etc, but the real subject of any Fish-Era Marillion album, the object of fascination for all the fans, was never hard to discern beneath the camouflage.

1984 Van Halen

No such worries for Van Halen, who could have avoided all Orwellian preconceptions by simply titling this album Songs About Fucking. They just couldn't help themselves, fucking in cars, fucking in the classroom, fucking bad girls and fucking girls in Calvin Kleins. And they never sounded as good as they did on this fucking album. The singles were iconic and, unusually for the Halen in recent years, the elpee itself wasn't padded out with ill-advised covers. However you simply don't analyse albums like 1984, because the more you do the more flaccid it can appear on paper. You run it up the flagpole, you suck it and see, you plunge in deep so you can feel that to which words can do no justice. Van Halen in 1984 made the hottest hard rock on the planet.

Love At First Sting The Scorpions

This album was a lot about sex too, the living proof that even ugly guys in bands got a lot of hot-rockin', no matter how mustached and be-denimed they may be. But whereas Van Halen were a fragile alliance of egos, The Scorps were a tight gang, blasting out rockers and collectively caressing their instruments through tender ballads. Love at First Sting had all the classic Scorpions ingredients; a vaguely dodgy album cover, an awkwardly-punned album title, and song lyrics that steadfastly refused to break new ground. Just like Van Halen, The Scorps instinctively knew that hard rock was aural fun not food for thought, and Rock You Like A Hurricane was a prime example of this unthinking brand of genius.

War And Pain Voivod

This exceptional Canadian 4-piece were firmly at the other end of the intelligence bell-curve, and also probably well out of the medal positions in the Rock Sex Olympics too. Seemingly obsessed with sci-fi and politics, their inventive venomous thrash betrayed jazz and prog influences throughout the first part of their career. War And Pain was the first green shoot of what would become an abundantly fruitful approach to the fast and angry school of metal. They would do better in time, but there were few doing it as well as Voivod were doing it in 1984.

Morbid Tales Celtic Frost

Another one of the very few that were managing to be innovative within the strictly-policed confines of thrash was Tom G Warrior's Celtic Frost. Somehow managing to be both more extreme and yet more accessible than most, the band were immediate favourites at Kerrang! where they were portrayed as avante-garde heroes. Morbid Tales relies more upon inventive use of chords than pounding speed, and the vocals are drawled as much as they are growled. Atmospherically the album reeks of gloomy shadows and the gothic doom that would dominate the darker hemisphere of metal for the next quarter-century.

The Last In Line Dio

The second effort from Ronnie James' band hardly dwarfed the achievements of their classic debut, but the pedigree of the singer was impeccable. The man just does not make bad albums, the worst he has managed is merely 'perfectly acceptable'. The first two tracks here ensure this album is safe from that faint praise, even if the rest of The Last In Line can appear largely anonymous next to the other Dio albums of the '80's. Riddled with pomp and majesty, not to mention the glorious lyrical idiosyncrasies that RJF was so fond of, this was mainstream metal delivered by one of the very best in the business.

Perfect Strangers Deep Purple

Finally, the grandfathers of metal were back. Replete with the ironic humour that informed the album title, Deep Purple Mk II were in business again, lovingly renovated after being garaged for over a decade, and eight years after the transmission failed on Mk IV. Perfect Strangers is not a bona fide classic album, (it's arguable whether the band managed more than two throughout their ongoing career), but it was a triumphant return nonetheless. The title track was iconic, Knocking At Your Back Door was great, and the rest was....

Well, it was the proper Deep Purple in a proper studio doing a proper Dee Purple album. And in 1984 that was more than the most optimistic Mk II fan could have hoped for....

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A Happy Ending?

2009-05-25T12:39:00.006+01:00

It was always grossly unfair to brand Fish-Era Marillion as being a poor man’s Genesis. First and foremost, Collins, Rutherford and The Really Posh One were fulfilling that role pretty much all by themselves, but it's easy to see that Fish-Era Marillion were heading in different directions, albeit falteringly and with frequent looks back over their shoulder. Of course the early stuff, like Grendel and Garden Party, was fairly derivative but the band soon found their voice and by the time of their second effort, an honourable and ambitious defeat, they were ready to step off into the unknown.

However it was still no small surprise that, by the middle of the most unlikely decade of the second Millennium Fish-Era Marillion were one of the biggest bands in Britain, had a brace of hit singles, and were second on the bill at Donington Park’s Monsters Of Rock Festival.

Of course the Eighties were the notorious Wibble and Parp Years of music. Keyboards were arranged in terraces, worn as mock guitars, and thrust high in the mix of far too many records. At least Genesis had the bass turned up on their records, (when there were enough of them to make a good album), whereas most of the lighter eighties rock acts subscribed to the theory that music is best when tinny and weak.

This was partly down to how people listened to music, with a flawed choice of bulky record or flimsy cassette that were both liable to ruinous damage. You could either lug your record player around, or a battery devouring ghetto blaster, or compromise on the new-fangled Walkman and enter a headphoned Land That Bass Forgot...

Not that the pop world minded; Radio One was still broadcasting on Medium Wave to millions of crappy mono transistor radios, but the rock world, well that needed a full-throated roar of sound across the spectrum. Fish-Era Marillion didn't roar though. For a start it would have been tasteless, not to mention barbaric and insensitive.

Ah yes, sensitivity. Fish was a self-proclaimed poet, erratic lover, and proletarian intellectual. This generally meant the songs were about him (even when they were supposed to be about other people), and invariably contained clunking adjectives and self-important histrionics. Bless him, but this was a modern rock singer, not English CSE. At least he was trying, and when he did hit the mark it could make you shiver.

So, 1985. You're a new wave of Prog band with a couple of commercial failures under your belt, whilst on a major label. Your singer is a burly, make-up wearing, Scottish clever-dick whose entire career will be a thinly-veiled autobiography. It would be an incredibly good idea to fuck off to Berlin and pull out a masterpiece, wouldn't it? Misplaced Childhood deserves a post all its own, suffice to say it was a creative high-point in the history of progressive rock.

So the band, who had claimed they were losing on the swings and losing on the roundabouts, was able to step out onto the giant stage at Donington Park after Metallica had played, after Nob Jovi had played, and topped only on the bill by that other rock success of the year, ZZ Top. Fish-Era Marillion were triumphant, despite being "absolutely fucking scared shitless". By the time they swaggered into Assassing they had a field full of hairy headbangers prog-clapping and calling out for some woman called Kayleigh.

There shouldn't have been a cheer, back in those selfish materialistic times, for a pretentious Scot announcing the band will be playing Side One of a concept album, but there was, a fucking massive one. And there shouldn't have been another, even louder, cheer from tens of thousands of heavy rock fans there that day when the first notes of a Top Ten pop ballad rang out across the racetrack. They all sang along too. It proved something about Hard Rock, something about how it was acceptable for a bunch of British losers to win even by playing the Radio One Daytime game and how it was better to fall in love with a pompous, wordy album about whiny self-regard than with some bunch of fucking Americans.

Unlikely, but not unwelcome, Fish-Era Marillion's success would continue for another studio album, (naturally another tenuous-concept effort), but then, just as unexpected as the massive success, the Fish-Era was over. Emerging from the shadows of their attention-seeking singer, a new band called Marillion tried to figure out what would happen when the focus finally fell on the music. As for Fish? Well, I'm sure that story is told best by himself....

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Another Brick In The Wall (Part One)

2008-11-25T19:40:00.005Z

It’s important to remember things in 1984 were a lot different to the present day. The boundaries were more tightly patrolled, the distinctions more profound, the definitions more simplistic. There was pop, there was rock, and in the UK the two were as chalk is to cheese, and had been since the early seventies. Rock meant something different in the US, but then American rock, as defined by Springsteen et al, was a far cry from the British version as there simply weren’t any traditional rock bands in the UK any more.

Genesis was something Phil Collins did when he wasn’t turning soul white, and Pink Floyd were on their way to consulting the lawyers about what would become the most fractious and amusingly spiteful divorce in music history. Other prog monsters were busy setting a course for the heart of obscurity as, with the possible exception of Yes, they struggled to cope with a modern world. The Police and The Clash were disintegrating, and The Who were officially spent. Queen were busy trying to reinvent themselves for the umpteenth time; they were now an electro-pop band after previous attempts at jazz and funk had been met with mixed welcomes. Deep Purple however, never ones for trend awareness, decided to reform.

The dreadfully self-important inkie-writers would all pat Punk on the back and congratulate it on its ideologically sound class-war victory, but those angry creatures of habit were yet again distorting the economic facts to fit the painfully correct neo-Marxist theory. For one thing, where were the punk bands now? Why had they withered away in the Thatcher Age?

