After pushing Iron Maiden my way, one day my friend Crip (His real name was Christian, but he had a gammy leg or something, so he was forever dubbed 'Crip') sidled over to me clutching another C90 in his grubby mits - Crip, by the way had proper long hair, at the time when mine was just a glorified mullet, he wore a denim jacket with patches on it at a time when I was still saving my paper-round money up in the hopes of buying a black leather jacket, Crip was cool.
He pressed the tape into my hands and told me it was by his favourite new band, but, he warned me, they might be a bit heavier than Iron Maiden or Slayer. So I took the tape home and put it in the stereo, pressed play and my jaw dropped. This noise was insane! The cover looked properly satanic (I kind of knew that some strange people looked down on Heavy Metal because it encouraged satanism, and that made listening to it A GOOD THING, but those sort of people also thought Dungeons and Dragons mad people worship Satan too, which plainly wasn't true - all that sacrificing virgins would have gotten in the way of all that dice rolling anyway...)
Ironically, listening back to Testament now, they are probably at the blunt end of Thrash metal, unsubtle, and kind of cliched, but then metal isn't a genre reknowned for it's subtlety, hence it's appear to teenage boys I suspect. Sadly, like most of the metal bands I've mentioned, Testament left their heavy roots behind them shortly after I got into them, turned to making generic rock and went a bit bland. Still, this tune serves as a reminder of the fist time I had heard music that genuinely seemed shocking.
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