Tag: Black Sabbath

Posted on

My 2024 writing round-up

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!”  No future historians will say, ever.  Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians.  Not any future, full-stop.

 

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation.  Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore.  We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state.  We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean.  It’s so much nicer.  For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them.  Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods.  Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

 

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing.  Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print.  This has been my best writing year to date.

 

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024.  Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style.  However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last.  Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
  • In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street.  Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

  • April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
  • And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony.  This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels.  Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion.  Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme.  Nothing at all…
  • The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs.  First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true.  And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls.  The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press.  As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.”  The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill.  It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures.  Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books.  A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks.  The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland.  Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
  • The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me.  This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore.  As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore.  But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture.  The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
  • Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms.  However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024.  This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin.  It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland.  Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
  • The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024.  As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass.  The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022.  The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024.  On January 1st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine.  This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale.  And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024.  It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war.  This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
  • The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly.  This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100th short story I’ve had published.  The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues.  However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too.  Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

  • August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons.  Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar.  (What, I wonder, inspired this?  What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?)  Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine.  The contents of this issue were available to read for free at the publication’s website during November but haven’t yet turned up for sale in book form.  When the issue is available for purchase, a link for it will appear at the bottom of Schlock! Webzine’s archive page, here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024.  In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31st, the final day of the year.  It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s accessible here.

 

And finally…

  • This is cheating. Self-publishing doesn’t count.  But on September 18th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result.  A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published.  (Even if I say so myself, though, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.)  Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

 

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever.  I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however.  That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.

 

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world.  I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab.  And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk…  Oh well.  My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

Posted on

In at the Deep end

 

 

I love live music and I live in Singapore, where in recent months there’s been much excitement about major bands and singers coming and staging concerts.  But I’ve felt like the title character in Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834) when he laments, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”  Yes, there’s been a buzz about Singapore being south-east Asia’s number-one stop for famous musicians on tour.  But frankly, as a grumpy old punk / goth / heavy-metal guy, the music made by the acts performing lately in Singapore really isn’t my thing.  Indeed, if I had to choose between listening to it and sticking a sharp stick into my ear, I’d probably go for the ‘sharp stick’ option.

 

Firstly in January 2024, Singapore’s National Stadium hosted half-a-dozen concerts by English group Coldplay, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘pop rock’, ‘post-Britpop’, ‘pop’ and, supposedly, ‘alternative rock’ band.  I regard Coldplay as being so wimpy they make Belle and Sebastian sound like Rage Against the Machine.  That’s all.

 

Then in February English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran played the National Stadium too.  Regarding Ed Sheeran, I can only say I agree with the late Mark E. Smith, mainstay of the fabulously unhinged post-punk / alternative rock group the Fall, who likened him to “a duff singer songwriter from the 70s you find in charity shops.”

 

And then, in March at the National Stadium, Taylor Swift put on six shows of her Eras tour.  That meant for a week Singapore’s usually orderly streets were filled with fans from all over Asia – ‘Swifties’ I believe they’re called in modern-day parlance – clad in spangly skirts, pink gowns, cowboy hats and friendship bracelets and with rhinestones arranged in the shape of hearts adorning their faces.  Taylor’s lengthy stopover in Singapore – the only shows of the Eras tour in Asia – prompted politicians in Thailand and the Philippines to grumble about the generous subsidies Singapore offered for each concert.  According to the Straits Times newspaper, these allegedly “were contingent on Swift not performing in other South-east Asian nations.”   To be honest, as someone immune to Taylor’s musical charms, if I was a politician in Thailand or the Philippines, I’d be thanking Singapore for keeping her away from my shores.

 

Anyway, this is a preamble to the fact that, last week, I felt totally starved of decent live music – I hadn’t been to a gig for half-a-year – and did something I wouldn’t normally do.  I bought a ticket for a Deep Purple concert.

 

Deep Purple are often referred to as one of the ‘holy trinity’ who, in the 1970s, fathered heavy metal.  But while I love the other two members of that trinity, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I’ve never been into Deep Purple.  To me, they didn’t have Led Zeppelin’s knack for coming up with irresistible guitar riffs nor that band’s ability to experiment, successfully, with other musical genres: blues, folk, reggae, rockabilly, world music.  And they didn’t have the splendidly ominous sound of Black Sabbath, which would influence future sub-genres of heavy metal like black and doom metal.

