Testing Their Metal

In her Hot Press column Demo Parade Tara McCarthy recently made the point that, while other forms of popular music progress and mutate, heavy-metal music has hardly changed since its emergence as a distinct sub-species of popular music. In spite of that it attracts a substantial band of enthusiasts with a loyalty to their favourite artists on a par with obsessive football followers.

Metal, as 2FM's John Kenny prefers to call it, is the only specialist area of rock music to merit its own programme on 2FM and its popularity can also be measured by the success of The Sound Cellar, Tommy Tighe's Nassau Street shop which is virtually Ireland's metal mecca.

But what is metal and how can it be distinguished from other species of popular music?

Adrian Collier, a firm Metallica fan and the mainman behind their Irish fanzine describes it as comprising "a free-flowing guitar style, with drums and heavy bass reinforcing each other to form a fairly solid, sometimes aggressive wall of sound." Like all musical definitions its imprecise but probably as close as you'll get.

According to Marcus Connaughton, producer of 2FM's Metal Show, you can trace the history of metal back to Black Sabbath and the early versions of Deep Purple, but the first know musical use of the phrase heavy-metal occurs in Steppenwolf's 1968 classic Born To Be Wild which borrowed the phrase "heavy-metal thunder" from William Burrough's Naked Lunch. Other early proponents of the genre were Vanilla Fudge, Mountain and Grand Funk Railroad.

The use of the term 'metal' in Kenny's show's title, was, according to Kenny himself, intended to enable the programme to cover a wider spectrum than just heavy-metal per se. "A strong guitar line is central to every metal band," Kenny explains, "and even some early Status Quo might qualify as well as all the punk metal, thrash, death metal and the other sub-divisions."

"In the near future," reckons Adrian Collier, "I can foresee metal being mainly broken into two dominant sectors, doom metal and death metal." Kenny agrees and points out that his two-hour show already virtually divides itself into two distinct parts. "The fans also are beginning to split into those two camps," he told Hot Press, "and in some cases fans of one camp won't be at all interested in the other music."

Connaughton believes that the assumption that metal fandom is only for males is totally incorrect. "That's proven by the huge amounts of mail we get to the show," he claims. "There are also some great female metal bands like Babes In Toyland while it is no longer possible to build a photo fit picture of a metal fan, unlike in the old days when long hair and leather jackets with studs nearly automatically meant 'metal fan'."

John Barnett, a metal enthusiast who is a keen listener to 2FM's Metal Show, feels that much of the animosity towards metal from other music fans stems from the fact that they miss the humour. "A lot of metal is just simply fun. It's over the top and its meant to be enjoyed without being treated too seriously," he says.

Asked to pinpoint the major players currently operating on the metal scene, Adrian Collier unhesitatingly names Metallica while Barnett adds Rage Against The Machine. Cathedral they both cite as one of the main purveyors of death-metal. They accept as inevitable the tendency of some bands with a metal image to seek fame, fortune and mass chart success by turning to the pop ballad. Even Guns 'n' Roses version of Dylan's 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' can be viewed in this light, but as Kenny points out, "That isn't just confined to metal bands. You can go back to a band like Simple Minds who came out of the punk thing as Johnny And The Self Abusers in the late seventies but now they're a mainstream pop-rock stadium act with hits like 'Don't You Forget About Me' which is just about as far from punk as you can get. In a similar way some bands start out as metal and end up as mainstream stadium bands."

More than in any other area of contemporary music, there tends to be intense rivalry between the fans of various metal bands. Collier explains it thus.

"It's a form of self-protection almost. Like Pearl Jam are my band, so stay away from them. But sometimes it gets totally unreasonable. But it might depend on a person's background or their circumstances. Some people can feel so alienated by what goes on around them that their favourite band may seem like the only people in the world that they can relate to and they become very protective of them."

This passionate support may be one crucial reason why some metal bands seem to last forever. Motorhead, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and many others have been on the go since the early seventies, and a longevity that is not paralleled to the same extent in other areas of rock music. Most of the punk bands, for example, disappeared or struggled on for a while as limp imitations of their previous selves, whereas many metal bands tend to stick fairly rigidly to their original brief.

