Nirvana and Dave Grohl, a counterfactual history

This was a piece written for a Metal Hammer presents… Foo Fighters special. It postulates an alternative world where the history of Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Nirvana took a very different turn indeed.

THERE was a palpable sense of nervous excitement at the Seahawks stadium: although the Dave Grohl Band were billed as the main headliners at the Seattle, Washington benefit for Senator John Kerry, rumours abounded that it was in fact going to be very special show indeed.

Sure enough, Dave walked out onstage alone with an acoustic guitar and started off with a laid back version of ‘Learn To Fly’, then a cover of Neil Young’s ‘Pocahontas’. Then, the atmosphere was electric when Dave announced that he had some “special guests”; there was no mistaking the gangling giant bass player Krist Novoselic, but for most of the crowd Kurt Cobain – fat, balding, bearded, bespectacled, wearing an ill fitting grey suit – was as shocking as it was welcome. Grohl went behind the drums, Krist slapped the bass a few times, while Kurt strapped on his guitar, walked up to the mic and practically whispered “Hello”. There was a long pause before they blasted into a rough and ready version of ‘Polly’. Fat guys in their 30s were stage diving, middle aged career women in faded Nirvana smiley t-shirts were slam dancing in the pit. Nirvana were playing together on the same stage for the first time since their ill tempered split in 1996. For those of a certain age, it was akin to the second coming of Elvis. But for the under 30s sporting Dave Grohl Band t-shirts, the perplexed faces gave away their thoughts: dude, who is that funny old guy that Dave is drumming for?

It’s funny to think that at the turn of the 90s, it was Kurt, not Dave, who was the superstar spokesman of his generation. It was Kurt, not Courtney Love, who was the t-shirt icon for troubled youth. Dave was just the hired hand, brought in to play drums on the band’s second album ‘Nevermind’; Kurt was the troubled genius. Indeed, even after the less than startling third album ‘In Utero’, Nirvana were still well on their way to being one of the biggest bands on the planet. But tragedy struck in early 1994, just as the band were set to play a massive European tour, Kurt’s wife Courtney Love was found at the couple’s Seattle home dead, either by her own hand or as recent conspiracy theories perpetrated by films like Nick Broomfield’s Courtney And Kurt, murdered, possibly by a contract killer hired by Kurt.

The tour was rescheduled, but it was apparent that Kurt’s heart was not in it. The band’s fourth album ‘To Boddah’ was a shambles, with Kurt allegedly strung out or absent during the sessions. Ironically, the band’s biggest ever hit single ‘This Is A Call’ emerged from this album and although Kurt gives a soul shredding performance on disc, he refused to perform the song live. The follow up ‘You Know You’re Right’, an older song, fared less well and the third single from the album, a cover of the Pastels’ ‘Heavens Above’, sank without trace. Newcomers like Korn were starting to soak up Nirvana’s fan base while disappointed fans clogged up the nascent eBay website with unwanted second hand copies of the album.

Dave, meanwhile, had been using Nirvana’s downtime to work with ex-Germs man Pat Smear, who had joined as Nirvana’s second guitarist. The original line-up of The Dave Grohl Band who recorded the band’s 1996 debut ‘Roswell’ consisted of Smear on guitar, Grohl on vocals, drums and guitar and Krist Novoselic on bass. Released to good – if patronising reviews – the album, propelled by its high energy singles ‘I’ll Stick Around’ and ‘For All The Cows’ outsold the Nirvana album. Although to this day Grohl insists the split was amicable enough, the ego clash within Nirvana was intolerable and while Cobain and Novoselic did a few final dates, interest had waned and they were back to playing club sized venues.

The more permanent line-up of the Dave Grohl Band coalesced in the winter of 1997 with ex Steve Vai guitarist Devin Townsend joining the band along with Obituary drummer Donald Tardy and former Fugazi bass player Joe Lally. The resulting album ‘The Dave Grohl Band II’ was a heavy, melodic work, perhaps for obvious reasons consciously eschewing the more Nirvana grunge flavoured songs on the first record lest he be accused of competing with Kurt. ‘Monkey Wrench’ – 15 minutes long with a ‘Moby Dick’ style drum solo split between Tardy and Grohl outdoing each other – and the phenomenal ultra heavy ‘Everlong’ established the band as one of the best metal acts in the world. Their tours with Pantera, Metallica and Slayer brought Grohl to a whole new audience though he retained at least one foot in the alt.rock camp by going out on the 1997 Lollopolooza tour in the US.

The classic DGB recorded one more album – 1999’s ’DGB III’, hailed by many as the band’s masterpiece, though less commercially successful because it was a dense and heavy record that contained only six tracks over 80 minutes – before Dave surprised everyone releasing an album of acoustic songs the following year.

‘Learn To Fly’, the album and the song, reconnected Dave with the Generation X audience that had been big fans of Nirvana. Now older and wiser, Dave spoke to them in a way that Kurt Cobain’s erratic and unapproachable solo works did not.

Embroiled in a bitter legal wrangle with former Hole members Eric Erlandson and Kristen Pfaff over the recorded legacy of his wife Courtney Love, Kurt was a mess. His acting career had been an embarrassing failure and he had lost custody of daughter Frances Bean after a high profile drugs bust. According to gossip, it was Grohl who mooted the idea of a Nirvana reunion to Kurt as a way to help him out of his financial difficulties. Kurt refused. Dave had even tried to interest Kurt in his new project Probot where Dave worked with various hardcore and metal heroes. Again Kurt turned him down flat.

Over the next few years, Grohl has been ubiquitous, joining Neil Young & Crazy Horse on drums for a US tour, playing with the reformed Gang Of Four, sitting in on the Kyuss tour in 2002 and even being tipped to play with Led Zeppelin. His 2003 album ‘Dave Grohl Band IV’ – with a new line-up featuring ex Alanis Morisette drummer Taylor Hackford – went platinum worldwide and puts him firmly up there in rock’s A-list royalty alongside Metallica, U2, REM and Tad.

Yet there are a lot of moody 30 year olds who got drunk for the first time to, lost their virginity to of slam danced to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and for them the prospect of a Nirvana reunion tour is thrilling. Hell, even a few misguided souls have suggested that it was Nirvana appearing at the Kerry benefit show that tipped the election his way and helped him to topple Bush in the 2004 Presidential elections. But Nirvana’s reputation rests on only one album while Grohl has made at least three classics and sustained a career that has ranged across folk rock to ultra-heavy metal, inspiring bands like My Morning Jacket on one hand and Mastodon on the other.

The truth is that Kurt needs Grohl more than Grohl needs Kurt and you can’t really imagine things being any other way. Can you?

Patti Smith – Horses (reissue) review for Classic Rock

Patti Smith
Horses
Arista/Columbia/Legacy

Repackaged reactivated classic punk

Although hailed as the first punk rock album – Horses was originally released in 1975 – Patti Smith’s debut has little in common, musically, with the Sex Pistols or even with New York contemporaries like Television. Richard Sohl’s icy piano intro to her appropriation – you could hardly describe it as a cover – of Van Morrison’s garage soul classic Gloria, which opens the album, and Patti’s slow drawling announcement Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine, is still as alien and disturbing three decades on as it was upon first release. Although the Ramones debut wrote the musical blueprint for punk, Horses added something more complicated and indefinable to the mix.

Thanks to Patti, a generation grew up pretending to be beatniks, romantic junkies, androgynous New York street visionaries and opium deranged 19th century French decadent poets. She made pretentiousness hip.

This legacy edition includes a remastered version of the album – a definite sonic improvement over previous CD reissues which all had a slightly tinny quality – as well as her incendiary cover of My Generation, originally released on the b-side of Gloria.

The bonus disc is a live recording of Horses as performed by Patti with original band members Jay Dee Daugherty and Lenny Kaye along with Tom Verlaine (who played guitar on Elegie on the original) caught at the Meltdown Festival earlier this year.

The live disc, like all bonus discs on every repackaging ever, is utterly disposable. It isn’t bad, it’s just a bit too much of a Guardian colour magaxzine thing, an empty exercise in nostalgia. It’s the original that you need, that still sounds like a revolution, that still says not to look back. While a lot of classic punk has aged badly, Horses still sounds timeless. Perhaps that has something to do with her enduring influence on everyone from Marilyn Manson to PJ Harvey. But perhaps it is because nobody – not even Patti Smith herself – ever really followed up on some of the ideas suggested by this album. The white hot improvisations, the torrent of words and poetry, was closer to some derranged free jazz experiment than the post-Velvet Underground milleu in which she found herself cast. Follow up Radio Ethiopia was an unsuccessful attempt at making a punk album while successors Easter and Wave were fairly mainstream – albeit excellent – rock albums.

Horses remains a glimpse into a wasteland populated by dead rock stars and other wreckages of humanity. It is her great American novel and has never been bettered.