 

© Phonogram Ltd

 

I also wasn’t into Deep Purple because, even as a teenager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the band seemed like ancient history to me.  This was because when I was at secondary school in Scotland, Deep Purple had split up – temporarily, it turned out – and spawned a bunch of splinter groups with former Purple members as their movers and shakers.  Ritchie Blackmore, Purple guitarist from 1968 to 1975, had formed Rainbow, which during the early 1980s included in its line-up Purple bassist Roger Glover.  For a while, Rainbow had as their singer the late Ronnie James Dio, a man I greatly admired, and I think their 1976 song Stargazer is a work of stomping, over-the-top brilliance.  But their later stuff I found mostly lame.

 

Meanwhile, David Coverdale, who’d been Deep Purple’s singer from 1973 to 1976, had formed Whitesnake, which during its early years contained such other Deep Purple stalwarts as drummer Ian Paice and keyboardist Jon Lord.  I liked the 1980 Whitesnake album Ready an’ Willing for its agreeable, aggressively bluesy sound, but later albums like 1981’s Come an’ Get It and 1984’s Slide It In seemed, in their inuendo-heavy way, to be about the size of Coverdale’s todger and his irresistibility to the ladies, and I gave them a body-swerve.  Later still, Whitesnake metamorphosised into a then-modish, American-west-coast hair-metal band à la Motley Crue, which in my mind made them yet more unspeakable.

 

© EMI

 

I’m writing about this in detail because, at my school, the great Deep Purple break-up had resulted in there being two antagonistic tribes among the kids who were into heavy metal.  Those who had the Rainbow logo (with a giant fist bursting out of the sea and grabbing hold of, yes, a rainbow) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who thought David Coverdale was a giant dickhead.  And those who had the Whitesnake logo (WHITESNAKE spelt in joined-up letters by an ultra-long and ultra-squiggly white snake) emblazoned on the backs of their denim jackets, and who entertained a similarly uncomplimentary opinion of Ritchie Blackmore.

 

Incidentally, there was a third Deep Purple splinter group on the go at the time – Gillan, unsurprisingly fronted by Ian Gillan, who’d served as the Purple vocalist from 1969 to 1973.  But nobody I knew at school liked poor old Gillan or his eponymous band.  My beef with Ian Gillan, though, is that afterwards, from 1983 to 1984, he sang with the mighty Black Sabbath and the album he recorded with them, Born Again (1983), is dire.

 

In 1984, Deep Purple reformed with their most popular line-up: Blackmore, Gillan, Glover, Lord and Paice.  But I had zero interest in this.  And while over the decades since, I heard about comings and goings within the band – Blackmore quitting again in 1993 and Steve Morse replacing him a year later, Glover departing in 2002 and being replaced by Don Airey, and Morse leaving in 2022 with Northern Irish guitarist Simon McBride stepping into his shoes – I’d never felt any inclination to listen to their music or see them live.  In fact, I could only name three Deep Purple Songs: Smoke on the Water (1972), Black Night (1970) and Hush (1968).  Oh, and Woman from Tokyo (1973), which makes it four.

 

And it didn’t surprise me to learn that Deep Purple was why Mark E. Smith (him again) sacked Marc Riley, bassist, guitarist and keyboard player (and future DJ) from the Fall.  Riley got his marching orders in part because Smith saw him dancing to Deep Purple in an Australian nightclub: “Get in the hotel and stay there till I tell you.” Smith raged.  “You don’t need to be dancing to Smoke on the Water.”

 

Anyway…  Onto last week’s Deep Purple gig, which took place at Singapore’s Star Theatre.  I found it a mixed bag – but the good bits in that bag were enough to make the evening worthwhile.  It was noticeable how Simon McBride and Don Airey, the band’s newest members, did a lot of heavy lifting, embarking on lengthy guitar and keyboard instrumentals that allowed Gillan, Glover and Paice, all in their mid-to-late seventies, to take a break.  Admittedly, Airey is no spring chicken himself, but presumably being behind a keyboard is less tiring than having to prowl continuously around a stage or belt continuously at a drumkit.  My tastes in music developed after the advent of punk rock and I’ve been conditioned to believe that instrumental solos are inherently evil, and believe that those who perpetrate instrumental solos should be locked away for 20 years in Prog Rock Prison.  However, tonight, I made an effort to switch off the punk part of my brain and just enjoy the quality musicianship on display as McBride twiddled his guitar-strings and Airey plinked his keyboards.

