Faith No More's album 'The Real Thing' was another one of those hot tapes that got passed around from person to person. It sounded kind of different to the usual metal stuff we were listening to - almost poppy, which as you will recall was a no-go area for us - but it was okay, because Metal Hammer and Kerrang were writing about them. They even *gasp* sang love songs.
This album is one of those super-nostalgic records - one that sound tracked an exact moment in time - the summer between finishing my GCSEs and starting my A - Levels. Without coming over all 'Stand By Me' it was a great summer, filled with great friends with stupid nick-names (Bod, Bish, Bobo, Crip, Taff...) my first (unrequited) crush and that time we went to see a dead body but got hassled by Keifer Sutherland...
Also, hanging out watching Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes and being exposed to music videos for more or less the first time - ones that you couldn't find anywhere else and certainly weren't shown on Top Of The Pops, which never showed any metal anyway (apart from the odd Iron Maiden track) and suddenly VHS tapes were being traded as eagerly as C90s.
One of the things about getting into any kind of music is how cool it is to explore the genre. Someone gives you an Iron Maiden tape, you head down to the local Morrisons to snap up Powerslave and Stranger In A Strange Land. Soon you have the entire Iron Maiden back catalogue, so you scour the pages of Metal Hammer looking for news of a new Iron Maiden release.
And in the mean-time, you start to explore the other big names of the genre. Soon you are inahbiting the basement of Crash Records, flicking through the Thrash section for the other big names. Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax. Vinyl is bought, tapes swapped and soon you have a pretty comprehensive collecton of the more well known works. But it's still not enough. The reviews sections of magazines are scrutinized even more for things like 'if you like Metallica, you might like this band' and then the more obscure bands, the ones that never make the charts - not even the Heavy Metal Chart on The Chart Show - are part of your ever expanding collection.
By this time I was going to see gigs, stage diving like a proper mosher, with my long hair and my leather jacket. But because the big bands only toured once in a blue moon - and the usually only playing huge venues that involved coach trips - I started going to see any metal band that came anywhere near Leeds or Bradford. And once I saw a band called The Beyond, and fell in love. As far as I know, they only made one album before disappearing, which was a shame because they were great. And pretty obscure too, which gave them a certain aura of cool in my record collection. They were also, perhaps a sign of the fact that I was growning out of my metal days as they were pretty subtle by comparison to a lot of the other stuff I was listening to. Plus they didn't sing about death and the devil all the time.
If Testament were shocking, then Slayer were like a lightning bolt to the brain. The scream at the beginning of this song, the fact that it's about The Holocaust, the noise....
This song is still controversial to this day and to be honest it's still pretty indefensible, especially subject-wise. Slayer flirted with Nazi imagery, and some of the members of the band have said some controversial things. I think that as a teenager who was immersed in war (my reading material was Warlord, Commando and Battle comics, spending Sunday afternoons watching 633 squadron and The Dambusters) I was perhaps lacking the critical faculties to realise that it wasn't cool to sing about death camps in a way which seemed if not glorifying then rather un-critical.
Still, Slayer fucking rocked*. They were the only one of the Thrash bands I was into who never sold out, never stopped playing rough brutal metal and Angel of Death, along with the whole Reign In Blood album (which pack in 10 songs in a punk-rock 35 minutes) is still a cool listen, even if some of the lyrics did make me laugh out loud when I was compiling this list.
I've perhaps been a bit unfair on the whole metal scene in these last few entries. I loved it as a teenager, and it set me on the path to discover all sorts of other music, made me realise that the tribal nature of genres is essential in forming an identity as a person (especially as a teenager)
It's just that it all seems a bit, um, silly in retrospect, a genre that seems designed to be grown out of once you leave puberty - looked back on fondly for sure, but the simple fact is, once you've heard Reing in Blood and Kill 'Em All, as a genre there really is very few other places to go
Of course if anyone disagrees with me, and want to point me in the direction of some more current metal then I'd love to hear it, and my inner awkward teenager would be eternally grateful...
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.
When heavy metal wasn't enough, there was Thrash. It was louder, brasher, angrier, the jeans were tighter, the hair longer. Like a junkie, suddenly normal metal wasn't enough. I needed faster, harder, more more more. I needed Metallica...