Machine Head at Wacken, 2005

This was written as a sort of extended live review of Machine Head at Wacken four years ago. They had yet to start work on The Blackening. It was a fucking amazing show. They play perfect hard rock that loosens the fillings and causes occasional nosebleeds.

This is what it must be like to be Jesus…or Hitler. We are onstage at Wacken in front of 40,000 German metalheads who are working themselves into a frenzy of adoration. As far as you can see in the ethereal twilight there are writhing bodies, horns in the air, girls on their boyfriends shoulders with their jugs out, and over there on the right there is a guy dressed as Santa Claus crowd-surfing his way to the front. Your Hammer reporter, having done this job for a few years now, doesn’t often stand onstage and when he does it tends to be at UK festivals where you usually look out onto a sea of bored faces and only a few enthusiasts at the front going through the motions. But this, to use a cliché popular among our Transatlantic cousins, is awesome! Even, dare one say, totally awesome.

Of course, they aren’t here to adore Hammer and a few record company bods; they are here to worship at the temple of Machine Head, headlining at Wacken Open Air for the first time, in the midst of playing an awesome – sorry but it’s really the only word that fits – career-high set. The band themselves seem hard pressed to deal with this reaction: Phil Demmel is grinning like a motherfucker, taking photos of his guitar tech standing against the crowd between songs. When he finally leaves the stage a good five minutes after the rest of the band, Rob Flynn can only shake his head and say “fuck!”

It’s impossible to wind them up any more but somehow this does. Even as a detached observer, the spectacle is overwhelming: it suddenly makes a lot of things make sense, like the mutual interaction of band and crowd and how this – standing here in front of a field full of people who are going crazy because you’ve helped to make them that way – must be a high that is more potent and more addictive than any drugs that money can buy.

If you were making a movie about Machine Head, this is where you’d freeze frame for that perfect feelgood-happy-ever-after ending. They’d make a great movie: their career follows the classic plot arc of a great beginning, a troubled cliff-hanger will-they-survive? second act and a cathartic ending where everything seems to have been put right. Not that they’re about to jack it in: far from it. 2005 has been a great year for Machine Head. But not so long ago a lot of pundits had written them off as dead men walking: releasing their album ‘Supercharger’ on September 11 2001 could be put down to unfortunate timing; calling the first single ‘Crashing Around You’ was even more unfortunate.

“Well here we are, it’s August 5 2005 and we’re four days off the 11th anniversary of ‘Burn My Eyes’ and we’re doing better than ever,” says Rob. “It’s a trip but we really shouldn’t be here. We got dropped and we should just be one of those bands that got dropped from Roadrunner that you never heard from them again.”

What is it, then, that made Machine Head different? Why are you here? we ask. Why keep going?

He pauses and shrugs: “I’m not good at anything else. I’m not good at sports, I was never gonna be a big sports star. I can’t be a nine to five guy…I’ve got good people skills but not the patience to deal with stupid people. But a big part of it was just wanting to prove a lot of people wrong. We got turned down by probably 25 labels, majors in the US, they were saying ‘you’re over, you should change your name, you should start a new thing’ and I think that the more we heard that the more we were like ’fuck you!’”

The band did consider all of these options but they were also taking inspiration from a hardcore fanbase who wrote letters, posted on message boards and came up to them at shows.

“We had been unsigned for a year and a half and it was not looking good but fans would come up to us in the street and say ‘You have to keep going. I love your music so much. You have to keep making music’. And you know we were thinking of changing our name and starting again, but especially at that time getting all this incredible feedback helped drive us to give it our best shot.”

The ‘best shot’ resulted in an upturn in their fortunes. First guitarist Ahrue Luster was replaced by Phil Demmel, then they released ‘Hellalive’, recorded at the Brixton Academy. In Autumn 2003 Machine Head released their fifth studio album ‘Through the Ashes of Empires’ which returned to a style closer to that of their classic debut ‘Burn My Eyes’ and also pivoted around the fantastic radio friendly metal classic ‘Imperium’. It wasn’t so much a rebirth as a rediscovery of what it was that made Machine Head one of the great post-thrash bands of the 90s: angry high powered guitar driven rock’n’roll. It also coincided with the rise of a new school of American metal bands who were clearly inspired by them.

“I definitely hear our influence in a lot of bands and most of them – not all of them – openly acknowledge it, which is incredibly flattering,” he says. “Like, I listen to a band like Disturbed and there’s a lot of Machine Head recycling going on there. They even stole one of my stage raps. But a lot of the newer bands like Killswitch Engage do acknowledge us. And they’re obviously influenced by other things as well and that’s what’s exciting about music for me.”

They are still a hungry band and they still have a lot to achieve, but the past 18 months has been like a well earned reward for their spell in the wilderness. Everyone in the band raves about their trip to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates to play the annual Desert Rock festival with Soulfly and The Darkness.

“I had actually no idea what it was gonna be like,” laughs Rob. “I really had it in my mind that it would be a few guys with camels who lived in tents. Obviously it wasn’t. And they treated us like royalty. They asked us if we would like to go to the festival in limousines or on Harleys. And I was like…what? So there we were, riding through the desert on Harleys…”

Most of the images we have of the Middle East tend to over-emphasise the swivel-eyed bearded nutter contingent rending their breasts and railing against America, the Great Satan. The truth, according to Rob, is that you’re more likely to find kids in Machine Head or Metallica t-shirts as you are in suicide bomber vests.

“I think the only thing that was really different was that a lot of the bands had to take a break so that people could face Mecca to pray,” he says. ”Though they didn’t do it during our set.”

As well as things going right with the band, things are going right with Rob’s life: the image of him as some anger-consumed proto-nu metaller raging against his abandonment by his birth parents isn’t borne out by the calm thoughtful man we meet in Germany who is as happy to talk about putting his two year old son to bed as about the band’s music.

The lowpoint being, of course, the death of Dimebag.

“We had just played the Alrosa a few weeks before. A lot of those same kids would have been in the crowd, maybe even the killer. We got a lot of crossover from Pantera fans. We were devastated. We were crying. We played two tours with Pantera. We were playing that night in Belgrade, Serbia and I dedicated ‘Descend The Shades Of Night’ to him, got through the first verse and then just lost it. It sucked. He was one of the good guys…I mean, what the fuck?”

As well as his role as one of the ‘captains’ of the forthcoming Roadrunner 25th Anniversary album project the band are already planning the follow up to ‘Through The Ashes Of Empires’ though perhaps with a renewed sense of confidence in what they can achieve.

“I think a lot of the fear that we had when we recorded ‘Burn My Eyes’; has gone. There’s a lot less fear of being judged. We were scared of playing mellow stuff like ‘I’m Your God Now’. We didn’t even play it on that tour in case people thought that we were pussies. We got to a point though where we weren’t ashamed of that side of us and then we felt stupid.”

Afterwards, after their show, the band are hanging around backstage mixing up 100 per cent alcohol cocktails for friends and colleagues from other bands. Rob is still overcome with emotion after the set.

“Wacken is the only metal festival that matters back home,” he says. ”This is the one that gets reviewed in all the magazines.”

How do you feel? we ask as a parting shot.

He pauses.

“Awesome.”

It’s probably the only word there is that describes it.

All hail fucking Mastodon II!

This is the review of Blood Mountain written for Metal Hammer in 2006.

Mastodon

Blood Mountain

Reprise

Strong contender for album of the decade

IT’S always hard to see where history is going when you are in the midst of it. When ‘Leviathan’ came out in 2004, it was universally recognised as a great album but right there and then nobody quite knew how great it was: ‘Leviathan’ was, as we can clearly see in hindsight, was one of those albums that changed everything. In the history of metal, it was as important as ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘British Steel’, ‘Reign In Blood’ or ‘Lateralus’. It was the album that other bands measured themselves against and usually found themselves wanting. ‘Leviathan’ really marked the end of the decade-long dominance of so-called nu metal: after Mastodon, Linkin Park and company sounded anything but nu. It was like a reboot of the whole heavy metal genre, a chance to start over and get everything just right.

‘Blood Mountain’ opens with Bran Daillor’s rolling drum attack intro to ‘The Wolf Is Loose’. Few drummers are as distinctive, as immediately recognisable. Even fewer are capable of sustaining Daillor’s level of inventiveness and skill. It’s a magnificent opener, one that links ‘Blood Mountain’ to the ferocity of ‘Leviathan’, but takes us forward to new and even more magnificent vistas of noise. Running through the albums highlights, well, you may as well just read the tracklist: this is the perfect hard rock album. Not only is there not a single duff track on the whole record but there is not a single track that falls below the status of ‘classic’. Just when you think that the standout track is the furious prog boogie of ‘The Crystal Skull’, you get wrapped up in the magnificent Voivod-like complexity of ‘Capillarian Crest’.

‘Blood Mountain’, like its predecessor, is more than an album of great standalone songs: it’s an album that is collectively much more than the sum of its parts. The fact that there is not one single moment of this album that is anything short of magnificent adds up to a very superior album.

