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.

Torchwood

This week I watched the final episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day on TV but this series has left me with rather mixed feelings about the show. It's not been bad - but it's not been exactly brilliant either. I suppose that's been my feeling with it all along although I had high hopes for this series. So, what was missing?

Torchwood started life as the "adult oriented" spin off of Doctor Who. What this initially meant was Doctor Who type chasing aliens stories but with gory violence, bad language and explicit sex scenes. This isn't what I had in mind for an "adult oriented" series and it just made it juvenile to my mind. However, it did improve as the series progressed and there were a few really decent bits of adult Sci-Fi - particularly the episode Out of Time which sees the consequences of three people who, having fallen through time from the early 1950's, find themselves struggling to cope with the future shock of modern Britain. The second series followed a similar pattern but with the tone and the writing being much more consistent and confident.

The third series of Torchwood took a different format: Children of Earth - one story told over 5 consecutive nights. For me, this was Sci-Fi gold with elements of classic British dystopian drama such as The Midwich Cuckoos and Quatermass but with intriguing modern elements. The synopsis was quite simple - aliens wanting to harvest the Earth's children for their own nefarious uses - but it was the exploration of how those in authority would deal with the crisis that was most intriguing and made this a very adult orientated concept - and not just of the post-watershed variety. Given this, I was looking forward to Miracle Day - so why am I disappointed with it?

The forth series of Torchwood was primarily not a BBC Cymru production - they may have had their name on the titles but it was mainly the American Starz network that were funding the production and pulling the strings. Russell T Davies may have penned the first (and by far the best) episode of this run but I felt his black humour, which had accompanied much of the earlier series, was missing. What was left felt like generic US Sci-Fi: a thin plot line padded out with irrelevant diversions to fill out the 10 hourly episodes. It's a pity, because the basic storyline, that one day people stop dying, should have provided plenty of opportunity to explore the consequences for mankind. On occasion it did, but then only fleetingly and often the more interesting story lines - for example the holocaust style death camps - were dealt with very superficially and did not explore the consequences for the lead characters. Only the sub-plot involving Gwen trying to protect her terminally ill father gave much opportunity to engage with the audience and, even then, I felt that Eve Myles had very little in the script to work with.

The American side of the cast were OK. Lauren Ambrose makes for a great villainess and I enjoyed Mekhi Phifer's CIA agent - particularly his love-hate relationship with Jack. Alexa Havins and Arlene Tur were a bit bland - again, a lack of scripting rather than any fault of the actors. Bill Pullman's child killer was intriguing as he was very against type for the actor but I didn't know what the writers wanted to do with him after the initial horror of his failed execution. I think the problem with many of the extended cast is that their characters were completely unnecessary for the plot and the eventual explanation of the origin of the "Miracle" and the resolution of the story felt like a huge cop out. Whereas the idea behind Children of Earth was very simple this one required a suspension of disbelief too far and would probably have been better left to Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If there is to be another series of Torchwood I think it would be better to return to single episodes as the first two series had - or to leave one writer in overall control as Russell T Davies was for the third series. I don't think Miracle Day was a complete disaster but I do think it could have been much better.

Whisky Galore

We have had one of our German friends' sons staying with us this weekend. He is working over in Ireland at the moment and fancied a weekend away from the farm (plus he never ever wants to see another potato again). It's always nice to have people visiting and he fancied seeing some of Scotland. Being a major tourist destination there are lots of things to see and do - although there are only so  many times that a visit to Edinburgh Castle can remain amusing. However, he fancied one thing I have never actually done before. We went and visited a distillery.

I think whisky is one of those things that rather divide people (what has recently become known as the marmite factor). I'm a fan of whisky but I can see why many people wince in disgust at the stuff: cheap whisky is like drinking battery acid. There are relatively cheap drinkable whiskies but I would not usually touch anything that costs less than £20 a bottle. Even then, I think the really decent stuff costs a good deal more. It's not the sort of thing that you would want to be drinking if your aim was to get drunk - whisky is a special treat, not Jakey juice.

We ended up going to Glengoyne distillery for largely no other good reason that it was one of the nearest to us that do guided tours. As it turns out, I could recommend it to anyone who has an interest in this sort of thing. It is a relatively small scale operation but the actual factory part of the site is fascinating. The brewing, fermentation and distillation process all take place within the same building and the actual equipment used will be familiar to anyone who has done home brew. The distillation process is not a million miles away from the sort of equipment that one would use in a school chemistry class except that it involves rather substantial copper pipes rather than the fragile glass test tubes and beaker of the laboratory.

Now I have been aware that different parts of Scotland produce different whiskies and that the difference in taste can be quite noticeable but I have never really appreciated why. I think I now have more of an idea as the tour itself is very educational. Glengoyne produce a Highland whisky but the tour guide was able to explain both their procedure and how it would differ from an Islay or Speyside whisky. It's actually worth noting this as many of the flavours in whisky are quiet subtle so it's worth knowing what they are and how they got there. Of course, there is the tasting and this is quiet generous. Unfortunately, I was only really able to take a sip as I was on driving duties. Still, I tried a few and I bought a few sample bottles to try at home.

