the battering flood of watts coming at you from all those Marshall amplifiers.
It’s primal, all the way through – stick-of-rock primal. Sound, volume, pummelling. It even hurts the next day. Brilliant!
The loudest musical performance ever recorded (so far), hitting a marauding 129.5 decibels (louder than a jet plane take-off), was achieved by an American band called Manowar during a concert in Germany. Manowar were one of those bands that gave Metal a bad name. They epitomised the clichés we were all so ashamed of. Manowar wore animal hides and fur, had huge biceps and Viking-style handlebar moustaches. They cut themselves with a ceremonial dagger and then signed their record contract in their own blood. They had names like Scott Columbus, Ross the Boss, Death Dealer and Rhino. They believed in True Metal (their own music), and dedicated their entire career to the vanquishment of their nemesis, False Metal (music other than their own).
Manowar set out to wither the competition with decibels and gesticulation. They succeeded up to a point, inspiring their huge and loyal fanbase to write letters into Kerrang! magazine accusing bands like Poison and Motley Crue of peddling False Metal, in terrible spelling. Every album Manowar released was even more epic than its predecessor, more grandiose in its warrior vision. They’re still going today, still topless and wearing loincloths, their moustaches just slightly craggier. False Metal is still out there winding them up, and they remain committed to destroying it. Joey, Manowar’s muscled bass player, sums up their ethos well: ‘The whole purpose of playing live is to blow people’s heads off. That’s what we do; that’s the energy of this band. We’re out there to kick ass. We’re out there to turn our gear on and blast. We’re out there to kill. That’s what Metal is. Anyone saying otherwise is not playing Heavy Metal. We will melt your face!’
Manowar.
Metal’s love of volume is ubiquitous. Here are some song titles celebrating, and, in some cases, frantically urging you to turn the volume up to aid your listening experience:
‘I Love it Loud’ – Kiss. A simple paean to loud music. Gene Simmons, the bat/demon character in the group, wants you to feel it right between the eyes.
‘Blow up your Speakers’ – Manowar. Speaks for itself. They also criticise MTV in this song, for not playing their music, a statement that to this day remains unrequited.
‘All Men Play on 10’ – Manowar again. Ten refers to the volume dial.
‘Blow up your Video’ – AC/DC. Because it’s not loud enough, and the speakers have already been blown up, elsewhere. This is another protest at lack of television airplay. It also makes the point that videos are commercial and unnecessary and somehow False Metal.
Loudness: the self-explanatory name of a Japanese Metal band of the 80s, humorously nicknamed Roudness by the Metal press. They wrote songs called ‘Rock Shock (More and More)’, ‘Burnin’ Eye Balls’, ‘Bloody Doom’, ‘Dogshit’, and my favourite, what-does-it-mean? ‘Hell Bites (from the Edge of Insanity)’.
‘For the Sake of Heaviness’ – Armoured Saint. Almost poetically honest.
‘Too Loud (For the Crowd)’ – Venom. (Metal loves brackets too.)
‘Louder than Hell’ – Motley Crue. Strangely, this song comes from the height of their poodle period, when you’d have thought being louder than hell was the last thing on their minds. This song isn’t loud at all.
(Manowar had a song called ‘Louder than Hell’ too.)
Although lyrics about how loud you play are evergreen, there are several basic lyrical themes which are even more beloved. These are: anything involving or referring to sex or the sexual act; travelling really fast; blowing things up (rebellious violence in the name of rock); and (preferably Norse) mythology. Any combination of these subjects is also completely fine, indeed combinations are essential if you’re going to have enough to write about over the course of a long career.
If a Metal band decides to stray from these well-trodden paths, they will usually end up producing a concept album. The concept album is Heavy Metal’s ultimate High Art statement, its holy grail of spiritual and intellectual achievement. Most Metal musicians will, at some point in their career, be inspired by a film they have seen, an obscure mythological tale they have read, or a social injustice they have stumbled across, and decide to retell that story via one continuous piece of music which often stretches over an entire double album. The result is usually a paper-thin narrative crudely welded on to a set of lyrically clumsy songs that are all still about sex and rebellion and mythology, but with spooky incidental music breaking up the individual tracks. These concept albums often come in expensive and showy packaging; fold-outs with poems and encrypted messages for their fans to unravel. Then, on the subsequent tour, at some point in the show they’ll play through the whole thing from start to finish, using tapes to fill in the linking bits they can’t play themselves, boring everybody in the audience who came to hear the songs which celebrate how loud the band is. Almost every Metal group makes a concept album at some point during their career, even Motorhead; it was about the First World War and it was called 1916.
Metal fans occasionally like to argue over what was the first ever Heavy Metal song. Often the answer is ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks. It’s got a rhythmic fuzzy guitar line and is clunky and unsupple; it piledrives. But the Kinks obviously weren’t Heavy Metal, so what bands can you call Metal? And are there different types? There are loads of different types, so here are a few handy pointers:
The Scorpions – Classic Heavy Metal from Germany
Def Leppard – New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM)
Meat Loaf – Panto Heavy Metal, but no-one likes him, he’s too fat, and uses too many keyboards
Slayer – Thrash Metal (slightly frightening)
Bon Jovi – Kind of Heavy Metal (especially if you are a girl)
Europe – (as above)
Marillion – Prog Rock (we tolerate them because we think they bring us intellectual credibility)
Genesis – (as above, for those slightly older)
Poison – Glam Metal (completely different from 70s Glam)
Michael Bolton – Heavy Metal (when he first started, believe it or not)
Led Zeppelin – Heavy Metal (though it pains me to say it)
Bryan Adams – Not Heavy Metal (but we like him anyway because he keeps it real)
Thin Lizzy – Trad. Arr. Irish Heavy Metal
Iron Butterfly – Heavy Metal with an Organ
If you think I’m being free and easy with my Heavy Metal tagging, I don’t care. It’s how artists were perceived by Metal fans that’s important here, not what their music actually sounded like. If Metal fans tended to like something, then whatever it was, it was allowed into the fold. Pretty much anybody could record a piece of pop fluff, but so long as it had a cranked-up guitar in there somewhere, no matter how low in the mix, or one of those solos (you know, a whiny one), then Metal fans would give it the collective thumbs up and allow themselves to buy it, or at least watch it endlessly on shitty pop TV; often it was the only way Metal could get anywhere near the charts.
At the absolute far end of Metal’s acceptability were Roxette, the Swedish Eurythmics of the late 1980s. Their music was primary-colour Euro synth-pop with shouty choruses, however because their portly guitar player had vaguely rock hair, wore his big rock guitar low, pulled the right shapes, made Os with his mouth and wore a tasselled leather jacket, some of us kidded ourselves into thinking we could actually hear a guitar in there, so in some quarters Roxette were tacked sheepishly on to the very edge of the Metal landscape. Kerrang! magazine would review their singles. They slated them, of course, but acknowledged their existence nevertheless. They weren’t so bad.
When