Having lived with this album at the time of writing for only a week – that’s blasting it out on the surround speakers at least once a night at home, drilling it into my skull every day on the tune on the way to work and forcing friends and colleagues in the office to listen to it from start to finish – it’s hard to make a lasting definitive judgement about it other than it’s obviousoly a great album. Just how great an album is for posterity to decide.

But right here and right now, whether your tastes run to new bands like Avenged Sevenfold and My Chemical Romance or to battle-scarred veterans like Slayer and Metallica, this is an album that you have to own.

[11]

All hail fucking Mastodon!

This is a piece that I wrote after the Metal Hammer end of year poll in 2006. I still stand by every word. They more than topped Blood Mountain with Crack The Skye. They are also probably the best live band I’ve seen and that list includes the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, Slayer, Oasis, Led Zeppelin, The Who, AC/DC, and, as they say, many more.

THERE is probably – quite rightly – a tendency on the part of most readers to take the results of an annual critic’s polls with a pinch of salt. Not just readers of Hammer, or even the music press in general, but every critic’s poll, from magazines that cover movies to those that deal with specialist fishing equipment, should be looked at carefully. People who write about music for a living, who are fed a vast quantity of product every day, tend to have different values from those with more limited budgets, who can afford to buy maybe one album a month – if that – and tend to make those choices very carefully. Pros can become jaded and sometimes fail to hear in a band what millions of record buyers hear. Similarly, the incredibly difficult albums by East European prog stoner jazz black metallers that get some writers hopping up and down – and let me interject a swift mea culpa here – will more often than not be lucky to sell in quantities that make it to double figures.

At Hammer we like to pride ourselves that we usually sort of get it right, that by and large we have an idea of what our readers want (including the half dozen or so extreme cases who will also be equally excited by the latest Lithuanian difficult music ensemble). Usually when it comes to compiling the list, the choices are fairly obvious as are their positions in the overall hierarchy. This year, however, it was a real bastard.

This has been an amazing year for music. Barely a week of 2006 went by without some absolutely earth shattering new album arriving on our desks. There was one particularly stupid day when we had the new Lamb Of God album, the new Iron Maiden album and ‘Blood Mountain’ all at once. We were like dogs in a circular room looking for a corner to piss in. And that made the choices in this end of year poll extremely difficult. Without getting all bland and banal about it, nearly every album on this list could have been ranked at number two.

But then only Mastodon’s ‘Blood Mountain’ could be at number one.

The editorial staff, writers and contributors at Hammer are a very diverse group with very different musical tastes and specialities. Yet ‘Blood Mountain’ was way ahead of its nearest competitor by a really sizable majority of votes.

You’d probably find that everyone who voted for it had their own reasons and that no two were in complete agreement. I can only chuck in my own personal tuppenceworth as to why it was my number one: for me, ‘Blood Mountain’ is up there with Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’, Black Sabbath’s ‘Master Of Reality’, Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, ‘Deep Purple In Rock’, Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’ and Metallica’s ‘Master Of Puppets’. This might sound like the usual vacant hyperbole that you hear from critics all the time – such as the tosser who recently said that Razorlight were as important as The Beatles – but it is meant in all sincerity and with a certain amount of embarassment because these aren’t comparisons that should be made lightly.

In my heart, I know that this is an album that I will still be listening to in another decade (assuming that I’m not dead, deaf or otherwise incapacitated) which isn’t something that I would necessarily say in all honesty about any of the others on the list.

The album sold well, though admittedly not in the sort of quantities that the likes of Green Day are used to, but while msot albums are dead and buried within a few weeks of release, ‘Blood Mountain’ is the sort of album that will continue to grow and to sell for a long time to come. Mastodon are a band who win converts easily, particularly when they play live. They are the only band who broke through the painful conservatism of a Slayer audience when they toured with them. No, they didn’t blow Slayer offstage, but then they are still a comparatively new and young band.

They appeal across genre gaps and generation gaps. And what’s not to love? Mastodon is what heavy metal music is supposed to sound like.

Occasionally we find old issues of Metal Hammer from back in the day and are amused and embarassed by the bands that the magazine went apeshit over. Most of them you’ve – mercifully – never heard of. Some of them you really don’t wanna know. And others we’re not gonna tell you wahat they are. History will judge – with equal cruelty – whether we got it right in 2006. Maybe there’s an obvious album that came out that we have completely missed. Maybe others high up in the poll will be regarded as utter mooses of ‘St Anger’-like proportions in years to come. But Mastodon? Hand on heart, swear on all that’s unholy. We are right. Anyone who disagrees is wrong. It’s that simple.

ROXY MUSIC – FOR YOUR PLEASURE

Written  for the 2006 book 100 Albums That Changed Music, edited by Sean Egan.

ROXY MUSIC

FOR YOUR PLEASURE

Released US June 1973 UK March 1973

US: Reprise

UK: Island

TRACKLISTING: Do The Strand, Beauty Queen, Strictly Confidential, Editions Of You, In Every Dream Home A Heartache, Bogus Man, Grey Lagoons, For Your Pleasure

PRODUCED BY: Chris Thomas, John Anthony and Roxy Music

ROXY MUSIC were one of the few bands to ever successfully solve the dilemma that had plagued rock since the late 60s; how do you make music that is genuinely progressive while still making music that is popular? For all that bands like King Crimson were blazing new trails through uncharted musical territory, their audience was confined to a static though devoted handful of aficionados. At the same time, pop music after a rush in the 60s, was becoming repetitive and backward looking.

Formed in 1971 by art school graduate Bryan Ferry and bass player Graham Simpson, Roxy Music soon recruited saxophone player Andy McKay, who also owned a VCS3 synthesizer. The VCS3 was notoriously difficult to play: it resembled a telephone exchange and required somebody with technical knowledge to make it work. McKay’s friend Brian Eno could operate it and also owned a Revox reel to reel tape recorder. He was drafted in as a technical adviser and then started to appear onstage with the band. Within a year Roxy Music had been greeted by some fairly hyperbolic press in the UK; they had a hit single with Virginia Plain and their first self titled album became the must-have album that year. Perhaps because of the hit single, but also because of the simultaneous success of T-Rex and David Bowie, who were lumped alongside them under the catch-all banner glam rock, Roxy Music found that they were attracting a much younger audience than they had initially imagined.

When they went in to Air Studios in London, there were many in the press and the music industry who were looking forward to seeing them fall flat on their faces. They disliked the fact that they had seemingly appeared from nowhere without “paying their dues”. They also disliked the glam aspects of the band. The release in 1973 of For Your Pleasure proved that they were certainly not a flash in the pan. While the first side of the first album is arguably superior in terms of the actual songs, For Your Pleasure is a more consistent album. Its also a much darker album.

The sleeve hints at this: a glamorous blonde woman – Amanda Lear, also the inspiration for Kraftwerk’s The Model – in fetishistic evening dress stands at a strange unnatural angle with a panther on a leash while the liveried driver of her Lincoln Continental, Ferry, looks on. It evokes the glitz of 40s Hollywood but also hints at something darker and more disturbing. This was underscored by persistent rumours – subsequently proven untrue – that Lear had been born a man.

Opening with the witty ‘dance craze’ update Do The Strand the album alternates between upbeat pop and heavy strange and disturbing songs, the centrepiece of the album being the terrifying In Every Dream Home A Heartache. In Every Dream Home A Heartache is a love song to an inflatable sex doll, intoned by Ferry in a chanting monotone, the voice of a man who has done everything twice and been bored the first time, over a trance inducing minimal keyboard riff. It ends with an explosion of heavy rock guitars. It is a song about having sex with an inanimate object and at the end, of course, he comes. In The Bogus Man they recreate the minimalist drive that krautrock bands like Can and early Kraftwerk were also experimenting with at the time. The closing title track sounds cold and brutally modern, almost as if you can tell it was recorded under harsh neon lights.

It has been said that For Your Pleasure was the sound of Ferry and Eno struggling for control of the band. Yet it sounds less of a struggle than a compromise between the faintly nostalgic and the boldly futuristic. Grey Lagoons is a perfect example of this: like Danny and the Juniors by way of Karlheinz Stockhausen. With Ferry’s reputation as a dictator, it’s hard to imagine that this was not exactly the album that he intended to make.

Eno, a self confessed non-musician, brought an element of destructiveness and chaos to Roxy Music. Other bands were fairly conservative in their use of the synthesizer, using it either to imitate other instruments or using the same unadventurous presets. Eno generated noise, treated other instruments such as Phil Manzanera’s guitar and McKay’s sax, and allowed an element of randomness to enter into the band’s performances.

The images of the band on the inside sleeve was, for teenagers growing up in the 70s, as shocking and as exhilarating as the music. Proper musicians had long straggly hair and beards and wore faded denim shirts. Roxy Music looked like hey had stepped out of a gay bar in a 40s Buck Rogers strip. Eno particularly generated a lot of homophobic abuse from fans of ‘proper’ music. Roxy Music even credited their hairdresser, Keith at Smile, which was possibly a statement as revolutionary for those times as any they made in their music.