 

 

One of a long line of rock guitarists from Belfast – see also Gary Moore, Vivian Campbell, Gerry McAvoy and Eric Bell – and, at 45, three decades younger than his Deep Purple compadres, McBride must find these moments a dream come true.  According to Wikipedia, McBride started to teach himself guitar when he was nine years old and while he was listening to his dad’s hard-rock collection, which included Deep Purple, on the family stereo.  Now, 36 years on, there are times when he’s practically carrying Deep Purple on his shoulders.

 

Airey knows how to play too and, perched over his keyboards and grinning manically like a mad scientist at work over a table laden with smoking vials, he was clearly enjoying himself.  Incidentally, in the past, Airey has played with Rainbow, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Saxon, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, among many others, and thus has a heavy metal CV to die for.

 

 

Of the other members… Roger Glover and Ian Paice did what was required of them.  Whenever the giant screen above the stage showed a close-up of Paice, he seemed to me to be a dead ringer these days for the actor Timothy Spall.  Which is ironic since Spall has played a rock drummer – he was Beano Baggett, the hapless tub-thumper with fictional 1970s rock band Strange Fruit in the underrated 1998 comedy movie Still Crazy, directed by Brian Gibson and written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

 

 

As for Ian Gillan…  Well, I don’t want to rag on him because of his age, but his voice has definitely seen better days and there were moments, as he tottered stiffly about the stage, when he looked like he was in pain.  Also, during some of the stretches in the songs when he wasn’t required to sing, he’d hirple offstage where, presumably, a chair awaited him.  Still, I’m past the days when I used to believe that old rockers should be forced to retire and make way for the Young Turks.  Probably that change in attitude is because I’m now an old codger myself.  If Gillan still enjoys what he does, and people are still willing to pay money to watch him do it…  Good on him.

 

 

The songs were well-performed even if, tune-wise, they didn’t leave much of an impression on me afterwards – I can still only identify four Deep Purple songs.  And at the end, rather wonderfully, the band signed off with three of those four: Smoke on the Water, Hush and Black Night.  As Gillan finally managed to hit the operatic high notes, and Airey channelled the spookily thunderous organ sound that was the speciality of the late Jon Lord, the hairs rose on the back of even my sceptical neck.  Finally, I understood why so many people loved this band.

 

Loved?  A lot of people evidently still love them. The concert attracted a good-sized crowd, not all of them old buggers like myself, and everyone seemed extremely happy by the end.  It was just a pity that many folk spent the gig staring at their phones whilst dutifully filming everything.  Jesus.  Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen?  Why not immerse yourself in the excitement and drama of what’s actually happening around you?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage.  (Suede’s Brett Anderson made this point forcefully in the same theatre six months ago.)  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.

 

I’m no bigger a Deep Purple fan now than I was before the gig, but credit where it’s due.  Despite the occasional shortcoming, they made an effort and put on a decent show, when they could easily have coasted on past glories and phoned in their performances.  I only wish someone had de-phoned the audience.

 

Posted on

Some fleeting success for Rab Foster

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

The January 2024 edition – Issue 144 – of Swords and Sorcery Magazine is now available online and it contains a new story by Rab Foster entitled The Fleet of Lamvula.  Rab Foster is the alias by which I write fantasy fiction and, by my calculations, The Fleet of Lamvula is the 20th piece of fiction I’ve had published under that name.

 

The first Rab Foster story to get into print was one called The Water Garden, which appeared in the now-defunct ezine Sorcerous Signals in 2010.  Back then, I thought fantasy – and particularly the sub-genre of it I enjoyed most, sword and sorcery – was something I might experiment with once or twice, but no more than that.  I certainly didn’t expect it to develop into a major strand of my writing, which it is today.  One thing that’s helped is the fact that there are a lot more outlets publishing sword and sorcery in 2024.  There seemed to be hardly any back then.  Let’s hope this happy situation continues.

