A Condensed History of Heavy Metal
In 1968 some Brummy kids were bored of listening to the Beatles, or whatever their parents listened to, and so they dressed in Black on a Saturday, went down to their local church hall and played Blues based Rock their own way: slower, harder and louder than ever before. They bit the head off a bat and called this Heavy Metal. They were pronounced to be the devil and were not allowed to play in church halls any more…
In the 70′s a new wave of British kids were bored of listening to Black Sabbath, they wanted to differentiate themselves against what those old people from Birmingham were playing and they said no, slower is not scary, you must ditch the blues and play it fast. So they took that music and played it harder and louder and faster. This was the scariest music could get. Wasn’t it?
By 1982 there were some kids in Newcastle who looked at Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Saxon, Judas Priest and Budgie and said that playing music fast is not scary enough, you must paint yourself to look like an evil clown. And so they painted their faces to look like the dead and they took that music and played it even harder, even louder and even faster. They recorded the most extreme album in the world and they called it Black Metal.
For a little while Venom ware the scariest kids on the block and all was good in the world of evil, but then some new kids in Norway came along and despite everyone telling them that it could not be done, they simply laughed in their faces and said: Call that scary? This is scary: they then burnt some churches, ate each others brains and invented Scary Metal. This was not around very long before someone said “ha – look we took Scary Metal and then shit down its throat and we have invented Scariest Metal” and then they had sex with dead people… Everyone went “Oh fuck, what those dudes did before they killed each other, that is really fucking scary” and they collectively shit their pants. Nothing could ever be as scary or as extreme as that.
But they were wrong. A band with a one armed drummer had gone to America and done something which was much much scarier than anything that had come before: they had made compromises and invented Soft Rock… This encouraged an alarming number of Men to dress as women in the name of Metal and also led to god fearing groups of Americans to become all confused and they went on to conceive Christian Metal (in a purely non immaculate way).
Fortunately another group of men including a funny little Danish hobbit, got very angry about all of this and they thrashed their way to Never Never land, becoming the new gods of Heavy Metal along the way. A little while later, back in England a young man called Daniel said “Hey you know what I think? that Jesus is a right cunt” and people sat up and listened to his Filth. Slowly there was a realisation that you only had to go one louder, one harder, faster, slower, or one deader and you too could trump that what went before and invent your own genre. New genres are created with every issue of Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Rock Hard, Terrorizer: Death, Doom, Drone, Industrial, Power, Sludge, Speed, Stoner, Thrash, Extreme etc. And so this has been going on for hundreds of years and will continue to do so until the end of time…
Here are my three universal truths about metal:
- Nu-Metal was dreadful and made by fuckwits.
- It is a lot of fun to throw quick lime over freshly sliced self harming Emo kids
- There is one true Punk, Metal, Garage band who could reunite the whole genre of hard rock into one big happy Rock & Roll family: and they are Electric Eel Shock from Japan… It is a shame that they didn’t have a better manager!