It was the end of that particular line-up of Roxy Music. Eno left the band shortly after and subsequent albums Country Life and Siren were massively successful, though never quite as adventurous as For Your Pleasure.

Nor were any of the Roxy-derived bands that followed ever really as groundbreaking in their time as Roxy Music were in theirs. Ultravox, Japan, Simple Minds and even U2 all drew some inspiration from this period of Roxy Music, even if in some cases it was only to copy Brian Eno’s eyeshadow techniques. Today bands Franz Ferdinand carry the torch for Roxy Music’s particular brand of British art school eccentricity.

After 35 years it still sounds like a futuristic album, the sound of 20 years hence. And whose to say it still won’t be?

Tommy Udo

ARE YOU FOLKING SERIOUS? THE RISE OF FOLK METAL

This was written back in 2003, since when the folk metal thing seems to have come and gone. But I just got the new Glittertind album Landkjenning recently and it’s excellent which is why I dug this out.

OF any of the many and multiform sub-genres and mutations that metal has spawned the one that is most guaranteed to raise a belly laugh is folk metal. Even those who are denizens of the underground, seemingly well informed about the rise and fall of all those micro-genres of which most of us remain blissfully unaware of, will be utterly incredulous that such a thing could actually exist.

Although it sounds like something from The Fast Show, folk metal is deadly serious and it is undergoing something of a creative explosion at the moment. OK, none of the band names probably mean a great deal to many of us – Glittertind, Cruachan, Korpiklaani anyone?- but all of a sudden, from Scandinavia, from Ireland, from Eastern Europe and Germany, there seems to be a whole generation of bands who were spawned by black metal and Viking metal, who have incorporated elements of their local traditional music into their sound. Some, like Finland’s Korpiklaani, play folk songs in a metal style while others like Glittertind play punk rock with folkish inflections.

It would be a bit of an oversimplification to say that folk metal was all descended from the sort of Viking metal created by Bathory and their ilk – though there is such a crossover between folk metal and Viking metal that it’s an easy mistake to make. Also, although there are similarities to so-called battle metal, there is very little crossover between folk metal and power metal.

It all gets a bit confusing because the definition of what constitutes ‘folk’ music is itself pretty nebulous. Webster’s dictionary defines folk music as the “traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of the people in a community.” Folk music is also a current genre of music that includes not only traditional tunes whose origins are lost in the mists of time and which have been handed down from one singer to another, but newly composed tunes in a folk style. Also “modern” folk song is a “song with a soft melodic sound and acoustic guitar accompaniment.”

If you think that black metal purists are elitist snobs you really want to be in the room when two folkies are having an argument: one school of thought holds that if you know who wrote a song then it isn’t proper folk music. Another holds that if it sounds like folk music then it is folk music. It’s like Israelis and Palestinians, Rangers and Celtic, people who like Marmite and people who don’t: they aren’t gonna agree to differ in a convivial fashion. Nope, they are going to put the sandal in, grab each other by the beard and tear those Fair Isles sweaters off in a big bloody brawl.

Me, I like something that’s attributed to the great Pete Seeger: Folk music is music that folk like.

Folk rock has a long history: in the mid 60s bands like The Byrds incorporated traditional American folk music into their sound. In Britain the English folk song revival in the early 60s fed into the burgeoning post-psychedelic rock bands like Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and the Strawbs. Progressive bands like Jethro Tull, Traffic and Gryphon incorporated folk and medieval music into their high prog style.

Historically, though, metal and folk have rarely found much common ground, though on early Black Sabbath tracks like Spiral Architect you can hear some folky inflections creeping in.

Until the 80s and 90s there are scant examples of folk metal: there was the novelty 1970 hit Jig A Jig by East Of Eden, there’s Thin Lizzy’s Whiskey in The Jar, and there’s the work of a relatively obscure but brilliant Irish heavy rock band called Horslips, particularly their 1973 concept album The Tain (based upon Táin Bo Cuailgne or The Cattle Raid of Cooley, a heroic tale of ancient Ulster).

The first important folk metal works came from another unfairly neglected band, Britain’s own pagan thrashers Skyclad and of course Sweden’s Bathory. Skyclad’s Wayward Sons of Mother Earth and Bathory’s Blood Fire Death pretty much wrote the book in terms of the musical blueprint and the lyrical themes that folk metal adopted. Later bands, inspired by the Viking metal of Bathory, discovered a purer folk sound and bands outside of Scandinavia incorporated their own folk culture into the lyrics and imagery that they employ.

In an increasingly homogenised and globalised world, nationalism is on the rise. Sometimes that takes the form of a backward looking romanticised view of the past that sometimes spills over into xenophobia, and outright fascism and racism. Sometimes, as in Scotland for example, it’s an inclusive nationalism that celebrates the things that make each nation and people unique. But for good or ill, everyone is seeking a sense of identity and folk metal, both in its positive and negative manifestations, is a symptom of this.

THE FOLKS THAT WE KNOW

THYRFING

FORMED 10 years ago, ostensibly as a side project by Pantheon members Patrik Lindgren (guitar) and Jocke Kristensson, Thyrfing began as a rather terrible synth-led pomp band, with pseudo-mediaeval keyboard flourishes supposedly creating a dark age atmosphere. It wasn’t until their 2002 album Vansinnesvisor (which translates as “tales of madness”) with its songs – sung in Swedish – and using odd instruments like the keyed fiddle and home-made percussion, that they succeeded in creating something that genuinely sounded like the sort of metal that actual Vikings might have played. Steeped in the lore and imagery of the ancient Norse culture, Thyrfing were erroneously accused in the Swedish media of having connections with the country’s small but growing neo-Nazi movement.

“There was a witch-hunt in the media to this topic,” says Patrik. “We have absolutely nothing to do with the Nazi scene or their ideology. Some idiots will ask you whether you are a racist if they see the hammer hanging on your neck. Such pathetic questions are a pain in the ass.”

Fiercely nationalistic, they resent the fact that the neo-Nazi appropriation of symbols like the sub-cross and the runes have tainted on the whole legacy of the ancient Norse culture.

Having just signed to Regain records, there will be a new album from Thyrfing later this year.

GLITTERTIND

Glittertind – named after Norway’s second highest mountain – is essentially a one man band, consisting of 20 year old Torbjørn Sandvik. It’s a one man show because as he says. “It was difficult to find others who would be dedicated to a type of music which mixes metal, punk and Nordic folk-music.” Inspired by Finntroll on one hand and the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly on the other, Torbjørn set about recording an album that wasn’t so much Viking metal as Viking punk. Evige Asatro, released last year, is an amazing blend of high energy punk and metal with of folkish melodies. Sung entirely in Norwegian, it celebrates the old pagan culture that was destroyed by Christianity. Like Thyrfing, Torbjørn is at pains to distance his brand of viking-centric Norwegian nationalism/anti-globalism from the bonehead fascists. “This question comes up from time to time, so let’s set the record straight: even though Glittertind holds Nordic heritage high, this does not mean other cultures or histories are inferior, this behaviour often linked to racism is not Glittertind’s point of view.”

Currently working on the follow up to Evige Asatro (which was actually recorded in 2002, he expects it to be released later this year.

MOONSORROW

FORMED in 1995 by the Sorvali cousins Henri (aka Trollhorn of Finntroll) and Ville to create their own folkish pagan themed metal, Moonsorrow are sometimes lumped in with the sub-sub-genre of Forest Metal which is like folk metal except all the songs are about forests and nature. Certainly on their new album Verisäkeet it is forest sounds that provided the ambient background to their grim, mournful Viking folk ballads. Mysterious, moody and doom laden, they are the opposite end of folk metal to the more frenetic Finntroll.

“We’re influenced by lots of things,” says Ville. ”We listen to a lot of progressive rock, but also film soundtracks, films influence us and of course Finnish history, mythology, nature have a large influence. Our roots have their very specific influence on us, both in music and otherwise. We are Finns and we are proud of our origin.”

Unlike many bands who sing in English to gain acceptance abroad, they remain true to their roots by singing in Swedish (which is spoken by most Finns) which gives the songs a really alien quality because it is such an unfamiliar language.

KORPIKLAANI

“KORPIKLAANI’s music is very Finnish and the band does not fear to be labelled ‘yokels’, living as they do in the middle of the forest,” their biography says. Like fellow Finns Moonsorrow, they are sometimes tagged as Forest Metal (Hell, the name translates into English as Forest Family or Clan). Finntroll take traditional Finnish songs and play them with a metal “twist” though employing a full array of distinctly non-metal instruments such as accordions, fiddles and penny whistles. More than any band here they evoke a Heathen pathos on one hand and a joyous sense of celebration with their ‘humppa’ derived dance tunes. They are brilliant but quite mad.