 

The Fleet of Lamvula, to quote Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s new editorial, “is the tale of a band of mercenaries exploring a pirate fleet stranded on the bottom of a dried-up sea.”  The original idea for the story was an image of some explorers on camel-back crossing a psychedelically-coloured desert – the ‘dried-up sea’ angle hadn’t occurred to me yet – under a psychedelically-starry sky.  This image came to me one day while I was listening to the trippiest song of all time, 1970’s Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

 

Also shaping the story was the fact that I’m a sucker for ‘graveyards of lost ships’ stories.  Ships’ graveyards exist in real life, of course, but I find fantastical, fictional examples of them irresistible.  For instance, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the 1968 Hammer movie The Lost Continent, wherein a tramp steamer full of British character actors wanders into a Sargasso Sea ridden with marooned ships, monster crabs, monster octopi, carnivorous seaweed and the murderous descendants of Spanish Conquistadores, was the best thing ever.  The dreamy, Hammond-organ-heavy theme song by the Peddlers has a certain charm too.  I also love an outer-space variation on this trope, the episode Dragon’s Domain from the Gerry Anderson sci-fi TV series Space: 1999 (1975-77).  This had the crew of Moonbase Alpha stumbling across a sinister graveyard of lost spaceships, with a tentacled monstrosity lurking inside it.  Even when I was a kid, I knew Space: 1999 was a deeply silly show, but that episode still scared the crap out of me.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

And one other source of inspiration for The Fleet of Lamvula was the film-work of one of my heroes, Ray Harryhausen…

 

For the next month, The Fleet of Lamvula can be read here, while the main page of Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Issue 144, is accessible here.

Posted on

Honour the Sabbath

 

From wikipedia.com / © Vertigo Records

 

I’m no fan of lengthy international sporting competitions – apart from the Rugby and Football World Cups – and I reacted with a weary shrug to the recent holding of the Commonwealth Games in the English Midlands city of Birmingham.  However, I’d have willingly sat through the Games’ twelve days of sporting endeavour, bored out of my wits, just to be present at the occasion’s closing ceremony.  For this offered a few minutes that, in my mind, were the musical highlight of August 2022, if not the year 2022.  I’m talking about the sight of former Black Sabbath singer and famous Birmingham son Ozzy Osbourne coming up through a stage-trapdoor into a shroud of blood-red mist to sing the 1970 Sabbath classic Paranoid, with Ozzy’s old Sabbath comrade Tony Iommi thumping away on electric guitar.

 

Apparently, Ozzy had originally turned down an invitation to sing at the ceremony due to health issues.  Quite a lot of health issues, in fact – Parkinson’s disease, neck and spine surgery, depression, blood clots, nerve pain.  But at the last minute, deciding the show must go on, he jumped on a flight from Los Angeles and made a surprise appearance in his old home city.  And though I was no fan of the sporting stuff, I was delighted to see him perform at this, the biggest event in Birmingham for years.  Long before anyone had heard of Peaky Blinders (2013-22), Ozzy – catchphrase: “Oi’m the Prince o’ Dawkness!” – had made it cool to be a Brum. 

 

Anyway, this has inspired me to dust down and repost the following item.  It was written in 2017, just after those mighty metallers Black Sabbath had played their last-ever gig.  

 

The third commandment tells us to keep the Sabbath holy.  Well, I believe in honouring the Sabbath but I’m not talking about the seventh day of the week.  I’m talking about Black Sabbath, the 49-year-old heavy metal band who played their last-ever gig two nights ago.

 

Fittingly, Black Sabbath’s farewell performance took place at the Genting Arena in Birmingham, the city where it all started for them.  Guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward and incomparable – many would say incorrigible – singer Ozzy Osbourne grew up in Aston, one of Birmingham’s working-class suburbs.  Prior to forming the band, they did a variety of unglamorous jobs there, including delivering coal, labouring on building sites and working in a sheet metal factory, car plant and abattoir.  Iommi ended his time in the steelworks with an accident that sheared off two of his fingertips and nearly ruined his budding career as a guitarist.  Osbourne, meanwhile, took up housebreaking and got jailed for six weeks.

