Heavy Metal is essentially a club, a gang with an allegiance to a musical and social set of values. It might be frowned upon by society at large, but that’s something that binds Metal even more tightly. Metal has always retained a dubious conservative mindset – black or gay Metallers are rare indeed. I’m not claiming the whole Metal community are a bunch of Daily Mail readers – heaven forbid, only most of them – but as a movement, and right through its 30-odd year history, those not of a WASP predilection have tended to align themselves somewhere else. They take one look at this bunch of clowns and for the rest of their lives say to themselves, ‘well, at least I’m not one of those …’ Metal fans know that people say this about them and they resent it; this partly fuels the ‘nihilism’ mentioned in the Collins Dictionary definition. This conservatism probably stems from Metal’s lack of outside stimuli from other musical or social trends; its bonding conformity has tended to squeeze out any progress society might have made since Metal’s inception, so ever since it has revolved around the old-fashioned ideals it’s always felt comfortable with.
The closest Metal has ever come to genuine inter-racial embrace (ignoring revered icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Phil Lynott, etc. who were unique individuals and succeeded despite rather than because of, the prevalent racial perception) was in the late 1980s, with the sudden appearance of Funk Metal and the all-black band Living Colour. These four chops-laden dudes from New York knocked down doors the genre had assumed would remain closed for ever, were tentatively embraced by an ethnically parched community, and fundamentally altered the rock landscape for the better. They set the pace for a glut of non-white rockers, who now had the freedom to express themselves within a format they had always loved but had nevertheless felt excluded from all these years. A few months down the line from Living Colour’s hit single ‘Cult of Personality’, every Metal band in the world had shoehorned a turgid funk track or two into their set, and were claiming Sly Stone and Funkadelic as deeply influential to their music. Funk was Metal’s ‘next step’ for a while – another blast of life-maintaining oxygen like the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (an exciting young vanguard of leather and perms in the late 70s that included Iron Maiden and Tygers of Pan Tang), the arrival of Guns n’ Roses in 1986, and the revolution of Thrash Metal, popularised by the likes of Metallica in the mid-80s. These arrivals kicked Heavy Metal’s perpetually fat and lazy arse and forced it into different directions – or at least kept us busy objecting to them. Metal would have died long before without their cumulative influences.
Homophobia is an accusation that one can direct much more easily. Heavy Metal has always been almost comically heterosexual, professing a collective horror at the antics of the homosexual pop fraternity and the gay community in general, which is ironic when you think about the basic trappings of the genre: long hair, tight leather trousers, phallic symbolism, make-up, bondage gear – the look is steeped in sexual ambiguity. The magnificent irony of this came in 1998, when the lead singer of arguably the ultimate Heavy Metal band, Judas Priest, left the group and outed himself live on MTV. Throughout his career Rob Halford had dressed in leather peaked caps, shaved his head and showered himself in blindingly camp iconography. Yet the sound of the Metal community’s jaw hitting the floor on his confession was loud indeed, and delightfully naïve. As with Freddie Mercury, it was suddenly all so obvious. Halford had even alluded to it in his anthem ‘Hell Bent For Leather’. But how were we supposed to tell from that?
Rob standing outside his mum’s house in Birmingham.
The most obvious visual sign of allegiance to the Heavy Metal cabal has always been in the long hair. In many ways it’s all you ever really need to demonstrate your purity, your unarguable virility. Short-haired Metallers always protest about this, but that’s only because they’ve been told they can’t have long hair by their parents or their bosses. Long-haired Metallers know this only too well and will always feel superior about it. Occasionally you get long-haired Metal musicians who cut their hair to be clever. They always grow it back again, though, unless they’ve done it because of baldness, in which case they wear a big hat, or a bandanna, or both at once with some sunglasses.
Wigs are more common than the world of Heavy Metal would like to admit. It’s vital to maintain the pretence that your hair will never fall out. Famous wig-wearers include all of Kiss, David Lee Roth and Ritchie Blackmore; W Axl Rose is just a rumour. Spinal Tap caused controversy just by wearing wigs in their film. It was as if the Metal community was saying, If they’re going to make a film about Metal, at least use people with real long hair.
The Heavy Metal community has never been one hundred per cent comfortable with the film Spinal Tap, despite its earnest claims to the contrary. The film’s frightening accuracy horrified Metal bands and fans alike when it was released in 1984, and the Metal community, as one, complained that it just wasn’t funny. But director Rob Reiner’s fondness for the subject and his attention to detail eventually won us over, until eventually it became bad form to protest. That is until the buggers decided to come back in the late 80s, this time as a ‘real band’, with a new album and gigs and everything. Oh no, not again, said Metal, and all the rock mags handed Break Like the Wind terrible, thank you very much now go away, reviews. The ‘band’ thought Metal fans would love it, as they’d been claiming to love the movie, but they didn’t, they hated it, and the whole project died a messy death.
Ha ha ha, who’s laughing now? we gloated.
Keep it True. Death to the False.
SILVER
It always troubled me that Alex got everything before me, if indeed I ever got it at all. It didn’t really matter because I was round at his place all the time anyway, but it still rankled, so I came up with a foolproof idea: I would invent my own AC/DC album, design a cover and a track listing for it, and try to convince Alex that it was the real thing. – a ‘lost’ DC album, never mentioned anywhere, found exclusively by me. It was a brilliant idea, except for one key element: I had no music to go with it. I would have to say that, unfortunately, I had mislaid the actual cassette along the way. Frustrating, yes, but these things happen. But it was brilliant, trust me. In fact Silver, the superb and legendary missing AC/DC album, was, in my humble opinion, The Greatest Record They Ever Made.
I constructed the cover out of black cardboard and wrote my much-practised AC/DC logo in silver pen in the middle. Underneath that I wrote Silver, all classy like, hardly smudging at all. Then I carefully listed ten made-up songs which I thought sounded like DC titles: ‘Stick it Further In’ and ‘Give it to me Heavy & Hot’ and ‘Let’s Rock Hard All Night’ and ‘AC/DC Forever’. I wrote those in silver pen on the inside, and the credits too – all tracks by Young, Young and Johnson, without a single mention of Hunter anywhere.
One afternoon as we walked downhill from home towards the water meadows, I showed Alex my cassette box with great pride and no hint of shame. I explained the extraordinary story behind the album, and the tragic tale of the lost cassette. Alex listened politely and toyed with the case. I described the songs, even sang him a few, then it went back in my pocket and we never mentioned it again.
It was around this time that I started my weekly charts in a green exercise book that I’d stolen from school. It was 1982 and I was sick of the charts on the TV and radio because there was no AC/DC in them. (There was that year, actually – ‘Nervous Shakedown’ sneaked in at the low 30s for one solitary week. I bought it, of course, and then pretended not to be disappointed when I realised it was exactly the same as it was on the album.) So to redress this imbalance I came up with the idea of compiling my own charts, based on my current favourite songs. Each week I solemnly transcribed my