FINNTROLL

Crazy name, crazy guys, you know the score: ancient weapons, oddball instruments, songs about Trolls and battles. They sing in Swedish – despite being Finnish – and they sound like nothing on Earth. A polka-band at a Polish wedding playing Darkthrone tunes? Nutters.

CRUACHAN

Irish band who straddle the world of Celtic music and mythology with black metal also incorporating complex quasi-classical/prog pieces, and medieval music. Their recent is the more satisfactory than their earlier stuff, moving away from black metal to a more mainstream sound.

WAYLANDER

Another Irish band, though despite having some surface folkish elements – their trademark is a penny-whistle intro – they are much more of a straight ahead metal band.

ELVENKING

Italian power metallers who incorporate folkish/Celtic music into their bombastic power metal. They also plunder pagan iconography such as the green man on the sleeve of their 2004 album Wyrd.

SUIDAKRA

German band Suidakra would dearly love to be Irish as you can hear on any of their three excellent melodic black metal albums. They play Irish folk music as only Germans can. It may be easily mocked but it works.

TUATHA DE DANANN

Despite the name that evokes the land o’ the wee folk and the fair Coleens, this lot are actually a Brazilian power metal combo who seem to have overdosed on Enya records.

TYR

Danish band named after the Germanic god Tyr (known in Norse mythology as Thor and in Finnish as Turisas). Formed in 1997, they are probably the only band ever to incorporate the traditional music of the Faroe Islands into metal.

ON THE ROAD WITH THE FOO FIGHTERS

This was written afor the now defunct BANG! magazine back in 2003.

“There honestly wasn’t any ambition to become a career rock band. Everything that’s happened up until now was just a happy accident. One day the happy accident will be that it ends, I guess,” says Dave Grohl philosophically.
The end – of the Foo Fighters, of this tour – is still somewhere way along the highway. For now, life is one long-assed ride on a tour bus.
“My mom only lives a few miles from the Pentagon and Congress, and after 9/11 I suggested that she come out here to LA for a while. She didn’t feel comfortable flying, so I called up my manager and asked if there were any tour buses going West. They said that there was only one, and that if my mom wanted a ride she would have to share it with Warren Haynes from Gov’t Mule. I was like, ‘Mom, he didn’t smoke pot in front of you or anything?’ And she said [adopts sotto southern belle voice] ‘Oh no David. But I could smell it when he was smoking it in the bunk below mine!’”
Dave Grohl laughs as he recalls the story, perhaps thankful that there’s no chance of any such familial faux pas on this tour. Like the other three members of the Foo Fighters, he now has his own personal tour bus, although in terms of comfort, it ranks midway between a submarine and the sort of caravan that you might take to Blackpool if you couldn’t afford a proper holiday.
You might expect there to be a level above ‘tour bus’ for a band of the Foo Fighters’ stature – a personalised helicopter, perhaps, like the KISS chopper – but in reality only a handful of bands can justify their own private jet. For Grohl, a reasonably nice bus complete with bed, table, TV, bog, shower, stereo, PlayStation, kitchen and complimentary fruit bowl is as good as it gets. And as me make our way to to the gig, Grohl enthusiastically DJs on a stereo that, when cranked up, could be heard all the way back home in California.

Rewind a few weeks to a piss-wet night in the windy city. After the comparative luxury of the bus, we’re now stood outside of a Chicago club called Metro watching some horror theater play out in front of us. A strange, loud little woman in a John Deere tractor trucker cap and with that unmistakable I’m-a-fucking-nutter look in her eyes is screaming at the harassed student on the door. “EXCUSE ME SIR, BUT IS JACK BLACK ON THE GUESTLIST FOR THIS EVENING’S SHOW?”
The Metro – a venue too damn small for the Foo Fighters is already bulging at the corners, with a massive queue still snaking around the block outside. Half of Chicago it seems, is on the guest list, and the poor harassed student guy really doesn’t need some psycho-dwarf woman screaming at him right now. Nor, for that matter, does he need some weirdos all the way from London, who look like they might be crack dealers, or Irish terrorists, and whose accents ” he just doesn’t understand: Still, we’re trying to keep it reasonable, not to raise our voices, to speak clearly and with authority. “We’re on the guest list.” “No, we really are.” “And we need a photo pass.” We seem to be winning. Student guy looks at the list again after we have literally spelled out our names and shown him our passports as ID, and miraculously manages to find our names. There’s no photo pass, but he seems convinced. His fingers hover, about to pluck one out, when: “I WOULD LIKE TO GET A MESSAGE TO JACK BLACK IF HE IS HERE TONIGHT. PLEASE SIR CAN YOU TELL ME IF HE IS ON THE GUEST LIST?”
No photo pass. We try explaining that the sinister midget is fuck all to do with us, but to no avail. Hell, we’re lucky he’s letting us in. He nods to the bouncer and points at me. “Sir, please step this way, we need to do a body search.” Cheers, nutter…

The Metro gig is an unofficial warm-up show for the rest of the Foo Fighters’ US dates, a chance for a few lucky punters who have won tickets through a local radio station to get up close to the band. And despite the Foo Fighters being every bit the stadium draw that his previous band Nirvana were, Grohl stilI relishes being able to see the whites of their eyes out front. It’s also the first chance a lot of this American audience have had to hear the new material from One By One live. The Foos oblige, starting with the album opener ‘All My Life’, and the record’s obvious hit singles ‘Times Like These’ and ‘Low’ nestle seamlessly with longtime favourites like ‘Learn To Fly’ and ‘Monkey Wrench’.
The Foo Fighters have become everyone’s favourite alt-rock band by stealth, by simply outlasting the opposition. Other contenders like The Smashing Pumpkins, Hole and Alice In Chains have imploded or, in the case of Pearl Jam, forgotten how to string a decent tune together. It’s as if everyone suddenly came to the same conclusion: hey, y’know what? The Foo Fighters are my favourite band!

It’s some turnaround from when Grohl released his first post-Nirvana album – Foo Fighters’ eponymous debut. There was a lot of sneering about ‘the new Ringo album’ and tasteless cash-ins with Kurt barely cold in his urn, but those who weren’t silenced by the blistering three minutes of ‘This Is A Call’ must feel pretty foolish now.

It’s maybe a mark of the Foo Fighters’ current popularity in America that they now attract street psychos – even if they do just pop down to the gig looking for Grohl’s friend and sometime collaborator Jack Black. Earlier that day, in the bar of the House of Blues hotel, a constant stream of well-wishers, fans, folks who merely recognise Grohl come over to shake hands, get autographs and pose for pictures. It’s as if they think they already know Grohl personally, and the thing is, I know exactly how they feel: upon meeting the man, it’s as if you’ve known him for years, but also you have some catching up to do. He has that knack of making complete strangers feel as though they are important to him, not some annoyance to be tolerated. When you’ve been around bands for a while, you realise that that’s actually a rare thing for a guy in his position. When most ‘talents’ enjoy even a modicum of success they develop a sort of ego-cancer that causes them to assume an importance on a par with an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh. But Grohl is a man of the people, the way Joe Strummer and Phil Lynott were men of the people. The way that poor Kurt was before a combination of insane fan hysteria and his wife made him behave like a proper rock star and buy a Lexus (he would return it a few days later, though).
Nice-guy Dave isn’t an act, although Grohl is the first to admit that it can be a bit wearing when you’re a friend to the whole world. He’s not one to flaunt his success, yet he has no qualms about being seen riding around in a top-of-the-range sports car. Ironically, it was another major league rock and roller with a penchant for plaid shirts and big-hearted songs capable of touching lives as well as shaking asses that showed Grohl how to enjoy success yet still remain a decent human being.
“We played Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit for the first time in 2000,” he explains “I was really nervous. We did our stuff more or less unplugged then I went back on and played ‘Everlong’, just me with an acoustic guitar. I was really giving myself, y’know, and when I finished and looked out, there were Neil Young and David Crosby just standing there, giving me these huge smiles. And I rushed offstage and just started bawling.”
Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, sporting an American Civil War-chic handlebar moustache, arrives and further Neil anecdotes are traded. For a while last year it looked as though the Foo Fighters might be on the verge of disbanding – an album was scrapped, dates were cancelled, Grohl joined Queens Of The Stone Age while Hawkins recovered from his near-fatal overdose – but now everything seems solid within the band. “I said I’d come back when we needed each other,” says Grohl, “and that’s what happened.”