 

Butler told the BBC recently, “It wasn’t a great place to be at that time.  We were listening to songs about San Francisco.  The hippies were all peace and love and everything.  There we were in Aston.  Ozzy was in prison from burgling houses, me and Tony were always in fights with somebody… we had quite a rough upbringing.  Our music reflected the way we felt.”

 

© Vertigo Records

 

If they felt miserable in Aston and channelled that misery into their music, I can only say the misery was worth it.  The first, eponymously-named song on their first, eponymously-named album in 1970 sets the tone for Black Sabbath’s career of evil.  It’s a gloriously dark and doom-laden affair, opening with rumbles of thunder, the sluicing of heavy rain and the clanging of altar bells.  These give way to a funereal chug of heavy guitars and the eerie high-pitched squalls of Ozzy’s voice (“What is this that stands before me?  / Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?”), which later speed up for a tumultuous but still ominous climax.  I imagine that if any of those peace-and-love hippies whom Butler referred to had gone to a Sabbath gig in 1970 (having ingested some psychedelic substances beforehand) and the gig had opened with this number, they’d have probably fled from the venue screaming in terror with their hands clamped over their ears.

 

Iommi and Butler were horror-movie fans and their music had a horror-movie vibe.  Even the band’s name came from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the legendary Boris Karloff.  Also horror-movie-esque is the cover of the first Sabbath album, showing a black-robed lady looming spectrally in the middle of a spooky autumnal landscape – the building in the background is actually Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire.  I find it cool that nobody knows the identity of the woman, presumably a briefly-hired model or actress, who posed for the picture.  Iommi has claimed that, later, she turned up at one Sabbath concert and said hello to the band.  But I like to think she’d never been at the original photo-shoot at all.  Rather, she was a ghost that haunted the watermill – and when they developed the cover-photo, her wraithlike image had somehow imposed itself on it.

 

© Vertigo Records

 

Black Sabbath produced another album in 1970, Paranoid, which was choc-a-bloc with groovily heavy tunes – the famous title track, the skull-crushing Iron Man, the nihilistic War Pigs and the sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan, which has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’.  The following year’s Master of Reality gave us the jaunty but provocative After Forever (“Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope / Do you think he’s a fool?”) and the apocalyptic Children of the Grave.  Other classic songs included Supernaut, which turned up on the 1972 album Vol. 4; the exhilarating title track of 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that’s perhaps my favourite Sabbath song ever; and the similarly exhilarating Symptom of the Universe on 1974’s Sabotage, which suggests (to me, anyway) Sabbath were secret forbearers of punk rock.  1976’s Technical Ecstasy and 1978’s Never Say Die are less acclaimed and lack a truly killer track, but I’m still partial to them both.

 

In 1980 we got Heaven and Hell which – shock! horror! – didn’t have Ozzy Osbourne doing vocals.  The singer had been sacked from the band due to his massive substance abuse and consequent massive unreliability.  While Ozzy maintains that he was no worse a wreck than the other three band-members were at the time, it was surely tough working with a man prone to such misfortunes as snorting a line of ants he’d mistaken for a line of cocaine or being caught by the San Antonio police urinating over the Alamo whilst dressed in a frock.  Making a Black Sabbath album without Ozzy sounds as feasible as filming The Lord of the Rings without Gandalf, but Iommi, Butler and Ward wisely recruited the late, great Ronnie James Dio as a replacement.  Dio gave Black Sabbath a new lease of life.  He made them sound different – his operatic voice a contrast to the wailing alienness of Ozzy’s – but I have no complaints about the resulting album, full of spiffing tracks like Children of the Sea, Neon Knights and Die Young.

 

© Vertigo Records

 

Dio sang on the next album for Black Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, and returned to sing on 1992’s Dehumanizer; but they were the only Sabbath albums for a long time that were any good.  During the 1980s and 1990s Iommi was the sole founding member who stuck with the band and a succession of jobbing musicians contributed to the records.  Singers included Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes, two alumni of Sabbath’s more mainstream 1970s rivals Deep Purple.  Meanwhile, the band seemed to get through drummers at a rate worthy of Spinal Tap, with the ELO’s Bev Bevan, the Clash’s Terry Chimes and the ubiquitous Cozy Powell banging the skins at various times.  To be honest, the band’s output during this period – 1983’s Born Again, 1986’s Seventh Star, 1987’s The Eternal Idol, 1989’s Headless Cross, 1990’s Tyr, 1994’s Cross Purposes, 1995’s Forbidden – is pretty rubbish.