If it was the dialectical inevitability for punk to exist in order to destroy the rock dinosaurs then it’s something of a rent in the space/time continuum for Pink Floyd, Genesis, Dire Straits et al to still be scoring number one albums in the early eighties. Not only did they all avoid destruction, they did so by simply ignoring the snotty young upstarts and carrying on regardless. After all, that infamous ‘here’s three chords; now start a band’ call-to-arms wasn’t the recipe for a sea-change in social order, it was the blueprint for Status Quo.

Besides, the charts were full of Frankie, Madonna and Jacko, not to mention Duran Duran and fucking Wham! for good measure, this was surely someone’s idea of mass opiate. The nearest thing to punk at the time was the New Wave-influenced haircuts on synth-pop moppets. Indie was stirring with The Smiths, and a few angry class warriors such as New Model Army were milling around in the background, but the years either side of Thatcher’s second election victory were cold, hard and barren for the Left in Britain. Indeed it had been the nihilism of punk’s idle generation that had contributed to the Conservative claim that Labour’s Not Working in 1979. Punk was as much a realistic vessel for social change as the Socialist Workers’ Party, and coincidentally had just as much to do with the working class.

No, it was capitalism that was killing the rock dinosaurs; in the shape of MTV. Put simply, if you were on MTV you had a hit, and now after years of ignoring the singles game rock bands had to adapt or die. Yes managed with ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’ and Queen, who had always suffered with consistency over the length of an album, also thrived in the video era. But those insisting on side-long epics about magical multi-syllabic worlds of the imagination had their cards marked.

It was all about the entertainment factor now, about Top Of The Pops and neon discotheques. Out with the seventies industrial gloom, in with the eighties economic boom. The decks were cleared as the Old Guard fell on their pension swords, and in the ensuing vacuum U2 and Dire Straits were inflated to stadium-sized greatness. Never mind the revolution being televised, television was the revolution. And so Rock was dead, to the mainstream at least, and Prince was king.

Just take a look at the line-ups for the Reading Festival in ’83; there’s only The Stranglers, Big Country and Cockney Rebel hidden amongst all the heavy bands. When the festival returned, (after two years off due to embarrassment at Black Sabbath’s '83 headlining set), things were even worse; a mixture of Goth, pub rock and only one genuine hard rock legend on the bill. Glastonbury was even worse; totally anaemic without the heavy rock that was keeping guitar music alive in the age of the synth.

Rock music had been marginalised in the press, and pushed into the late hours once a week on the radio. But away from the demands of popular fashion there was only one way to stand out from the crowd; be harder, faster, and much, much louder.

The Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park had become the biggest gig of the year in heavy music. Reading was on a downward spiral, Glastonbury was a quiet little affair with very little rocking going on at all, but Donington had become the place to stack your Marshalls, where all kinds of rock rubbed denim shoulders with each other. The first year featured Rainbow, Judas Priest, The Scorpions and Saxon but also had April Wine, hardly the heaviest band in the world, on the bill too.

This wasn't a narrow minded shunning of False Metal, this was an attempt to promote the whole spectrum of rock music. Subsequent years would also see a variety of decidedly un-metal bands like ZZ Top, Hawkwind, Blue Oyster Cult, Status Quo and Slade at the festival, but by the mid-eighties there was a little less variety on display, simply because the older bands were fading away and the bright young things that sprang up to replace them had grown harder and more aggressive.

Some bands were eager to move away from the metal ghetto, Quo and Slade in particular didn’t want to be seen as a bunch of headbangers, and the headbangers themselves were a bit wary of some acts (*). But most bands were simply glad of the fact there was somewhere prestigious that would have them and their fans.

And that was the situation in 1984; no Reading that year, Glastonbury simply a small and unambitious concern situated right out in the sticks where electricity still had a novelty factor, meanwhile Donington Park playing host to AC/DC, Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Moore, Y&T and Motley Crue thay year. A pop-obsessed post-punk world held its nose and pretended not to notice, and the inkies impotently tutted and hissed. Rock wasn't dead after all and, threateningly, it thrived upon all the adversity and disapproval thrown at it.

(* Bon Jovi were controversial Donington headliners in 1987 simply because regular rock fans thought the soft-rockers would bring a new audience in and ruin the only British festival that would book the likes of Dio, Priest and Ozzy. After all, by then Goth was polluting the Reading audience so much that heavy rock bands were no longer welcome)

Micro Cuts

2008-11-21T10:55:00.003Z

In this tiny world of school uniformity, of trousers, shirts, and jumpers grey, you had only your head to express your individuality. The twin severities of the school barber and gratuitous homophobia meant that ‘style’ was the last word one would truthfully be able to affix to ‘hair’. It truly was only your grade-four back and sides head that made you stand apart from the crowd of 700.

I had smallish but otherwise ordinary head marred only by ears that stuck out like car doors, much to the amusement of others, but I was still better off than those whose foreheads rose unreasonably high above the eyebrows. These people were Mekons, or slapheads). Then there were those whose skulls were perfectly rounded at the back, and they were rechristened Eggy in a rampant fit of craniometry. “Oi Eggy, pass down the flop!” and “Lobs out Mekon, Mer-Chaps is on patrol!” were perfectly acceptable sentences in this epithetic universe. There are some boys whose real names I simply cannot remember due to the fact they were never used by them or I over the five years. Moo, Blur, QP’s, Ox, Mooncheeks, Mumm-Ra... Sorry fellas…

One of the many Eggys in my House was well fucking metal. He was a year above me and had survived the Mod Purges of late ’84, alongside his fellow Second Year rocker, Buggy. Buggy wasn’t quite as fundamentally metal as Eggy, preferring Van Halen to the mighty Maiden, but his heart seemed to be in the right place., not to mention the fact his head wasn’t a funny shape. Buggy was something of an enigma, listening intently to Van Halen I and II on his walkman, comparing, contrasting, interpreting, evaluating.

Eggy was a lot more approachable. He fizzed with enthusiasm, once running clear across the parade ground brandishing a Maxell C60 whilst loudly proclaiming “WHEELS OF STEEL! WHEELS OF FUCKING STEEL!” such was his joy at obtaining a copy of said Saxon album. And Eggy had got proper copies, retail cassettes of two Iron Maiden albums, Piece Of Mind and The Number Of The Beast. We slowly bonded in the first few months of 1985, across the boundary of being in different Years, over the brilliance of ‘Arry’s Mob and the unfairness of not being allowed to have long hair.

Buggy was more distant, the intellectual counterpoint to Eggy’s emotional ardour. If you asked him why he liked ‘The Trooper’ he’d have a jolly good think about it and sit you down for your full and frank answer a couple of days’ later. There were rare occasions on Saturday evenings when Eggy and I would have control of the record player in the Quiet Room, and Buggy would occasionally join us as we dropped the needle on Killers and imagined what a heavy metal concert would be like. But more often than not Buggy was hooked up to his walkman, sat in a soft chair, writing a letter to his sister about where his thoughts had taken him. If a meteorite threatened to strike the Earth Buggy would have successfully argued it out of existence with only a book of statistics and a calm demeanour to assist him. He didn’t seem ill-at-ease with social contact; he just seemed to have grown out of it.

However there was very little that Eggy and I had grown out of….

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Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

2008-11-21T09:30:00.004Z

Sometimes it is the subtext surrounding an album that pushes it over the edge of greatness; there are divorce albums (Dylan), death albums, (The God Machine) drug albums (pretty much everybody, to be honest). Then there are those records that are forged under unique circumstances, such as the reunion albums of Aerosmith and Mk II Deep Purple, or the albums Faith No More made while band members honestly and openly hated each others guts. Maybe these albums would be great even if the personal issues had not become public knowledge, but sometimes it’s not initially the music that some hit records are known for. The listening public comes forewarned and fully armed with preconceptions, not all of which were unforeseen during the record’s making.

The Number Of The Beast wasn’t known for being made under the influence of drugs, divorce or death. However it did wear its context literally on its sleeve; there would be no arguing about what this record was about. The image of a big red Devil puppet with an even bigger band mascot Eddie in control, marauding over a hellish landscape of leaping flames and writhing bodies, was a sure-fire indication that the album wasn’t about crop rotation or the post-colour TV decline in average takings at British cinemas. Then there were the interviews featuring bullshit tales of mysterious ghostly studio problems and the £666 repair bill for the producer’s car after crashing into a vicar driving some nuns to church. Not only was this thing all about Satan but everyone in the band wanted to make sure that you, the record-buying public, was reminded of the fact again and again and again.