When BANG hooks up with the Foos again on the second leg of the tour in Denver, Colorado, Grohl greets us in the hotel foyer. He’s clutching an acoustic guitar that he has been playing in the bar, fooling around with some riffs. Denver, the Mile High City, is so far above sea level that it is always difficult for outsiders to adjust to, and Dave, who has had a cold threatening to break out for a couple of days now, vividly describes the explosion of snot that has beset him since arriving. He’s determined to be fit for the show his band are playing at the Fillmore (a venue run by the same company’ who own its more famous namesake in San Francisco), rather than the outdoor Red Rock arena. Again, Grohl takes the opportunity to see human faces and not a sea of distant dots.
The Denver gig is uplifting: the Foo Fighters seem to be less polished as the tour goes on, although of course they only make it seem that way. There is something of Crazy Horse about them, in the way that they so easily gel together. The inevitable comparisons with Nirvana are still being made by the US mainstream press: Kurt may have been the spokesman for his generation, and in a peculiar sort of way, Dave is as well – it’s just that that generation have grown up a little. If Kurt was all about the exhilaration of negativity, then Dave is about the joy of life.
Ten years on, the self-mutilating, Tuinal-gobbling, teenage suicides of ‘Generation X’ have either topped themselves or gone on Prozac – that’s evolution – and the pierced-faced grunge kids of 1992 have become the well-scrubbed mainstream-looking twenty- and thirtysomethings of 2003. If it wasn’t for the smattering of street loonies – yes, they’re here too – who keep coming up to us vacant-eyed, demanding high-fives and yelling “I KNOW WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM, MAN! OH YEAH! YOU THINK I DON’T, BUT I DO!” you’d never think that serious drugs had ever been involved.
“The first time I played here was with Scream and I had taken way too many mushrooms,” Dave tells the crowd, later on that night. “And then there was a skinhead riot in the lobby of the venue.” Disconcertingly, a large section of the crowd begin to bark like dogs in a show of approval, although it’s not clear exactly what they are approving of. Mushrooms? Skinhead riots? Of Dave having played in Denver before? Only in America. . . and possibly certain parts of Renfrewshire…
But maybe that’s the secret of the Foo Fighters’ success: they’ve distilled three turbulent decades of American punk rock, from The Stooges, MC5 and Blue Cheer to X, Black Flag and Minor Threat, via HUsker Du, Pixies and Dinosaur Jr and made it palatable to the MTV VH1 crowd. And yet lurking just below the surface is the subliminal clarion call to the paranoid babbling wanking-on-buses spin-bin that, I suspect, dwells within us all.

In the early hours of the following day, the Foo Fighters are assembled in the lobby of their hotel ready to trundle on to the next town. Dave is visibly excited that Gregg Ginn from Black Flag had been at the previous night’s show (as indeed had various members of Coldplay), and it’s clear that he still appreciates the approval of his peers.
“Oh sure,” says Dave, “one of my proudest moments was when Grant Hart [ex Husker Du drummer/singer] said to me, ‘Dave, you’re doing a great thing for drummers everywhere.’ That choked me, let me tell you!”
With that, the still smiling Dave Grohl gets back on the bus. The door hisses closed, the engine starts up, and the Foo Fighters disappear on down the road once more.

ART OF DARKNESS – THE GROSSEST ALBUM COVERS IN METAL

Originally published in Metal Hammer special The Devil’s Music.

AS a veteran of the most extreme manifestations of all things metal, Hammer prides itself on being hard to shock and even harder to nauseate. That changed a couple of years ago with the release of an album by US grindcore outfit Cattle Decapitation called Humanure. The cover was a painting by Wes Benscoter of a cow shitting out human remains, the face and torso still visible in the heap of excrement. We’ve seen albums that depict DIY surgery, demon rape, grossly mutated sexual organs and acts of barbarism so foul that we dare not describe them and merely sighed and chucked them on the pile to be reviewed or – more likely – used as Frisbees. But somehow that sleeve was the one that had us retching our lunch away. If they set out to make people barf then they succeeded wonderfully.

Strangely enough, the band thought twice about the cover and when their label Metal Blade gave them the option of changing the sleeve (Hammer had been sent an early promo) on the grounds that they would find it impossible to have it stocked in any record store anywhere, they chose to do so.

Cattle Decapitation are all militant vegans, and the sleeve was actually making an unsubtle point about the consumption of animals, turning the food cycle around by having the cow eating man.

“We didn’t want the sleeve to gross people out. We think our music and our lyrics do a good enough job of that already,” singer Travis Ryan told Hammer. ”But we were getting complaints that people couldn’t find the album in the shops and that’s exactly why we signed with Metal Blade in the first place.”

METAL album sleeves have offended since day one. Black Sabbath’s eponymous 1970 debut featured an inverted crucifix inside, something that raised the hackles of the great and the good eager to save our youth from the forces of darkness. Strangely enough, though, it also managed to piss off the band as well. “We had no say as to what went on the cover,” says Tony Iommi. “It was all down to the label. People keep asking us who the girl on the front cover is and I have to tell them to this day that I have no idea.”

The washed out picture is credited to Marcus Keef, the in-house designer at their label Vertigo records and was actually taken at Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames. The girl on the cover was supposedly an  actress hired for the shoot who later met the band long after the album had been released. The image suggested a witch or a ghost and further reinforced the bands’ links to the occult. Alex Sanders, Britain’s self-styled King Of The Witches, attended several Sabbath gigs and tried to get them to attend his covens supposedly on the strength of the cover alone. Marcus Keef also designed the sleeve for ‘Paranoid’ [which was originally to have been called ‘War Pigs’ hence the blurred picture of the bloke in the crash helmet waving the sword which graced the cover] as well as a poster included with ‘Master Of Reality’.

Although it was all a bit of a happy accident, Sabbath’s first album is one of the few where the sleeve actually looks like the music sounds: malevolent in a way you can’t define, vaguely hallucinatory, the stuff of uncomfortable nightmares. But it wasn’t until the release of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ with its skulls and demons that they got one again that you could argue was at all appropriate to the way that they sounded.

Early metal bands, in fact went through the same corporate cookie cutter as every other band be they prog, pop, soul or even easy listening middle of the road. Usually the record company’s idea of a great sleeve was a cheesy band shot or – worse – one of those vaguely surreal concept photos typically produced by the design partnership Hypgnosis. It wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s that a definite metal style emerged, artwork for album covers, t-shirts and posters that actually gave you some idea of what the band sounded like. It was art that looked as heavy and evil as the music sounded.

The inspiration came from horror comics, science fiction and fantasy art, medieval engravings of demons and devils, the great mad renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch and cheesy porno. More often than not these ingredients were all blended together into a ridiculous whole.

Early metal sleeves came under attack from feminists, and sometimes not without good reason. In This Is Spinal Tap the band are told that their sleeve for Smell the Glove is sexist and won’t be used to which they reply ”Great, we want a sexy sleeve.” In real life, German mullet-haired metal merchants The Scorpions had the artwork for their 1976 album ‘Virgin Killer’ pulled. The sleeve depicted a naked pre-pubescent girl, with what looks like a crack in the glass of a frame obscuring her crotch. It’s a creepy sleeve not least because we can now see that it’s a piece of child pornography and while for most of us it’s hopefully going to be our only exposure to it, for some it may only be their first. There’s still some debate as to what was going on in the minds of the band at the time: some suggest that it was once again the record label pushing them through blatant controversy. If that’s the case it backfired and The Scorpions became successful in spite of the sleeve and not because of it. Whatever the reasons the sleeve was pulled in many countries and the original is now a much sought after collector’s item.

Iron Maiden were one of the first bands whose album and singles cover art had a kind of consistency, an identifiable logo and a style of their own. Maiden’s early art by Derek Riggs was raw and juvenile. They also weren’t above inventing ‘controversy’ for publicity reasons, such as the cover of ‘women in uniform’ which depicts Margaret Thatcher getting stabbed by Eddie. Maiden’s covers are too silly to be truly evil, but Riggs’ apocalyptic horror comic style was to have a big influence on later, more extreme bands.

With the emergence of more extreme music in the 80s, a new and more extreme sort of image was needed to package it in. Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’ depicts Hell as a knock off of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights (a painting that has graced many a black metal and death metal album cover, incidentally) but the truly diabolical sleeve was that of ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ which depicted the Slayer logo set in a fascist-style eagle, that seemed to confirm all those rumours about their alleged Nazi connections. Of course they shook it off with the usual “what, us Nazis?” how dare you comments.

But the most Satanic and evil sleeve of that decade wasn’t actually a metal band, it was the much banned 1985 album ‘Frankenchrist’ by The Dead Kennedys which featured the painting Landscape XX, or Penis Landscape by the visionary Swiss artist HR Giger. Giger is probably best known for having designed the exomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien. He had designed album covers for prog bands like ELP (‘Brain Salad Surgery’) and Magma (‘Attahk’) but they were comparatively anodyne. Giger’s style is to blend organic and mechanical forms in a realistic and disturbing way. Landscape XX depicted rows and rows of erect penises inserted into disembodied vaginas. It wasn’t so much pornographic as anti-pornographic: having looked at it and figured out what was going on, you really didn’t feel like shagging for a while. The band was sued and charged with distributing harmful matter to minors. They eventually won the case, but singer Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label was almost driven to bankruptcy.

Giger’s Satanic imagery is said to derive from vivid nightmares that he has suffered from all of his life. His work has always been a major inspiration for the more Satanically inclined metallers. Celtic Frost, Danzig and Attrocity have all used his paintings on album covers and those that can’t afford Giggler often plump for the many imitators that he has spawned.

