Heavy Metal

I've been sorting through my old vinyl albums lately. I've never made any concerted effort to replace the old LPs with CDs or other digital media but occasionally the old albums have gone beyond playable. I replaced all the Beatles with CDs and I'm also doing that with Led Zeppelin as well. There have been a few artists where I seem to have had a spate of buying their LPs but it's actually just a few of the tracks I like. In these cases, it often quite easy to find a suitable "Greatest Hits" or Anthology collection which covers almost anything I would want to listen to. Saxon is a case in point. I bought around 6 of their albums in the mid-1980s but I recently found a triple box set which covered almost everything I would ever want to hear by them (and, in fairness, most of their stuff is pretty formulaic). I also picked up a Budgie compilation for next to nothing which nicely replaced a few taped albums from them - I saw the band in Cardiff but it must have been towards the end of their career and I couldn't find their albums in the shops for love nor money. Well, particularly the latter.

The one common factor I've found with this is that I've bought a lot of music over the years that would be generally classed as "Heavy Metal". It's actually one of those slippery terms as originally it was used rather pejoratively and it was only in the late 1970s that bands were arriving on the scene that were happy to self identify with this label: the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (or NWOBHM to use what must be the ugliest acronym of all time). Prior to that it was used as a lazy synonym for "loud and talentless" by dreary music journalists whose idea of fun would be a 3 hour atonal rock symphony inspired by a cat walking down a piano during a Schoenberg recital - which is all well and good but sometimes one wants to listen to something that simply goes Kerrang! I always assumed that the term originated from the Steppenwolf song Born to be Wild in which the phrase "Heavy Metal Thunder" describes the sound of a motorcycle engine - a heavily overdriven electric guitar is similar to this. In fact it appears that its use as a musical genre is attributable to Rolling Stone journalists - and not in a good way.

All this got me thinking as to how I ever got into this genre in the first place. It's an extreme form of music and it's not one that I would have been exposed to whilst growing up. It was rarely played on mainstream radio and there was nothing much like it in my parents' record collections - although on closer inspection there precedents were their. My father's collection of rock and roll singles (sadly, this was mostly on fragile 78s) included the likes of Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. There were many others by less well known artists that really pushed their sound to the extreme. I was also very taken with his classical records and even here there were the musical precedents - this might sound a bit outlandish but the opening Power Chords of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, the flashy soloing of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor and the heavy riffing of Holst's Planets Suite have all had a direct influence on Heavy Metal musicians and certainly had an effect on me. Occasionally, Heavy Metal would seep into the mainstream - odd appearances on Top Of The Pops (which, of course, had Whole Lotta Love as it's theme tune) or in unlikely places like the Weekend World political interview programme which had Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride as its theme.


I can't remember exactly when I first went down to the local record emporium and came back with a Heavy Metal album. Many of the bigger record shops, such as Woollies and John Menzies, weren't particularly Metal friendly and even the larger chains like HMV weren't exactly extensive. Some of the smaller outlets were better. There was a shop close to my house called Rox which did a good selection of Rock music and I found two gems in Birkenhead's Skeleton Records, an Aladdin's cave of new and used LPs, and Liverpool's Probe, who stocked some of the more outlandish alternative acts. However, at some point I must have gone out and bought a Heavy Metal album - but which was the first? One possibility is the album Queen II. I bought this on the back of the Bohemian Rhapsody song assuming that it would sound similar. Well, it does and it doesn't. Queen II is their heaviest album and is a reminder, if any was needed, that they were a Heavy Metal act in the 1970s. By the 1980's their output moved dramatically away from overdriven guitars and sonic melodrama but songs like Ogre Battle are about as about as sonically brutal as anyone else at that time.

Another possibility for a first purchase is an odd compilation called Axe Attack. It's mainly odd because it was released under the K-Tel label who were best known for releasing TV promoted compilations of cheesy holiday hits: Viva Espania and Boney M type of things. This did have an influence on me as I bought many of the accompanying albums as a result. In fact, I wonder how many other people got into the genre after hearing this. It starts off with Rainbow's All Night Long which had been a big top 10 hit. I bought a couple of Rainbow albums but they always ended up being not quite as good as I imagined they would be. However, I did buy the album Glory Road by Gillan after listening to Running, White Face, City Boy - and a magnificent collection that was. The third track was Judas Priest's Breaking The Law. I thought I had the album this came from but I can't find it right now - I do, however, have Stained Class. The next few tracks are ones I never bothered much with: Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch Fever is OK but I was never inclined to buy any of his albums; the Scorpions' Make It Real was very polished but not really my sort of thing; and Girlschool's Race With The Devil was great until I heard the original by The Gun. Side One finishes with Doctor Doctor by UFO which I liked but I have never bought anything else by them - maybe I should.

Side Two was where it really started to get interesting for me. It kicks off with AC/DC's Highway to Hell. They are really closer to a straight forward Rock and Roll band than Heavy Metal but Highway's crunching opening riff was right down my street and the album remains a favourite. Next is Whitesnake's Ready and Willing. This is more blues rock and, again, the accompanying LP seems to be missing - however, I did buy a decent Whitesnake compilation this year which has most things I would want. The next track is Iron Maiden's Running Free but this is different from the album version. I'm not sure if this was a single or demo version but it sounds more raw and aggressive than the album take - maybe they should have gone with this version. The next couple of tracks are so-so: Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion is OK but it's a kind of American Rawk that I've never quite got into; Frank Marino & Mahogany Rush do something called You Got Living - aside from the poor grammar it is as forgettable now as it was then (apparently he is big in Canada).


The last two tracks are classics and probably pushed me into the more extreme end of the genre. Black Sabbath's Paranoid is a relentless chug but I bought the album of the same name and was blown away by Ozzy's doom laden lyrics against Tony Iommi's grinding guitar. The final track is Motörhead's Bomber. I loved this - especially with the stereo turned up to 11. The Bomber album is much of the same: fast, aggressive and with Lemmy spitting anger at the world about him: Ain't a hope in hell / Nothing's gonna bring us down / The way we fly / Five miles off the ground. Total blisteringly nihilistic bravado as Lemmy defiantly and ferociously stands up against the world - or maybe it was just about military aircraft. The ending of this track is phenomenal: whereas any other band would play out with a dull guitar solo, Motörhead pound out the same two chords for over a minute until the track fades but the sonic attack still lingers (maybe that was tinnitus). However, this was extreme rock and roll - and I was hooked.