However, for once it wouldn’t have been the dumbest question on earth if an interviewer had piped up with “so, what’s this new album all about then?” The Number Of The Beast, as it happens, is as much about the Devil as Darwin’s Voyage Of The Beagle is about Snoopy from Peanuts.

The first track is about Vikings, which admittedly is no great departure from traditional Heavy Metal themes, and the following two songs are no more original, being retellings of a film and a TV series respectively. Track four features a prostitute, and the title track rips off Tam O’Shanter. The first single, Run To The Hills, is about cowboys and Indians, and the album then finishes up with a ditty about being an honest criminal and a tale of what it feels like when you’re just about to be hanged. Then there was a bonus track on modern editions, with a storyline that is somewhat similar to the plot of Asimov’s Nightfall. Iron Maiden hadn’t sold their souls to the devil; they’d just been watching films about men who had.

So it seems at first glance that no-one is in any danger of drowning in the lyrical depth of The Number Of The Beast, but this is as false an impression as that given by the excitable cover art.

Children Of The Damned is about retribution and consequence, summed up in the final question “What have we learned?” The Prisoner tells of escape from misused authority and the desire for vengeance, whereas The Number Of The Beast is about a man's horrific dream of the seducing nature of a corrupt power. Hallowed Be Thy Name is about power too, but about being powerless over one’s ultimate fate and contemplating one’s life in those terms.

The most maligned lyric though is that for 22 Acacia Avenue. The first two verses, where a man is encouraged to blow fifteen quid on a whore to cheer himself up, seem standard enough for the lewd male world of heavy metal, but when the music changes then so does the perspective. This is the cue for a description of the man’s conflict between seeing the woman as a cheap object of desire and his equally demeaning craving to rescue and protect her from the degrading treatment she receives. He is unable to equate his lust with that of her ‘other men’ and tries to separate her humanity from her sexuality in his mind. Finally he pleads with her to respect herself and stop selling her body but inevitably falls back into a traditional position of paternal power and orders her to leave with him. Charlotte herself doesn’t get a word in edgeways, but then the song isn’t really about her at all.

Of course there’s the music to consider. Iron Maiden were supposed to be all Boy’s Own; bravado, bombast and big hairy bollocks banging to the beat. They were the heavy metal punks; they’d played fast and raw on the first album but sounded like they were running out of steam on number two. However punk was deader than Sid by 1982 and New Wave had only managed to spawn Duran Duran and Spandau fucking Ballet. What could one expect next? The future was far from certain especially seeing as the entire sound of the band would change without Di'Anno.

But Maiden always had a knack of trading up when they replaced band members; Adrian Smith, who had replaced Dennis Stratton for Killers, proved to be a marvelous addition and Bruce Dickinson, the new singer on The Number Of The Beast, had a frighteningly wider range than his predecessor. This gave the band new abilities; Smith was far more metal than Stratton, Dickinson easily more able and enthusiastic than Di'Anno. Steve Harris could finally be as ambitious as his talents would allow.

Dickinson was legally unable to write for his first album with the band but has claimed ‘moral responsibility’ for some of the tracks. It would be interesting to get him into the same room as Steve Harris to publicly discuss who wrote what, but one fact is irrefutable: Steve Harris upped his game considerably for The Number Of The Beast. The precise crescendae of Children Of The Damned, the constantly offbeat title track, and the Top Ten hit single Run To The Hills are all genre-defining classics.

Adrian Smith didn’t slouch about either, penning The Prisoner and 22 Acacia Avenue with the band-leading bassist. The former is a series of speedy lunges punctuated by skyscraper-sized choruses and an instrumental section bursting with rhythmic challenges; the latter is peppered with strategic changes in tempo and theme to fit the swinging moods of the lyrics.

The crowning achievement of the album is all down to Harris though. Hallowed Be Thy Name has suffered from over-exposure through the years, as have many other tracks from The Beast, but it is simply one of the great multi-faceted epics of musical storytelling from the plucked intro to the guitar-duelling finale.

In many ways this album has never been bettered. But consider the real context behind all the satanic shenanigans. It is a little mystifying how the band found this classic record within them after the soporific cul-de-sac of Killers. But they, unlike some others, managed to keep the momentum going just as the NWOBHM was falling into a terminal decline. The Number Of The Beast wasn't a fluky one-off, it just came out of the blue. One fan recalls hearing the first single on Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show;

It was not introduced at all - but knowing what Maiden sounded like and knowing what Bruce sounded like, it took me until "We fought him hard, we fought him well." to know exactly who this was - and I was jumping up and down like a mad jumper-up-and-downer.

Iron Maiden supported Priest, the Scorps, and Rainbow in the US, and turned themselves into the biggest heavy metal band in the world in the process. The band was still in a state of flux though; Clive Burr, whose rhythmic 'feel' is so vital to these tracks, would be sacked before the next album, and Bruce Dickinson's endearing new-boy lack of self-awareness would also have disappeared by then to be replaced with a not-entirely productive rivalry with Steve Harris. But The Number Of The Beast had set an entirely new trajectory for the band, and for heavy metal as a whole. They were going straight to Number One.

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Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

2008-11-18T14:04:00.005Z

It’s difficult for the uninitiated to decide whether Judas Priest is a mediocre band with great songs or the precise opposite. Quality control was always something of a problem in both songwriting and standard of lyrics, as one would expect from a band formed in what was once The Workshop Of The World. After all, the British worker in the 1970s was either on strike or on a three day week, and his legacy was a fleet of beige Austin Allegros for every Rolls Royce that eventually rattled off the production line.

Indeed, when Rob Halford was growling about a thousand cars and a million guitars on Ram It Down there was a slight economy with the actualité; the cars were all Morris Marinas and the guitars were Woolworths Top Twenties. Such was the way in Industrial Post-War Britain, the unambitious land of Bucks Fizz, The Birdie Song and Tight fucking Fit.

It took until 1982 for The Priest to pull a truly classic album from their collective sack. Previous efforts like Stained Class and British Steel were potential greats holed below the waterline by sub-standard filler and shockingly bad lyrics, but Screaming For Vengeance was too good for such metaphorical icebergs. The overture of The Hellion was forty one seconds of musical brilliance, (although the concept explanation on the back cover was a shaken jeroboam of nonsense), and Electric Eye was even better. Fast, aggressive virtuoso riffing matched words that, for the first time since Breaking The Law, were actually thought-provoking social comment, and this was all topped with a terrific pounding chorus. Electric Eye and the title track, a high-octane shrill battle cry that showed all the fledgling thrash metallers how to do it properly, were easily Priest’s finest offerings in the eighties.

There were the mid-paced rockers, Bloodstone and Devil’s Child, where the words were proud nonsense skipping about on day-glo stilts but the delivery was impeccable. And after all what did it matter what Halford was blathering about when he was doing it with such elan? There was a groove to the beat here too, like a steroid-pumped Purple instead of the fist-pumping four/four plod of traditional anthemic metal; the kind of beat that brought girls flooding into the audience. The last time women dressed sexy to see men called Glenn, Ian and Kenneth perform music was during the skiffle era; it wouldn’t be too long before a group of young women would be covering a Priest song for a new generation of curious ladyrebels…

The cherry on the top for Screaming For Vengeance was the obligatory hit single, You've Got Another Thing Comin'. At first glance it’s just another typical song about not letting men in suits who don’t like loud music tell you what to do, but sooner or later one is struck by the knowledge that it is the very best song of its type in the history of music. Pretty much every Judas Priest song, apart from the ones filled with fistfulls of rhyming gibberish, is usually about inarticulate rebellion anyway, but this is the heavy rotation high water mark for both band and genre.

But then this was the perennial problem for Judas Priest; the ebb and flow of quality. They had the parts; (Tipton and Downing were the finest twin guitar attack around for years, the riffs were great, the singer was unbelievably powerful, the rhythm section was unpretentiously dependable), but they were thrown together so haphazardously, with such lack of forethought, self awareness or ambition, that everything they put out on record had a greater chance of being more miss than hit.

Screaming For Vengeance is that statistical anomaly where lucky numbers turn up one after the next to provide effortless perfection. It wasn't the last time for Priest, but the next peak would be a long, long trough of lazy mediocrity and occasional inspiration away. But no-one should forget that 1982 was possibly Priest's best summer of the Eighties, headlining around America with a song that wouldn't get off the radio, Iron Maiden as openers and the world at their feet...

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Teenage Lobotomy

2008-11-15T16:05:00.003Z

By 1983 Iron Maiden were on the brink of eclipsing their nearest rivals. They had supported Judas Priest in America only the year before, but if the Priest were all about trebly guitars and high pitched screams then Maiden were all about the bottom end.