But while Giger’s art is – regardless of its subject matter – beautifully executed and technically brilliant, the same can’t be said for the visceral nightmares that began to grace the sleeves of bands like Carcass, Cannibal Corpse and Anal Cunt.

As befits a band with songs like ‘Skull Full Of Maggots’ and ‘Born In A Casket’, the art for Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Butchered At Birth’ featured cover art by Vincent Locke (of Dead World Comics fame). It shows two skeletal zombie surgeons performing a gory abortion on a corpse while all around them there are dead foetuses and the skeletons of new-born babies hanging from the walls. Although we are inured to this sort of thing, when they arrived in the early 90s they were probably the grossest things many of us had ever seen. The records still can’t be stocked to this day in Germany in the original sleeves.

This sort of painting harks back to the gory glory days of the uncensored American horror comics of the 1950s such as Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror which eventually became so extreme that there was a backlash against them leading to the comics industry adopting a voluntary code of practice and effectively castrating comics for the next 30 years.

It’s kind of hard to tell people who are shocked by these images that they are actually very funny: sure, it’s dark humour and arguably it’s sick humour but it’s so over the top that it can only be a joke.

Humour, though, can land you in court. When Cradle Of Filth produced their first batch of Jesus Is A Cunt t-shirts, they knew that they would be controversial. Even a decade on there are still hapless teens in out of the way towns getting arrested for wearing them. Oddly, nobody seemed offended by the masturbating nun on the front. It was the logo on the back that got punters into trouble the world over. The t-shirt was condemned by the Catholic League of New York and the Lord Provost of Glasgow, subsequently forcing record shops to take them off their shelves, thereby making it the most sought-after and bootlegged t-shirts in the country.

Christians, despite their unwarranted power in the US politics, are really a soft target and easily offended. And they are fun to offend. You can hardly begin to count the number of ‘blasphemous’ album covers and t-shirts that proliferate in the murky depths of the extreme metal underground. One personal favourite is Christian Death’s ‘Sex And Drugs And Jesus Christ’ which features a junkie Jesus injecting heroin. Marilyn Manson’s ‘Holywood’ depicts him in a crucifixion pose which offended many of the groups whose sole reason for existence seems to be to get offended by Marilyn Manson. Even here in the arguably more secular UK, the fly posters for the album generated a small scale campaign by evangelical types to rip them down and deface them with stickers exhorting us to go to their church.

Interestingly, however, most bands stick with poking fun at Christians. Other faiths, as we now know, won’t exactly take it quite so calmly. Hammer has often quizzed bands who make a big display of how anti-Christian they are why they don’t have a pop at, say, Islam. Why don’t we see t shirts proclaiming that The Prophet Mohammed Is A Cunt or – worse – a pig? Who will be the first band to depict the Prophet on the sleeve of one of their CDs (he doesn’t have to be doing anything: depicting him is enough)? The answer is probably never.

Some bands have said that they would draw the line at attacking Islam because they are not racists (though Muslims are not a race) and that they will only attack things within their own culture. All admit that they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives sharing a hidey-hole with a Danish cartoonist.

Extreme evil art these days is confined to the underground, partly because it has become a bit cheesy but also because of the commercial might of chainstores such as Wal Mart in the US. When Nirvana released ‘In Utero’, whose sleeve depicted a vitrified female corpse displayed in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington (wings added by Kurt) the chain decided that they would not stock it as they found it offensive. Nirvana relented and issued it in a different sleeve for Wal Mart because as Kurt Cobain explained, when he was growing up that was the only place that you could buy records.

Wal Mart is notoriously puritan and since they account for millions of sales, artists and labels are only too willing to tailor their product to accommodate them.

As the standards by which we define extreme music shift, so too the power of images to shock is diluted. Every day Hammer receives envelopes full of albums by black metal and death metal bands from countries that you’ve never heard of and many of those have artwork that depicts mutilations, plates of viscera, gory killings and senseless torture. Some are mildly amusing but most are just a little bit pathetic.

Most of the artists who really convey an image of evil and terror do so through their stage shows. Gorgoroth, for example, release pretty dull albums in pretty dull packages but their live show complete with flaming torches, crucified groupies and mouldering goats heads on stakes convey a real sense that you have entered Hell.

And despite the controversy over the cover of ‘Holy Wood’, Marilyn Manson never seems link his paintings to his music. Odd, because they are powerful, dark works depicting murder and mutilation, albeit in a less figurative and more abstract way than most common or garden death metal sleeves.

And while Slipknot may serenade serial killers and the like, their albums are always released in packages that are unlikely to upset the apple-cart at the Wal Mart chain.

One of the most shocking images ever to grace an album cover was that on Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 debut. It was a classic news image of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963 as a protest against the oppression of Buddhists by the US-backed government of South Vietnam. it’s a powerful image because it’s an image of a real death, a snuff photo if you like. It isn’t there for a sick thrill; there is a point to it, something that becomes apparent in RATM’s politically charged music.

Perhaps because you can now see really gross uncensored images of the war via the internet and increasingly in the mainstream press – real decapitated soldiers, people burned to death in their cars – the power of a painting or a drawing of some gut-dripping zombies doesn’t really have the same effect as it once had.

Where can the imagery of evil go next? We shudder to think.

MARCH OF THE PRIGS: POP VS ROCK SNOBBERY THROUGH THE AGES

This was written for a magazine that never happened, but if it had it would have been the best rock magazine ever. And it would probably be defunct now.

“ROCK IS NOT POP YOU THICK FUCKER”: I actually said that to my music teacher Mr Campbell in 1973. It was an argument over Led Zeppelin IV. I had lent my copy to a mate who had returned it. But really it was an opportunity to walk around with the album under my arm to smugly advertise the fact that I had superior taste to everyone else.

We were in the music class when the music teacher snatched it off me and played Rock And Roll – or at least the first minute – then, with an I-smell-shit expression, took it off and then proceeded to lecture us about ‘pop’ music, pompously proving to us logically why it was “to Beethoven, Schubert and Bach what a dirty postcard from the seaside is to Shakespeare.” Actually these days I quite like Beethoven and Bach – Schubert is and always was a heap of feeble Teutonic saccharine bollocks, wanker couldn’t even finish a symphony – and comparing them unfavourably or otherwise to Led Zeppelin (or Miles Davis or John Cage or Burt Bacharach or Metallica for that matter) is as dimwitted as saying that a cream bun is better than a steam roller. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

In many ways my sneering music teacher was just a reflection of my own raging musical snobbery. Me and my small clique of mates just hated the idea that as far as anyone like that was concerned there was no difference between Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep and Hawkwind – all bands big with the ‘hip’ kids in small town Scotland – and Slade, The Sweet, Mud, The Osmonds and Gary Glitter. That was POP: commercial bollocks for teenyboppers, kiddies too thick to know better. Unlike us, who were into ROCK: proper music played by real proper musicians with long hair and beards who wrote their own songs and …er…stuff.

There were endless lectures, putting down poor old George Forbes who still liked T-Rex. It was like the bloody Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, attacking the class enemy with relentless criticism. “It all sounds the same. Not proper music like Emerson Lake and Palmer. They’re classically trained!” George took it all in good spirits but you could tell he didn’t really give a fuck what we thought. And as for girls who liked David Cassidy and Donny Osmond, there was no point because they were all lost causes anyway. Future teenage mothers, as somebody in my nasty little circle put it.

With hindsight, it’s the bitterness that small differences produce and obviously these days I’m not only actively more tolerant of Mud, Slade and the Sweet but, reader, I actually like them. Back in the music class of 1973, though, I had run out of arguments – the musicianship, the originality, the authenticity etc – which reached deaf ears anyway. So I fell back on a petulant outburst of “ROCK IS NOT POP YOU THICK FUCKER.”

The teacher looked at me with an expression of raw hatred. In retrospect, I think he restrained himself admirably: I’m sure that I would have punched my bloody face in and not stopped until nmy fist came out the other side.

In Scottish schools in the 70s they still had corporal punishment so I was sent off to be hit by a strange old man with a leather strap wearing a black gown. Six times. Hard. As far as I was concerned, the dissidents in Soviet gulags never suffered half of the injustices and oppression visited on me that day. All I had done was to utter THE TRUTH. I was a martyr to rock.

In my defence, I was 14.

Today, pop has soundly defeated rock after three decades of bitter struggle. Tin Pan Alley is firmly back in control and this time it’s personal: you can pretend all you like about the importance of Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys or Mastodon, but we’re all in Simon Cowell’s world now and he just lets us live here. Under sufferance. Pop Idol and an endless procession of interchangeable stage school graduates are the sweet revenge of every kid who was ever sneered at in the playground for preferring T-Rex, or Motown or The Human League or Kylie to Gnidrilog, Yes or REM.