I was quite interested at how much bottle went for in the shop. Some of it was quite reasonable, with their 10 year old single malt available for £27. Their more aged bottles cost a wallet worrying £89 and there was even a 40 year old bottle for an eye watering £350. I gave that one a miss although I was rather glad to note that the water they use is the same stuff I get out of the taps for free!

The Inevitable Doctor Who Post

I haven't posted anything about Doctor Who for a while. Mainly this is because it hasn't been on. It came back last week with Let's Kill Hitler which turned out to be a huge disappointment. I can recall reading a Sci-Fi short-story years ago where the main protagonist goes back in time to kill Hitler before he comes to power; but on returning to the present day (or at least the 1960's) he discovers that the US and Soviets have destroyed the world and then has to return to 1930's Berlin to save Hitler, and the world. I was kind of expecting something like that and not a huge MacGuffin to give the cast the change to mess about with Nazi uniforms. It's a pity as Hitler makes for a fascinating, if somewhat terrifying, historical character and Nazi Germany is ripe territory for Science Fiction anyway. Actually, the episode was better on second viewing but I was really hoping for something better this week in the form of Mark Gatiss' Night Terrors.

I really rate Mark Gatiss as a writer - particularly the horror genre that he is quite an expert in. Not that I have liked everything that he has done and I thought last year's Who adventure, Victory Of The Daleks, was a bit of a dog's dinner. However, he hasn't disappointed with Night Terrors and actually seems to have captured some of the hiding-behind-the-sofa scariness of the show's 1970's heyday without losing the modern series' humour. I think what works here is that he has tapped into primal fears - of the dark, of the unknown - in a self contained episode.

In a way, this was very much like the classic Doctor Who - possibly due to the relatively low budget setting. Funnily enough, I watched the Peter Davison adventure Resurrection Of The Daleks with the kids in the afternoon which had arrived via LoveFilm. I remember watching this when it was first on but I never really appreciated just how incredibly violent the whole thing was. From the police machine-gunning a group of people to death in the first scene through to the Dalek exterminatathon and even the Doctor, uncharacteristically, offloading the contents of a pistol into a Dalek creature. Now, whilst I do wonder why this managed to get a PG rating, it did strike me as to why it stood up so well. It's derelict dockland setting may have made for a cheap enough shoot and the bloodbath may have kept the action quotient high, and even the plot does rely on a great knowledge of the shows history (at the point this was made, some 20 series' worth). However, this doesn't really matter as the story is kept rolling along by a very good script. I think this has always been the case with Doctor Who (and Sci Fi in general) and despite the big budget of the new series the standout episodes have always been the ones with the best scripts.

Night Terrors is very much closer to horror than Sci-Fi which will, no doubt, annoy the Hell out of the Sci-Fi purists. Personally, I'm not that bothered as long as the story makes some coherent sense and, if anything, I think it would have been better if we were merely told that little George had been adopted and his past was unknown - as often happens in real life. This could easily have fitted in the Twilight Zone series - I'm sure there was something not dissimilar. This story did make sense to me - both in terms of being about the fears that all children have and in that it was about parenting and the odd tightrope that it can entail. It is very tempting as a parent to wrap children in cotton wool rather than let them face up to their fears and, in essence, this is what has happened to little George. Here his fears and magical thinking have become realised so that they affected all of those around him and for many children their fears are quite material. I could really identify with the father's dilemma and I felt that the whole subject was very well researched which is interesting as, as far as I know, Mark Gatiss doesn't have any children of his own.

Amy and Rory didn't really have two much to do with this episode but their exploration of the doll's house had a feel of the early series where much of the first episode of a serial would involve the characters wandering about an unfamiliar setting. One of the early 1960's episodes actually involved the cast being miniaturised - I don't know whether this was an influence. However, this and the creepy dolls worked very well for me. I think this is the best script that Mark Gatiss has done for Doctor Who - even surpassing The Unquiet Dead which was one of my favourites from Christopher Eccleston's series. In fact, I think it is also my favourite from this series, surpassing the Rebel Flesh two parter. It remains to be seen what the rest of the series produces.

In terms of classic scary Who this is right up there. My 9 year old son claims not to get scared by anything although sometimes things do bother him. We watched the first Harry Potter film the other night and one scene really did startle him - it was certainly not what he had imagined from reading the book. He says that Night Terrors didn't frighten him at all: in fact he said he was disappointed that it wasn't scary which rather indicates to me that he was slightly spooked. As for the younger two I felt this was a bit too much for them so I'll save this for a later date. My younger boy suffered from real (medical) night terrors over a two week period when he was around 4 years old - and that's quite a disturbing experience for any parent.