Piece Of Mind sounds earthy, with a bass-heavy atmosphere of real ale and honest sweat toil, whereas Screaming For Vengeance was brash, metallic, crisply lager-esque. The guitars on Piece Of Mind growl, and Bruce Dickinson’s voice on this album has a more mellow timbre than Halfords. Confident, muscular and with endless tenacity and enthusiasm, Iron Maiden were about to strike out as headliners across the world thanks to this album.

It’s common for fans to wax lyrical about the start to the album. Where Eagles Dare, featuring the audacious introduction by new drummer Nicko McBrain, was endearingly ambitious in every respect. Song structure, time signature, vocal lines and instrumental section; all were a cut above any previous Side One-Track One on an Iron Maiden record. Then there’s Revelations, the first Maiden song to be officially penned by Dickinson, which uses space and melody in a manner only hinted at on previous releases.

In fact Piece Of Mind is probably the most accessible album of the First Dickinson Era. Flight Of Icarus, Die With Your Boots On, The Trooper, Sun And Steel and Still Life all have FM-friendly harmony vocals on each chorus and the guitar lines are also surprisingly singable. Icarus was the first single, somewhat derided for its slothful pace and commercialism but still surprisingly welcome whenever it pops up on the MP3 player or radio. Boots is a phenomenally enjoyable gallop and yet far more complex than that suggests, while Still Life starts as a cosy little ballad of narcissism and culminates in fatal madness. Both are undeniable classics of heavy metal.

But it’s the musicianship as much as the songwriting that makes this a great album. The guitarists trade passionate solos and inventive harmonies, while Steve Harris acts as counterpoint as much as he underpins the rhythm. Dickinson has such a preponderance of gruff brawny power and so much character, in what might possibly be his peak performance to date, that it is impossible to imagine anyone else singing these songs with any validity. Dickinson himself has never bettered the chest-beatingly manly studio version of The Trooper, and has since been guilty of bellowing for effect where once he sang with venomous passion.

All this fervent creativity was only possible due to the technical ability of the new brown-haired boy on the drumkit. The ‘what-can-we-do-today’ attitude that came of having such skill at hand meant that songs like To Tame A Land were possible. If Dickinson nailed down the soul of Piece Of Mind then McBrain had a monopoly on its heartbeat.

There were only eighteen months separating Maiden Japan and Piece Of Mind. Iron Maiden had gone from the edge of oblivion to becoming world-beaters in a year and a half, and now had two of the best albums of all time under their belts as well.

The Seed

2008-11-08T12:53:00.005Z

The mod-induced sale of records had a side-effect for me; I was Known To Be Metal. This meant that others Known To Be Metal knew of me too. All of a sudden I was part of a tape-trading network, forever begging to borrow an Older Boy’s twin deck cassette player so I could copy new stuff, trying to make the most of the bargaining value of my small collection. This was to Napster what teletext was to broadband internet…

Having Maiden Japan and If You Want Blood available for sharing got me a TDK D90 with Twisted Sister’s You Can’t Stop Rock N Roll on one side, and some bunch of screamers called Metallica to fill up the other side. Dee Snider’s mob could always be judged by their 1982 cover of Leader Of The Pack, and their poppy big-chorus metal never really grew on me. Metallica on the other hand….

The decline of vinyl was always bemoaned most for the detrimental effect it had on packaging. Why spend thousands on putting together a great cover for your album when it’s going to be the size of a placemat and be wedged inside a jealously possessive piece of plastic? Why spend more money on asking your publishers for permission to print your own fucking lyrics when some spotty tosser will have a badly phoneticised version on his website before release day? The proof of this is in band tour t-shirts on sale at gigs; I haven’t seen a decent one since the turn of the nineties.

And nowadays with legal and illegal mp3’s there is no need for an image at all; much like way-back-when listening to a home-taped copy of an album on your knock-off shoddy not-Walkman. Turning the tape over after the silly disappointment of Twisted Sister to find Ride The Lightning was an incredibly disturbing experience.

The brain-bending crash into full-throttle thrash from a gentle acoustic introduction was like watching a Sunday night BBC costume drama suddenly descend into a melee of murder and fornication complete with blood spattering the camera lens. Fight Fire With Fire was a manifesto for the album, which itself seemed like a frantic intelligence questioning the purpose of its emotions, the lyrics becoming a crumpled blueprint for enraged times. Ride The Lightning used dramatic melody themes and blistering time-changes just as well as Maiden had ever done, and For Whom The Bell Tolls thumped along its way to becoming a fist-clenching classic.

The real clincher though, the point where you knew this was something really fucking special, was Fade To Black. It all seems so perfect now, the lighters in the air acoustic verses with the crunching guitars in between, and the swelling finale, even though the whole thing reeks of a chorus-deficient Children Of The Damned.

The next two tracks were merely ok, but then comes Creeping Death, possibly the cream of the crop here. It has the catchiest chorus, the finest guitar soloing and the most originality on display in the whole album. It simply sounded like nothing else anyone had done, it wasn’t thoughtless thrash but it wasn’t NWOBHM either. Creeping Death is one of the most dumbfoundingly brilliant moments in the entire history of heavy metal

This then was Metallica, the true leaders of the pack, fighting their way from the chrysalis of their formative influences to become something far more interesting indeed.

And then the tape ran out two and a half minutes before the end of The Call Of The Ktulu. I don’t think I ever listened to the Twisted Sister side again….

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Now playing: Black Sabbath - junior's eyes
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Digital Bitch

2008-11-08T12:40:00.003Z

The late-seventies Mod revival had looked in the first place like a tawdry exercise in self-conscious nostalgia for a dying age of Empire, and by the mid eighties the mockneyed tones of a host of Wellerbees were as irritating as the sound of a hysterically revved Lambretta. Who’d want to go back to a pre-Pepper Britain anyway?

Well, several Second Year boys for a start. They were particularly enamoured of The Who, The Jam, The Merton Parkas, Time UK and so on, as well as British sixties TV shows like The Prisoner and The Avengers. The boys all dreamed of riding down to Carnaby Street on pompous little Italian scooters, festooned with rear view mirrors so they could spend the entire journey looking back wistfully, before buying fitted suits, impractical shoes, flick-knives and gobfulls of Dexedrine. Then on to Brighton, for massed fights with bloodied hordes of imaginary rockers and teddy boys for pride of place on the front page of The Daily Herald.

Impressionable boys? Had they seen If they’d have been busy developing camouflage fetishes and demanding to be caned by prefects, if they’d read Sillitoe they’d have developed Northern accents and pretended to be the product of tram-stop knee-tremblers between inarticulate lathe operators and married typists smashed on cherry brandy and grimy hopelessness. But Mods they had become, and thus all history was to be rewritten to fit the newly-formed facts.

All those Modernised boys had been metalheads in their First year, and all of them needed funds for their inkie music papers and fashion magazines. So they sold off all the tapes and lps they had amassed between them in their immature formatory year. A couple of their fellow Second Year boys got the good stuff, such as the early Van Halen albums and the Di’Anno era Maiden, but there was enough left for me to get tremendously excited about, specifically two Priest albums, Stained Class and Screaming For Vengeance, and the cream of the crop; Ozzy’s Blizzard Of Ozz.

It’s probably a struggle for youngsters in this day and age to visualise Ozzy Osbourne as being a contemporary concern, but he was, in the mid ‘80’s, one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His behaviour at this time, a matter of public record, seems to have eclipsed his musical legacy in retrospect. Indeed one would be forgiven for stumbling to the conclusion that Ozzy Osbourne is frequently, dependably, his own worst enemy.

All this would be true if it were not for the sheer brilliance of his first solo album. The first track, I Don’t Know, marries classic riffage to a fist-pumping rhythm and features a flowery middle eight where Ozzy wistfully gives the benefit of his amassed wisdom. Next up is Crazy Train. This is a masterclass in lead guitar from Randy Rhoads, and is indisputably one of the greatest rock songs of all time. There’s the ballads to skip, then on to the undeservedly controversial Suicide Solution. This song was, like the aforementioned Stained Class, subject to a silly lawsuit. If you’re going to be successful at suing Ozzy your best bet is to claim his 80's fashion sense has irreparably damaged your eyesight. Going to court over a song that basically says ‘drinking is very bad for you’ then you’re going to look like a fuckwit and you’ll still have all that grieving to do. Mr Crowley is far more sinister in content, and is possibly Ozzy’s best song of his solo career.

It’s a stone-clad fact that bassist Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake on drums are the understated heroes of this album, laying down rhythms that pulse, pump, drive and punctuate these songs. Well, as long as you have the original album that is. If you have the remastered reissues then you’re listening to a dirty pair of scabs who should have known better.