And in truth the ‘rock’ snobs have had it coming for years…

Pop vs rock is only applicable to the UK: the ‘culture wars’ fought in the 60s and 70s was born from a sort of ‘cultural cringe’. The boys who were doing A Levels, going on to college or university, destined for white collar jobs did not want to be associated with the music, fashion and haircuts of their blue collar compatriots. It was a far worse kind of snobbery than the disdainful to-the-manor-born kind for we were all working class kids looking down on other working class kids. I know, for I was that stuck-up and desperately aspirational smug little ponce.

The early 70s ‘rock’ fans would distinguish themselves from the other kids by adopting a deliberate anti-fashion look, an extension of hippiedom and other youth-cult leftovers going back to the beatniks. The look was faded flared denim (preferably Levis in opposition to then more populist brands like Wrangler or Brutus), granny glasses, beards (as much as could possibly be grown, always a good look for a 14 year old), steel-grey RAF greatcoats, ragged trainers, suede desert boots, cheesecloth shirts or Afghan coats (preferably white ones) and lank centre parted long hair as opposed to feather cuts. We smoked spliffs, ‘they’ smoked Embassy Regal, we drank Schlitz, ‘they’ drank Breaker Malt Liquor. We dropped acid, ‘they’ took Mandrax. We read Sounds, ‘they’ got Disco 45 (a weekly mag that printed the lyrics to records in the Top 20) and the Daily Record. We thought we were pretty hot shit and that ‘they’ were peasants.

People like me then would tell you with pride that they did not own any singles (usually a lie), never watched Top Of The Pops (always a lie) or listened to Radio 1 apart from Sounds Of The Seventies (the BBC’s grudging concession to ‘prog rock’ on Monday to Thursday between 10 and midnight). Albums were kept in transparent plastic sleeves and treated with reverence and care. You did NOT roll joints on them. The record went into the inner sleeve, opening upwards, NOT outwards so that the disc slid out. The way my mum did it. Albums were stacked upright, arranged by band or by genre NOT in one of those K-tel flip-stands. Albums were regularly wiped with a calotherm impregnated cloth. Albums were never played as background music: they were approached with ritual and reverence and often listened to – nay, contemplated – in solitude, on headphones.

The ‘rock’ fans would even speak differently, adopting knowing Americanisms. We’d refer to ‘albums’ (derived from collections of 78 rpm discs issued in album form) as opposed to the more accurate ‘Long Player’ or ‘LP’. ‘Gig’ (from jazz hipster parlance for a job of work, not necessarily musical) rather than ‘concert’ or ‘performance’. ‘Cans’ rather than ‘headphones’, ’shades’ rather than ’sunglasses’… You get the drift.

There was something a little bit emperor’s new clothes about it all: Jethro Tull or Yes or The Mahavishnu Orchestra, so the reasoning went, were superior to The Rubettes because they were harder to listen to. Bands who made singles made them to be instantly catchy, but bands who made albums made them like great novels or paintings. You had to work at it. You had to ‘know’ stuff before you could appreciate it. This snootiness evolved, and had me, at 16, pontificating on how I much preferred Metal Machine Music to Transformer.

There were different pecking orders within it all, of course. Those of us who liked Sabbath, Mott The Hoople, Cream, Hendrix, Zep, The Who etc were often patronised by the kids who liked ‘high’ progressive bands by Yes, ELP and King Crimson. And the true rock snob – the fan who was into genuinely difficult and unpopular music like Faust, Can, Hatfield & The North, Henry Cow, stuff that was on Virgin when the label was synonymous with extreme underground stuff – looked down on everyone. Sadly – and this will come as no surprise to you – the guy at my school with all the Comus albums was me. I was in the mindset that if you liked Queen, you may as well like the Bay City Rollers.

‘Pop’ was trivial, ‘rock’ was profound.

But really I was just part of a cycle of snobbery that was as old as popular culture itself. Before there was rock there was rock and roll. Little Richard, Elvis, The Big Bopper, Jerry Lee. But as the 60s dawned, rock seemed to have proved those who dismissed it as a passing fad to be correct: Elvis was in the army recording lame show tunes in his spare time, Little Richard had found God and Jerry Lee Lewis was playing country music to make a living. The brightest and best were dead – Eddie Cochrane, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper – or, like Chuck Berry, in jail. Popular music was once again dominated by white-bread, easily manipulated Judeo-Aryan boy puppets like Fabian, Bobby Vee, Bobby Darrin and Pat Boone. They looked like they ate and shat candfloss and were smooth between the legs, like Barbie’s unfortunate boyfriend Ken. In Britain, Tin Pan Alley ruled: we had a string of seemingly identikit pop stars with overly-emotional surnames – Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Terry Eager – churned out by sinister uberfag impresario Larry Parnes. Sound in any way familiar?

The market for rock and roll was teenage girls. It was teenage girls who made Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, The Who, who screamed and bought all the rip off merchandising and made them rich. But their affection is fickle, and when they grew up and moved on, the bands that they once screamed for were either left high and dry or they were left with the minority audience: other blokes. And that’s where the haughtiness came in, from a shared sense of inferiority and latent misogyny.

Music then as now was ridden with brutal snobbery. The ‘thinking’ male music fan in 1964 would have been withering about The Beatles. He’d have been into stuff like John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck and the Modern Jazz Quartet. He was a scowling figure dressed in a duffel coat and a black polo neck with a small CND badge pinned to his lapel and a copy of the City Lights edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl sticking conspicuously out of the pocket of his brown corduroys. He may have been into folk music – proper authentic traditional American acoustic music by Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lefty Frizell as ‘collected’ by folk’s own John The Baptist Alan Lomax – and was maybe a bit sniffy about ‘newcomers’ like Phil Ochs or Bobby Dylan. He had one of those awful beards with no moustache and a shaggy non-haircut. Although only 20, he was likely to smoke a pipe. He was into ‘free love’ in theory though seldom found girls who would actually ‘put out’ and voted Communist at the general election of 1964, mainly to piss-off his dad. If he was really really hip, he might have discovered the blues on a few dusty imported 78s or crackly LPs and if he lived in London he may have been a regular at Alexis Korner or John Mayall’s blues sessions at the Marquee, then on London’s Oxford Street. But before the mid 60s there is no way on Earth he’d have cared about rock and roll – even the new breed of bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and The Who. That was music for little girls.

Variations of this archetype evolved and permeated the 60s and 70s: by the time punk rock came around, you had these guys trying to give the impression that they were hip to something beyond punk even though you knew for a fact that a few weeks before they had been grooving to Gong.

At some point in the early 80s I was granted the gift of a moment of clarity, when, to paraphrase Burns, I was briefly able to see myself as other people saw me. At that time I had mutated from big-headed prog bore to pompous post-punk pillock with what seemed like little effort. Joy Division, Magazine and A Certain Ratio were the albums under my arm then. The Afghan had been replaced by a grey suit with narrow lapels, black shirt with tab collar and skinny red tie and a shaved at the sides long at the top haircut that was supposed to make me look like a 1920s Russian Constructivist. Inevitably I edited a fanzine, full of earnest think-pieces and interviews with bands like Josef K, The Poems and Positive Noise. I’d ask questions, in all seriousness, like: do you see yourself more in the tradition of Dada or of Futurism? And: how would you say that Kierkegaard has influenced your songs?

For some reason I found myself on Radio Clyde’s punk show Streetsounds, hosted by journalist Brian Ford. I was excited: at last I was going to have a megaphone to shout it out loud and put everyone right. And Christ, did I? I droned on about how The Human League had sold out (Love Action had just entered the charts), sneered big headedly about The Ruts, was condescending and patronising about the utterly great Altered Images and big headedly nasty about the new Simple Minds album. What should people be listening to then? asked Brian. Clock DVA and This Heat, I replied without hesitation.

 

I got home feeling all pleased with myself. My girlfriend had recorded the show and I listened back. But instead of the erudite, witty and bitingly smart chap I imagined myself to be, I heard somebody who sounded suspiciously like a right stuck-up prick. A boring know-all. All at once I was the fat trad jazz bloke in That’ll Be The Day sneering that rock and roll was a passing fad, I was the sad beardy with horn-rimmed glasses who shouted “Judas!” at Dylan; I was John Milner snapping off the radio in American Graffiti and barking: “Rock’n'roll’s been going downhill since Buddy Holly died.” “I sound like a twat!” I wailed. My girlfriend smiled and nodded. It was true!

I’m not pretending that things have totally changed and moved on, but I like to think that at least now I recognise the snobbery in myself and do something to challenge it. Mostly because in overcoming snobbery you have more to gain than to loose. I had to overcome priggish attitudes against pop music but also against soul, jazz, heavy metal, hardcore punk, reggae, funk, disco, you name it. I’ve tried with contemporary R&B and I guess I just don’t like it. Oddly, I’ve also had to overcome a certain amount of snobbishness against the prog rock that I grew up with and see that I was right all along. And so so so wrong.