By now there was a little gang of us, all dressed in black, hanging around on park benches and drinking cheap cider on a friday night. We swapped tapes of new bands, pored over Kerrang, Metal Hammer and occasionally hung out at one of my rich friends house who had MTV and watched Headbangers Ball. Seek And Destroy was our anthem, we used to sing it drunkenly much like a generation later, other, similarly drunken fools would sing Oasis tunes.
Thrash bands tended to have slightly different concerns to more traditional metal. In the 80s especially, the fact that govenments were corrupt, that pollution would kill us all or if it didn't then nuclear war certainly would. It fitted perfectly with trying to find a world view as a teenager - even if to my more jaded ears now some of it seems hilariously unsubtle, but then to be fair, metal as a genre is hilariously unsubtle.
Metallica are now more famous for being grumpy old men who hate file sharing, acting like primadonnas on documentaries and generally being the kind of people who the Metallica that recorded Kill Em All would have hated. I think that there is a lesson in that, but I'm not sure what it is.
However, Seek And Destroy, and pretty much all of the first 3 Metallica albums, are just about as good as metal ever got. And if you can't find something to love there, there really is no hope for you...
If Iron Maiden made me want to learn to play guitar, Guns 'n' Roses made me want to be A ROCK STAR. I mean, sure, those guys from Iron Maiden made good music, but they seemed a little, well, boring. Bruce Dickinson seemed really posh and the rest of the band came across as down to earth and a little at odds with the noises they made on stage.
Guns 'n' Roses came with swagger, attitude and a guy with a big hat. Plus girls seemed to like their music, and that seemed like something that might be important one day soon, as my teenage hormones prepared to crank themselves up to wreak havock on my poor unsuspecting self.
When I started compliling this list, I listend to a lot of my old heavy metal albums, and a lot of it seemed pretty cliched, some of it downright awful and at least one song made me laugh out loud at how terrible it was (Hello Sacred Reich...) but this tune never quite left my ipod and how could it? That guitar intro is just majestic! It has actual human feelings in it - an aspect lacking from most heavy metal, where anger is the only discernable mood in most bands catalogue - and you could kind of dance to it, rather than just mosh, if that was your thing of course.
This song was, of course, as close to the mainstream as it was acceptable for a young mosher to go. Liking 'trendy' music was anathema to us. Chart songs were death, pop was some sort of lower life, to be mocked, hated and ignored. Every non-metal head was a person to be converted. I used to turn up to parties like a Jehova's Witness with a mix-tape or two in my pocket to try and bring the unsuspecting into the metal fold. At least one tape was flushed down the toilet...
I was about 14 when I discovered heavy metal. My friend Crip (who disappeared and no-one seems to know where he went. If, on the off-chance you are reading this Crip, 'Hello') gave me another tape, this time of Live After Death by Iron Maiden and I was transfixed. Again
Heavy metal, as a genre, seems designed to appeal to teenage boys. The key ingredients (at least of classic heavy metal) are The Devil, War, Murder and violence. All the stuff that your average teenage boy thinks is really really cool. Look at the covers of any Iron Maiden album for example - they have a big ol' zombie on the front for Jebus' sake. How could any self respecting 14 year old not love that?
Plus, the music is loud, aggressive and generally unappealing to anyone over the age of 20. It encourages tribal behaviour in much the same way as football does and there were, at least in my circle of moshers, no girls allowed...
This isn't, by the way, me being dismissive of metal as a genre, I'm just listing the reasons that I loved it so much. Iron Maiden were a perfect gateway drug into the black lands of Heavy Metal - their albums looked like the Dungeons and Dragons books I was reading, they knew that war was simultaneously horrific and totally cool (Growing up in the 70's and 80's, I was surrounded by films like Dambusters and The Guns of Navarrone, reading Battle Action, Commando and Warlord comics)
Plus, suddenly, my Mum was telling me to 'turn that racket down', I got to wear tight black jeans and t-shirts with monsters on them. It was everything I needed.
Iron Maiden were the prefect band to obsess over - their lyrics were full of literary, historic and cinematic references that spotting made you seem cool, Their record paintings were full of tiny little details that meant you could spend hours poring over, just to spot the Blade Runner or Dr Who reference
Musically, they had all the moves that metal heads love, but everyone else can't stand. The pseudo-operatic song structures, the 'widdly widdly' guitar solos that made me want to learn how to play (and then quit shortly afterwards when I realised I was never going to be as good as Dave Murray) and the 15 minute songs.
Pandora's box was open, my hair was growing longer and I was now a mosher...