Daisley and Kerslake had to sue Ozzy to get royalties to this album, (and to the follow up Diary Of A Madman). The Osbournes later had their revenge though, and got ex Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin and current Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo to overdub the original parts played by the original rhythm section. One wonders if Trujillo expects to do the same for Master Of Puppets? If I am ever allowed near the masters of Angel Dust or Lights… Camera… Revolution then I’ll quite happily return the insult with a human beat-box and farting noises for the former and a rubber band for the latter.

But then that’s the whole story of Ozzy in a nutshell, unwitting genius tempered by monstrous ego and flatulent greed, shadowed by his blisteringly corrosive economy-sized Lady Macbeth of a wife.

A pity that heavy metal needs its own Posh N Becks, but if this is the case then Blizzard Of Ozz is the equivalent of a last minute free kick to send England to the World Cup finals, and this from a man who is more famous for scoring spectacular own-goals on a regular basis. These are songs that will be heard long after Sharon is dead; Ozzy himself will, thanks mainly to this album as well as his work with Sabbath, live forever…

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Now playing: Black Sabbath - all moving parts (stand still)
via FoxyTunes

Charting The Single

2008-10-17T19:22:00.004+01:00

It was difficult for a squeaky pre-teen to know how to be extraordinarily metal. The boarding school had their own barber, a giggling psychotic flanked by two half-wits trying to become one assistant, and any boy whose hair threatened to reach their ears was sent to be sheared lest there be an outbreak of long-haired permissiveness.

One was forbidden from altering the uniform in any way so there were no patches, no denim jackets, no studs and no tassels. It was considered daring to slide a brightly coloured paperclip onto one’s blazer lapel, or to have an unusually skinny knot on one’s tie. Each boy was ordered to carry his schoolwork in a briefcase, presumably to foster an air of considered professionalism, but the strict uniform code did not extend to these cases. Starved of any other form of self-expression, we graffitied our own possessions until they resembled miniature slabs of the Berlin Wall.

The vast majority of briefcases were daubed in names of football teams, or other sporting heroes. There were only a few music-themed cases, after all if you were into Tears For Fears you would be best advised not to shout about it in such a male-orientated mini-society. However there were the psychobillies and, of course, the metallers. Quite a few budding artists attempted slightly squiffy-looking Eddies, but most settled for band logos in splattery Tipp-Ex, and so, without even hearing particular bands, I immediately knew which ones were the best.

I only had albums by Maiden, Motorhead and Acca Dacca, but it seemed that Dio was very popular, as were the three M’s of Motley Crue, Metallica and Marillion. Meat Loaf wasn’t well-liked though, as he was very obviously False Metal. Bon Jovi started to appear more and more often as the Eighties slipped from early to late, and the likes of Purple and Whitesnake became correspondingly less prevalent. Status Quo weren’t just False Metal, they were also terrifyingly shit.

The problem was getting exposure to these artistes. The divide between each Year at school was impermeable; you couldn’t just borrow an Older Boy’s Twisted Sister albums. Most Common Rooms were fouled by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark or U2 at best, while in my House it was a choice between Michael Jackson or fucking Five Star. The Third Year Boys, who had control of the Quiet Room, were busy cultivating a painful Mod revival although they did allow a little Python and a bit of bodypopping to Grandmaster Flash.

In general we First Year boys were expected to settle down to Now That’s What I Call Music and a heart-stopping series of inexplicable urges brought about by Clare Grogan and that brazen slut Janet Ellis.

So all I knew about most of the bands I was supposed to like was what I heard on the radio or TOTP. I knew of Crue from Smokin’ In The Boys Room, Van Halen from Jump, and ZZ Top from ‘Legs’ and co. Not to mention Acca Dacca, and their various singles. Then there was Marillion with the undisputedly effeminate Kayleigh and Lavender. I do sometimes wish I’d fathered girls in 85 and 88, simply so I could christen them Kayleigh and Kylie. They’d be 23 and 20 now, and horrifically disfigured psychologically no doubt…

I always felt I should love the rock music I came across in those times, even if I didn’t actually like it, but more often than not it secretly disappointed me. The good stuff, the hard and heavy rock anthems, were hidden away from me. I wasn’t allowed to stay up to listen to Tommy Vance on Friday nights yet, and I was too young to network with the metallers I could identify from their briefcases.

All I could do was cover my briefcase with the names of bands I knew nothing of…

I Can Sing A Rainbow

2008-09-15T17:06:00.001+01:00

It only took three primary colours, salvaged in ‘68 from the charred and shattered remnants of one of Hendrix’s Stratocasters, to create every shade of the metal spectrum. Everything that followed was a mix of The Big Three. Folk-tinged, blues-stealing, sex-obsessed rock gods Led Zeppelin contained the ore, the epic progressive boogie merchants Deep Purple were the forge, and Black Sabbath, an oppressive angry monolith, was the pig iron from which weapons of heaviness were crafted.

Every band thereafter was defined by their metallic ratio; (x)%Zep + (y)%Purple + (z)%Sabs = 110% Metal. And those percentages weren’t always a simple matter of influence, in many cases it was a statistical reality. The next generation, bands like UFO, The Scorpions and Judas Priest, reacted to the stagnant realities of life in the pre-stressed concrete seventies and produced a more scarred and corrosion-stained metal than that of the three originators, who were too busy being drugged and sexed up to their eyeballs in the arenae and stadia of America to notice. However, although the late seventies heavy rock whole was incredibly more metal than the sum of their late sixties hard rock parts, everyone knew their roots. And those roots were tangled up like a Norfolk family tree….

Zeppelin were fairly restrained for the most part, deciding to disband rather than continue with Cozy Powell replacing the regrettably dead John Bonham, and only allowed the drummer from Genesis to briefly join their ranks for a one-off after a suitable and solemn time of grieving.

Purple and Sabbath on the other hand, well at some points it has been difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. Don Airey, Glenn Hughes and Ian Gillan were in both bands, and the combined cast list of all participants reads more like the spread of a virulent STD in a sink estate rather than rock family history.

For instance, Elf singer Ronnie James Dio reached the public eye through ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. The little man Dio then replaced Ozzy in Black Sabbath, went solo under the band name Dio, then rejoined Sabbath. Ronnie James legged it again when Ozzy returned, then Sabbath took him in for a third spell but changed their name to Heaven And Hell. In between the second and third Sabbath stints Ronnie James Dio, fronted, naturally, Dio.

I must add a personal note here to testify that the man has been absolutely fucking legendary throughout all points in his career).

Meanwhile, ex-Deep Purple vocalist David Coverdale’s solo band, Whitesnake, had half of Purple in it, as well as Neil Murray who, naturally, went on to join Sabbath. Dio guitarist Vivian Campbell jumped ship in favour of Def Leppard, whilst Gillan guitarist Janick Gers moonlighted with Fish post-Marillion and eventually found a happy home with Iron Maiden through his work on Bruce Dickinson's first solo album.

Take a deep breath, there's plenty more where that came from. Purple have had fourteen band members, Sabbath have had an astonishing twenty-four. Take a minute to think about this, as tit's a tangible possibility that you were once in Black Sabbath.

It was the sidemen, the Vinnie Appices and Cozy Powells, that found retaining some form of identity the hardest. Imagine what it would be like when, under the influence of incredibly mind altering drugs, you strutted out on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans and suddenly had to remember which band’s songs you were supposed to be playing. There’s no point looking at who else is in the band, because they’re in the same boat as you.

It explains why bands have their name emblazoned fifteen feet high on stage backdrops despite the fact everyone in the audience must be pretty sure of who they’ve come to see. You’d be struggling to figure out what's going on, then turn around and see a massive seven-coloured arc and think “Christ, I think we must be Rainbow tonight. Ok, ‘Kill The King’ on a count of four, good luck lads, see you at the cocaine-fuelled orgy backstage, a-one-two-three-four….” It might have been easier to run heavy rock like an American Football team and have six different line-ups to put out on ten minute rotations.

Cozy Powell actually played in every single band in the world, apart from Zep, at some point during the late seventies and early eighties, sometimes for so brief a time as to be immeasurable. We have evidence; he was caught on tape with Rainbow, the Michael Schenker Group, Whitesnake, Emerson Lake and Powell, Black Sabbath, Robert Plant, Cinderella, Gary Moore, Roger Daltrey, and The Brian May Band. This was nothing compared to the promiscuity of Black Sabbath, who by the late eighties had actually featured a former member of The Clash, alongside anyone else who was walking past the studio that day.