Oddly enough Ireland has not as yet produced any metal act to challenge the new world order. Although Therapy?'s audience may actually include some metal fans they do not fit at all comfortably into that category, and one would probably have to hark back to the days of Thin Lizzy or Skid Row to find any Irish band with metal credentials and any kind of international success. On the home front Mamas Boys and Winters Reign merit a namecheck.

This failure is odd given the potential for the use of Celtic mythology and symbols in a metal context, and the fact that there is a Celtic-rock-metal band in Spain called, would you believe, Erin! In this context Marcus Connaughton mentions a band called Skyclad, whom he describes as "Fairport Convention meets Metallica." But he feels there are grounds for optimism on the home front. "With Therapy?, My Little Funhouse and Kerbdog we have for the first time for along time, three hot Irish bands who, if they're not exactly metal, would undoubtedly have some fans in the metal field and all three are world contenders," he points out.

Barnett acknowledge the value of the Metal Show as an outlet for Irish metal acts, but he also admits its importance in a more general sense to fans like himself. "It's great to know that for two hours every week there's a programme on national radio that I can sit down and listen to and hear my favourite bands. Without it we would have to rely on word-of-mouth or call in to record shops like the Sound Cellar or Borderline to hear some new stuff," he says.

On the subject of the coverage of metal on TV Collier is less enthusiastic. He says "You might get the occasional metal video on the Beat Box, whereas MTV, if you can get it, shows lots of metal. Considering how popular metal is in Ireland, I think it gets a very poor share from the media in general, so a programme like John Kenny's is invaluable to the fans."

Metal Music has, over the years, received more than its fair share of hostile criticism not only on the grounds of the overt racism and sexism of some songs and album covers, but also because of allegations of subliminal messages of a destructive nature designed to encourage listeners to commit suicide and other black deeds. Some of that hostility has lead to fascist-style demands to ban albums, incarcerate bands and even for a blanket ban on the music.

Marcus Connaughton argues that metal is treated unfairly in this regard. "When the connection was made between Mark Chapman's murder of John Lennon and his reading of J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye, I didn't hear anybody demand that Salinger be arrested or that his book should be banned," he observes. "But the self-righteous often need a target and a popular art-form like metal is an easy one to pontificate about. I never heard any of these people complain that you might commit suicide after listening to Leonard Cohen, but then Cohen is a poet and that kind of intellectualism makes him safe from such accusations. Metal is just kids having fun and its easier to pick on."

"Every metal fan is really tired of all this," claims John Barnett. "If the same accusations were levelled at U2 rather than Judas Priest it'd be laughed at. There's an awful lot of hypocrisy about it and a lot of people just out to make a name for themselves.

Away from media-fanned controversy, the reality is that the exuberance, colour and energy of metal music has obvious appeal and, at its best it's exciting, harmless fun which often acts as an introduction to other forms of music. John Kenny, for example, remembers his first record purchase.

"It was 'Silver Machine' by Hawkwind," he recalls, "and it started me off as a real music fan. Since then I've opened up to all kinds of music, not just metal. Without that initial interest I might never have ended up appreciating such a wide range of material. Hawkwind today might not be thought of as a metal band but at that time they certainly were."

"The whole thing about metal is that it is great fun," says Marcus Connaughton. "The fans are intelligent enough to be able to stand back from it and see it for what it is, whereas non-fans and critics seem to swallow it wholesale and end up looking very stupid indeed."

Given that metal in some form or other has been with us since the sixties, an enormous volume of good, bad and indifferent music has passed across the recording heads. So recently Hot Press decided to link up with 2FM's John Kenny show to enable Hot Press readers and 2FM listeners to help us find the top 100 metal tracks of all time.

From next Sunday, September 26th, the Metal Show will start broadcasting the Top 100, with ten tracks every week from number 100 up until they reveal the top ten on 28th November. The full list of 100 will be printed in our issue of 2nd December.

John Kenny's 2FM Metal Show all time top 10 album tracks

(not in any particular order)

.Truth - Clawfinger

.One - Metallica

.Walk - Pantera

.The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy

.Them Bones - Alice In Chains

.Symphony Of Destruction - Megadeth

.Rock and Roll - Led Zeppelin

.Iron Man - Black Sabbath

.Fear Of The Dark - Iron Maiden

.Take The Power Back - Rage Against The Machine