The circle was complete when a Led Zeppelin member finally joined the confusion (and threatened a rupture in the space-time continuum). Jimmy Page teamed up with David Coverdale for a Plant-watering LP in the nineties, a situation so ridiculous that the only option left was for everyone to go right back to where they had started from.

Hurrah! Ozzy was back with Sabbath, Deep Purple were (briefly) Mark II again, and Zeppelin’s Page and Plant reunited, if only to spite John Paul Jones. Metal fans could again salute the originators without suffering involuntary wild-eyed snorts of incredulity at seeing Ian Gillan fronting Sabbath, Joe Lynn Turner steering Purple, or Pat Butcher from Eastenders settling herself on Bonham's old drum stool. There were less controversial versions of Rainbow and Whitesnake knocking about, and Ronnie James Dio even resurrected his self-referencing band. The legends were back where the legends were made.

But that bandswapping lark was fun while it lasted. Here's how it looked just before it turned farcical with Sabbath's 'Born Again' album;

Black Sabbath 1981:
Ronnie James Dio – vocals
Tony Iommi – guitar
Geezer Butler – bass guitar
Vinny Appice – drums
Geoff Nicholls – keyboards

Deep Purple 1981 (defunct since 1976):
David Coverdale: lead vocals
Tommy Bolin: lead guitar
Glenn Hughes: bass guitar, lead vocals
Jon Lord: organ, piano, keyboards, synthesizer,
Ian Paice: drums

Rainbow 1981:
Joe Lynn Turner - vocals
Ritchie Blackmore - guitar
Don Airey - keyboards
Roger Glover - bass
Bobby Rondinelli - drums

Whitesnake 1981:
David Coverdale – vocals
Micky Moody – guitar
Bernie Marsden – guitar
Jon Lord – keyboards
Neil Murray – bass guitar
Ian Paice – drums

Ozzy Osbourne 1981:
Ozzy Osbourne – Vocals,
Randy Rhoads – Guitar,
Bob Daisley – Bass,
Lee Kerslake – Percussion, Drums, Bells, Tympani
Don Airey - Keyboards

Ian Gillan 1981:
Ian Gillan - vocals
Janick Gers - guitar
Colin Towns - keyboards
John McCoy - bass guitar
Mick Underwood - drums

Mark Perry’s 1992 family tree gives a fuller picture, as does Pete Frame and Simon Robinson’s Deep Purple Roots And Branches. If you want to see a ridiculously long list of fantastic rock albums, take a look at Don Airey's discography.

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Now playing: Dio - Heaven And Hell
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Show No Mercy

2008-09-14T19:03:00.002+01:00

It’s an easy and pleasing short-cut to explain why the earth shifted for heavy metal in 1984, but This Is Spinal Tap wasn’t the genre-killer that most metal-haters hoped it would be. There were reports that a certain British heavy metal band walked out in disgust at a screening; it’s more likely that they had to leave due to laughing themselves into a state of hypoxia. Harry Shearer is still bemused, decades later, at how the film is held in such high esteem by the very people it was supposed to be humiliating. Perhaps he should watch the final few scenes again, where the classic ‘Tap line-up reunites to play sold-out concerts in the land of the rising yen. Despite themselves, their crassness, their stupidity, Spinal Tap is found to be a truly great band with truly great songs.

This Is Spinal Tap did force newer metal bands to either curb their lampoonable enthusiasms or to make them proudly larger than life. This did not come naturally to good old honest British Rock. Only one nation can really manage such astonishing levels of ascetic piety and sordid grandiloquence simultaneously without giving the slightest damn about consequence or opinion; America. Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, and W.A.S.P. on one hand, Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax on the other, all making waves, all making a name for themselves across the pond. Priest, Saxon, Purple and Whitesnake looked fumblingly outdated next to these lithe and vital new creatures, but all four bands released successful albums in 1984.

There was a far more potent force than satire sweeping across the UK during that year though, one that had fundamental and far reaching effects on the roots of heavy metal fandom at the time. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives, emboldened by a khaki victory at the polls mere months previously, decided to go to war with their enemies at home; the Trade Unions. The Tories were all about building business, enterprise culture, and freedom of the market. The Unions, meanwhile, wanted regulation, protection, and workers’ rights. At a time when the Soviet Union was still strong, (despite their increasingly swift turnover in leaders), and the I.R.A. was waging a terrorist campaign that made Al Qaeda look as threatening as the Monster Raving Loony Party, Thatcher learned that being tough was the only way to lead the weak. She took on the National Union of Miners by ordering widespread pit closures and by March of 1984 the coal miners of Britain had started a strike that would last for a year.

British heavy metal was always a product of the industrial working class, much to the chagrin of the art-school New Wave liberals who craved a Marxian authenticity for their cultural elitism whilst voicing despair and disapproval at populist infantile proletarian entertainment. Birmingham’s factories gave Black Sabbath and Judas Priest their sound. Def Leppard were forged in Sheffield, Saxon were born in Barnsley, Venom in Newcastle upon Tyne. Bruce Dickinson was from Worksop whilst his Iron Maiden bandmates were from the rough East End of London. All of these were fertile grounds for youngsters who wanted more than three chords and an attitude in their music.

London’s Docks had been in terminal decline for years, but South Wales, the Midlands and North of England and had been kept alive by a heavily subsidised coal industry. That meant a hundred and ninety six thousand weekly pay packets going from the pit to the pub, the shops, and to the kitty. Then there were the industries that depended on coal, not least the power stations generating the electricity that made twentieth century life possible.

Both sides in the dispute claimed the other was holding the country to ransom, but it was Tory business that won and wrote the history while Union industry lost and paid the price. Britain was in the middle of both recession and modernisation, and some areas would eventually emerge as a streamlined land of yuppies and bankers, homeowners and shareholders. But for the broad swathe of the nation that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution there was a lot less money about for the average working class youth, and an increasingly bleak future as employment prospects all but disappeared.

So there was no money for buying records, or gig tickets, no way of affording guitars or self-financed ep’s. Heavy rock bands cutting their teeth in the Working Mens’ Club were a thing of the past in these times of dancing to Frankie and Jacko down the discotheque and watching The Smiths on TOTP singing Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. Whitesnake were belting out ‘Slide It In’ as if nothing had ever happened, but it was the escapist glamour and power of America that rang true for the British heavy rock fan living through the Miners Strike and the Brighton bombing. The British bands that had gone international were relatively safe, untainted by smouldering anger and the pain of failure, but new bands found it increasingly difficult to find an audience and maintain a British identity.

Britain just didn’t make things anymore; the glory days were a long time passed. Judas Priest brought out Defenders Of The Faith in 1984 and remained massively popular in America, but there was no faith left at the end of the year in a country besieged by bomb blasts and industrial action. By then the funniest thing about This Is Spinal Tap was the idea of a new British heavy metal group becoming successful in the States at all. British bands that formed at this time, like Wolfsbane, The Dogs D’Amour and The Quireboys, (and even The Stone Roses, eventual indie darlings of the Manchester baggy scene), would struggle for years to gain any kind of success or attention outside the small ads of the specialist press.

But British metal, just like Spinal Tap itself, would eventually come out of purdah again, only this time it would be the Brits riding on the coat-tails of an American Invasion. Rock bands like Bon Jovi and Metallica came to conquer the land of Purple, Zeppelin and Sabbath and were horrified to find it in the middle of a Dark Age of dodgy Goth bands and Stock Aitken and Waterman polluting the charts. UK rock was resuscitated by the new Glam and Thrash scenes, and bands new and old went out across Europe and the US in search of glory as the economy boomed in time for another General Election. And every single tour bus had a cherished copy of This Is Spinal Tap on board…

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Now playing: Deep Purple - Pictures of Home
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Denim And Leather

2008-09-12T19:17:00.004+01:00

Every now and then Top Of The Pops would have a thirty second snatch of a heavy metal video, picking up from a chorus and ending during the first bars of a guitar solo. Just long enough for the viewer to realise this was a heavy metal band playing a heavy metal song popular enough to be in the Top 40, just short enough to prevent the reach for the remote control by protective parents and picky pop fans. This was Public Service Broadcasting at its most sanctimonious, meeting the greater good of the greatest amount of people with as little offence or injury possible.

So although your average TOTP viewer had heard of Maiden, Motorhead, Ozzy, Leppard, even possibly some of the softer American bands like Foreigner, they never really knew what they sounded like from the seconds between "who are this lot?" and "turn this rubbish off!". There was a proper place on the BBC for this kind of music, and that wasn't in an early evening family entertainment show. There should be no barking at moons when most people wanted to see that nice Spandau Ballet instead.

This was understandable at a time when a fourth channel seemed revolutionary, and indeed for Daily Fail readers preposterously dangerous, but it was achingly frustrating for those bands who craved more exposure. Leppard cracked America, where British rock bands were welcomed with open limbs, then Maiden followed suit. The third big band of the early eighties, Saxon, merely floundered in an evaporating puddle of indecision when the going got tough.

The first few albums were undeniable Top Ten popular classics, and Saxon twice played the legendary Donington. They should have gone on to be massive but, despite being hauled around America as special guests of Iron Maiden, they never quite managed to remain in the public consciousness for anything other than their stereotypical image.

Saxon released the epic Crusader album in 1984, the same year as some old touring pals of theirs released a satirical film that skewered the whole genre and forced bands to abandon the old ways or die.

The band didn't really change and by the late 80's Kerrang! had printed a damning live review of a gig with a headline, The Eagle Has Crash Landed, mocking the title of their powerful 1982 live album. Saxon remained fairly popular on the Continent, (and have now happily flourished at home in the more respectful late Noughties), but anyone listening to that classic concert recording can only scratch their head and wonder how things went so wrong.

In the long run it was everyone who failed Saxon, and not the other way around. No-one wanted stories of sword-wielding heroes, not in the 1984 of Spinal Tap. The traditional heavy metal values of denim, leather, and medieval fantasies suddenly seemed very old-fashioned, and people were laughing. Saxon then went softer as everyone else was getting harder and, like Judas Priest, got steamrollered flat by hungry new American bands with their brash aggression or pretty-boy looks. And because Saxon never got the exposure they deserved in the first place, everyone conveniently forgot they were once one of the best bands in the world.

There Was A Ninety-Two Decibel Rocking Band

2008-09-11T22:00:00.000+01:00

Music cassettes. Dear God! Much as it is difficult to imagine having only a flint hand-axe to skin a cat with, one can hardly begin to explain the near-uselessness of the pre-recorded music cassette. No skipping tracks, fast forward to the end of the damned thing to start side 2, and the fragile snap-happy nature of the frequently chewed up tape itself. But I had to make do, as CD’s were still far off in the horizon and my vinyl was to precious and bulky to take to school. Besides, user-friendliness was a foreign concept in the Wimpey burgered early eighties.

First year Boys didn’t have a study to retire to, and the Third Years’ had a monopoly on The Quiet Room. I had my ghetto blaster, a seriously large pair of headphones, and a draughty vestibule with a threadbare granddad chair as a location for my plebby metal solitude. And I had one of the greatest albums of all time to listen to.

Of course I had no idea at the time. All I knew was that AC/DC were a heavy band, and that this live album was pretty fucking exciting to listen to. The cover was a bit hardcore too, Angus plunging his Gibson into his stomach whilst Bon Scott warbled away. It took a little while to get used to the lead singer’s screaming and growling, but the rest of the band, well, it was the simple sound of brilliantly excessive rock and fucking roll.

There’s no reason for anyone reading this to be unaware of the three-pint excitement of the opening to Riff Raff, nor of Bon Scott’s brief ‘hot in here’ intro to Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be. And of course by the time ‘Bad Boy Boogie’ is rattling your eardrums you’ll know that this is something very special indeed. The swallow dive down to the obligatory Angus Young solo showcase is only to be expected at an Acca Dacca show, but it’s the skillful easing through the gears back up to Bon Scott’s triumphant declaration that ‘I wanna tell you no story, tell you no lie’ that separates AC/DC from any other chancers selling three chord songs about loose women. There’s all the light and shade of monochrome here, the swell of bravado and the bloodrush of confessional from five men with a shady past and an uncertain future, there’s the knowledge that this is what life is really like when you’re in AC/DC.

After all that there is the discovery that Side Two is where all the real hits are hiding. The ‘Angus’ chant that heralds Whole Lotta Rosie, and then the likes of High Voltage and Let There Be Rock, this album is riddled with absolute genius. It never failed to take a pale young boy away from a lonely life in windswept Suffolk to the boozy chaos of an April night at the Apollo.

Bon Scott was dead just over a year after that night in Glasgow. AC/DC went on somehow to find success on a worldwide stage but, especially for those of us that never saw Bon Scott in the flesh, 'If You Want Blood...' was their finest hour.

I Think I'm Turning Japanese

2008-09-11T20:55:00.000+01:00

It’s all about having one more, at the end of the heavy metal day when all the hard rock cows have come home and the grebo chickens are doing whatever the bloody cliché requires of them. One more is, well, one more. And my copy of Maiden Japan, purchased from an Older Boy at School, had one more.

Live output from ‘Arry’s Mob was once frighteningly rare, somewhat prized, and usually to be found on b-sides. Maiden Japan was the first live ep, from the Di’Anno era, intended to fill a little gap until the next album was released. It was the nearest thing Maiden fans had to a live album until 1985, and was also the last Iron Maiden record Paul Di’Anno appeared on.

I had the import version, which added Wrathchild to the running order of Running Free, Remember Tomorrow, Killers and Innocent Exile. The excitement of the recordings is infectious, high tempos and husky roars over a shrill thrilled Japanese crowd, but the appetite is whetted, not sated, by this mere morsel. It seems astonishing, especially as seven full live Iron Maiden albums were released between 1985 and 2005, that this was all there was in the record shop racks from a band famed for its live performances.

But Iron Maiden were in trouble by the time this was released. Killers had been received with mixed reviews and was weaker than the eponymous debut, although fan reaction had been strongly positive. By the time of the Reading Festival Steve Harris was looking for a change and within a month Di’Anno had played his last gig with the band. Maiden Japan, released four days after that date, could seem only to be useful as an historical document of the raspy fag-end sound of Di’Anno, before Dickinson’s Air Raid Siren voice was heard in late ’81. However the Maiden Japan recording of Remember Tomorrow was later overdubbed by the new singer and ended up being passed off as a live track from his first dates in Italy on the flipside of a subsequent single….

Maiden Japan is many ordinary things; a rack-filler while the band regrouped and soul-searched, an historical document, and a shambolic swansong for a troubled singer. But, as 1981 drew on and the NWOBHM fizzled out like a cheap sparkler, it could have been the last gasp for yet another band that almost made it big....

Rock N' Roll MF

2008-09-11T20:50:00.000+01:00

It is of course completely impossible to rid oneself of the friendly bacterium Metal Metallicus, but one can become disenchanted with the side-effects. I myself found difficulty in digesting vast quantities of heavy metal in the early nineties when the term motherfucker suddenly became omni-present in songs. Bands became utterly obsessed with this, to the extent that mothers were being fucked left, right and centre for as far as the ear could hear. The notion seemed to stretch the bounds of plausibility. Surely mothers, even in the developed world with its many and varied labour-saving devices, were too busy to be getting fucked several times within a five-to six minute song? Was it just rock and rap acts fucking all these mothers? How were such encounters initiated?

Then of course the internet was invented and we received visual proof of many, many, mothers having copious amounts of indecently graphic sex with strangers. Unless, of course, the captions are woefully inaccurate and merely reinforce the collapsibly fragile fantasy of being an initiative-free boy in a thunderously male penetratory world? Sadly, the phrase became so overused it completely lost all meaning before the great minds of the late twentieth-century could examine the available evidence.

However the most telling factor in this whole sorry state of imaginary affairs is that no-one seems to be able to consistently proclaim whether a motherfucker is a good or bad thing to be. The term can be added to any noun in the dictionary and a perfectly adequate song title will emerge, memorable and meaningless. And so, perhaps for this last reason alone, there still seems to be a lot of it about, motherfucker…..

Drop, Drop Dropping It Down, Oh So Slowly

2008-09-11T20:45:00.000+01:00

My first legal vinyl heavy metal album was, naturally, by Iron Maiden. It was a somewhat incongruous Christmas present to me, and so instead of contemplating the somewhat improbable Virgin Birth I was instead confronted by the murdering monster on the front cover. The flipside was something of a culture shock too. Steve Harris, standing on the drum riser, besides that same monster spewing smoke onto the rest of the band performing in front of a forest of hands; Iron Maiden concerts looked like fun places to be…

Of course I was a good four years out of date here what with Paul Di’Anno on vocals and Clive (how ostentatiously un-metal for a first name) Burr, on drums. This was a very different beast to the band I’d recently seen in the Aces High video and heard on my home-taped albums, but it was simply some more Maiden as far as I was concerned. I plugged my headphones into the living room stereo and stared at both sides of the cover for added atmosphere while listening to the album over and over again.

Killers has lost its power over the years, sadly, although some songs remain special. Opener, The Ides Of March stands out, after so many Thrash Metal bands went on to insist upon writing instrumental tracks to showcase their virtuosity, alongside Wrathchild, Murders In The Rue Morgue and the title track. Drifter was a favourite of mine at the time, as was Innocent Exile, but Killers became an album I reached for less and less as time went on and my collection grew. Songs like Another Life are weak and repetitive, and the lyrical content is so vapid in general that the pointless instrumental Genghis Khan doesn’t seem out of place on this album where frantic rifferama and melodic guitar duels are left to provide much of the character.

It was my first heavy metal album though, and for that alone I remember it fondly. Unfortunately, disaster was to befall; one day in 1986 I dropped the record onto a hard floor and a good bite-sized chunk broke away, meaning the first two tracks on each side were unplayable. I would place the needle upon the nearest playable groove to the damage and then start the record player, so as not to miss a beat, never really appreciating the irony of Killers being such a flawed record in the first place…

Heavy Metal Army

2008-09-11T20:40:00.002+01:00

So what, then, is heavy metal?

No-one knows.

Seriously.

The tighter the definition, the weaker the consensus. There is metal, there is not-metal, but the dividing line is so subjective it may as well be made of microscopic mermaids riding atomic unicorns towards an unknown futuristic past, as far as detectable reality and adequate description are concerned

There are finite degrees towards heavy metallity; for if there can be a concern over whether an artist or band is heavy metal or not, (e.g. Therapy?, Ash et al), then there must be some characterizing factor, something metallic that is tangible within them. The trouble is the degrees never stop, however finite they may be, as one gets more and more metal. Take year 1994; it is arguable whether Sepultura were more metal than Pantera at that time but the fantastic thing is Napalm Death were definitely more metal than both combined, without even trying, while Judas Priest were desperate to be more metal but every effort towards that goal weakened their claim.

History doesn’t help us. Aerosmith, the band that brought us ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’, were often described as heavy metal in the ‘70’s thus proving nothing except that the original roots have little definitive value nowadays.

We don’t even know when heavy metal began. Blue Cheer? Grand Funk Railroad? MC5? All these are arguably proto-metal, brothers Montgolfier in the Wright-sibling world of Sabbath and Priest. The people who, it is claimed, invented metal, such as The Beatles with Helter Skelter? They always seem to feel they started it inadvertently and then deliberately had nothing to do with it thereafter; deadbeat dads fathering a whole genre and allowing it to run delinquent through inattention and embarrassment at their role in the whole thing.

There are, however, certain things we can say for sure:

Heavy metal didn’t exist at one point, but there came a gradual awareness of the fact it had been around for a while. With no discernible beginning we can extrapolate it has no actual end, and is a circular universe of tail-munching metal snakedom, for ever and after forever, hallowed be thy name.

It is a relative term, in that you can, no matter how metal you are, always be ever more metal still, (although at the other end of the scale you can be absolutely not metal at all). There is always something more metal than you, even if that something seems only to be Metal itself.

Finally, and most tellingly, you can’t do heavy metal, you must be heavy metal. Even when a band, like U2, tries to ‘do’ heavy metal they always claim to ‘be’ ironic in intention, for they lack necessary courage, resolve and integrity to be true to their own hunger for the genre. That mockney tosspot from Blur got it right in Song 2, giving us some overall reason for the lack of definition for the term, for you can feel heavy metal (whether you like it or not). When you start to like it you are heavy metal and that, whilst being a wonderful and unique experience, is also utterly, finally, indescribable.

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Now playing: Deep Purple - Space Truckin'
via FoxyTunes

Initiation

2008-09-11T20:35:00.002+01:00

There were around thirty of us, aged from eleven to fourteen, sat in four rows of battered sofas and comfy chairs. Thursday night was Top Of The Pops, quite possibly the most exciting thing in 1980’s boarding school Britain apart from tuck shop day, or a heart-stopping glimpse of the new Cadet Leader’s impossibly beautiful teenage daughter. The school was a quasi-military private secondary for seven hundred sons of Royal Navy personnel, underwhelmingly ordinary despite the pompous circumstance and single-sex brutality, but it had a slang-ridden culture of sheltered elitism all its own. We knew no different though, we just knew topofthepops, uttered in one excited exhalation, was on at half past seven.

So we dashed back from the classrooms where we had evening homework so as to miss as little as possible. The show had all the biggest chart acts of the week, and the added promise of grown up girls dancing in tight outfits too. I will always remember the same boys, a year or two later in the same room, all utterly transfixed by the sight of a jiggling Adeva and unwillingly dreaming the same lonely mammalian fantasy. However this night I, a pale and skinny homesick twelve-year-old, was fascinated for once by something other than bouncing titties.

It was the video for Iron Maiden’s new single Aces High, released to promote their current World Slavery Tour. Initially it was the boundless energy of the frontman’s performance that struck me dumb. Running, scrambling, and indeed flying across the screen, I somehow got the impression that the muscular long-haired singer had managed a flying leap over the massive drum-kit (although further investigation reveals my befuddled mind had exaggerated things for me). Afterwards I recreated the moment; performing a mid-air splits over a small table and loudly ripping the crotch of my grey uniform trousers to mid-thigh on each leg. The seed was sown. When I found out that one of the older boys owned some Iron Maiden albums I pestered them relentlessly until I had my own home-taped copies to listen to on my chunky small-brand personal stereo, and quickly discarded the now-redundant Musical Youth tape I had previously cherished.

Well, doesn’t this whole thing just reek of closet-homosexuality? An all-male (and hazardously homophobic) boarding school, the sub-conscious adulatory worship of the more mature boys in the years above, the lad-doth-protest-too-much mention of fulsome breasts? The vibrant, attention grabbing singer with his gender-confusing hair, bewitching the twelve year old boy with a body still awaiting the physical and emotional cataclysms of puberty? The whole thing is very suspicious to a sexually experienced adult, especially to one who has never been a male pre-teen.

But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Boys choose their heroes for boyish reasons and not for some deep-seated adult sexual desire. It was about who I wanted to (grow up to) be like, not who we wanted to fondle, to kiss, to fuck or be fucked by. The honest suspicion must be reserved for those who continually ascribe grown-up sexual motivations to immature adolescent children.

And yet, non-sexual feelings are still immensely strong, given their crushing freshness to a developing child, and it is no exaggeration to say that I loved Iron Maiden, unconditionally and truly. Kristin Scott-Thomas, in The English Patient, points out the startling differences between various loves, platonic, sexual, filial and so on, but only the young boy in my memory, recently separated from family and thrust into a bizarre pseudo-society, can fully appreciate and understand the heroic devotion I developed upon encountering the world of grown-ups.

When I went home for half-term holidays I was interrogated by my concerned parents, who had suffered the wrenching guilt and fear of leaving their child in a strange place and needed some reassurance that they had done the best thing for me and my future. How was I, how were things, and how I was getting on? “I like Heavy Metal,” I squeaked self-importantly, “and I want a ghetto blaster and some Heavy Metal tapes for Christmas”.

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Now playing: Rainbow - Stargazer
via FoxyTunes

Rising Proudly Towards The Sky

2008-09-11T11:37:00.001+01:00

It all started, as so many things did in those days, on an autumn evening in a room full of adolescent boys.

Some might say this is entirely fitting for an introduction to a music genre supposedly centred around perpetual immaturity. Others might go on to suggest that no-one ever really closes the door on that room in terms of emotional development, choosing to retreat there in times of lows and highs rather than face life in its naked reality.

The actuality is incredibly different, something that is hard to communicate to a self-perpetually ignorant society that revels in shunning patience, practicality and personal responsibility. Whether it be Goths or gaming, emo or harmless fashion eccentricities, nothing irritates the Naughties Heat-reading mainstream more than a sub-culture that remains impervious to cultural assimilation. People can read about it in their Arts pages of national newspapers, see it documented in Arena or some other highbrow critique-fest, or sneeringly laugh at the comical parodies, but they can never get close enough to understand without having to properly belong.

Of course there is the difference between belonging and belongings. Top Shop can sell you Rock Chick chic, but tomorrow's conformity may demand urban grit or fairytale glamour. Why would anyone want to really belong, when to join in is to have one's identity so closely narrowed to a sometimes viciously derogatory and morbidly stagnant stereotype?

All that matters for the moment is that many do. The ignorance is interesting of course, as it reveals so much about modern society despite uncovering so little about the sub-culture itself, but this is a place to divulge the truths, big, little, profound and trivial about what happened to me and so many others in the past three decades. Facts first, analysis later, and then all shall become less opaque.

On that September day, back in 1984 before my teenage years had even begun, I became a Heavy Metal fan. This is the story of what happened next...