 

Happily, the original line-up had reconciled by the late 1990s and they’ve played together sporadically since then, at least when other work commitments (like Ozzy’s solo career), illness (Iommi was diagnosed as having lymphoma in 2012) and plain old quarrelling (Bill Ward fell out with everyone else and quit in 2012) didn’t get in the way.  In 2013 they even managed to produce a new album, 13, which while not quite up to their old standards got some positive reviews and produced a decent single, God is Dead?  Filling in for Ward on the drums was Brad Wilk from Rage Against the Machine.  I imagine for Wilk getting this job must have been a dream come true.

 

Well, it seems they’ve finally called it a day.   Maybe that’s just as well in Ozzy’s case, since the old boy’s 67 now and surely needs to take it easy after a lifetime of drugs, alcohol, excess and idiocy.  (At Christmas, after the news that George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt had died within the space of 24 hours, a friend said to me worriedly, “At this rate Ozzy’s not going to make it to the Bells.”)

 

They deserve to enjoy their retirement for their legacy is huge.  Their weighty fingerprints are all over musical movements like grunge and hardcore punk.  And they’re clearly major influences on such metallic sub-genres as black metal, doom metal, goth metal, power metal, sludge metal, speed metal and stoner metal.  Indeed, they’re responsible for more metal than the Brummie steelworks where the young Tony Iommi lost his fingertips and almost lost his future in music.

 

From youtube.com / © BBC

Posted on

21st century metal

 

© Nuclear Blast

 

Such has been the fanfare recently over the return of Swedish 1970s pop darlings Abba, with a new ten-song album and a supposed ‘virtual concert’ where ‘digital avatars’ will perform in the shoes of the band’s now somewhat long-in-the-tooth members, that I’ve wondered if I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t actually like Abba.

 

Okay, ‘doesn’t like’ is a bit strong.  A more accurate verb-phrase would be ‘is totally indifferent to’.

 

There are a couple of Abba songs that get me tapping my foot in a vague, mindless way, like Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! or Money, Money, Money (both 1979) or the song with which they won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, Waterloo – which, come to think of it, was an appropriation of the breezy, sax-laden sound of Roy Wood’s glam-rock band Wizzard.  But unlike, say, the entire population of Australia, a country that’s given us such Abba-obsessed cultural phenomena as the cover band Bjorn Again and the movies Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding (both 1994), I don’t worship the ground that the shiny, 1970s, high-heeled boots of Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn have walked on.

 

However, while the planet’s airwaves turn into the equivalent of the soundtrack of Mamma Mia! (2008), though thankfully without the pained, raspy sound of Pierce Brosnan attempting to sing, I will seek solace in the one type of music that truly matters… heavy metal.

 

Here’s a quick guide to the heavy metal bands, all of whom have become prominent since the beginning of the new millennium, that I’ve been listening to lately.

 

Al-Namrood

As this 2015 feature in the magazine Vice noted, “Al-Namrood have never played a live show, because it could result in the entire band being executed.”  That’s because the band Al-Namrood (a) play black metal and (b) are Saudi Arabian, two concepts that go together about as harmoniously as serpents and mongooses. According to their guitarist and bassist Mephisto, who, like all the band’s members, has never revealed his real name for his own safety, “Al-Namrood is the Arabic name of the Babylonian king Nimrood, who was a mighty tyrannical king who ruled Babylon with blood and defied the ruler of the universe.”  Yes, those sound like pretty black metal things to do.  It’s a shame that the band has had to operate so far off the grid because the music by them I’ve heard, its growling vocals and relentlessly thunderous guitars and drums laced with delicious Arabic folk stylings, I’ve found irresistible.

 

Behemoth

Polish black metal and death metal band Behemoth are similarly unloved by their country’s political and religious establishment.  And though the repercussions obviously won’t be as serious as those risked by Al-Namrood in Saudi Arabia, Behemoth’s frontman Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski has recently been convicted of blasphemy and could face imprisonment in the increasingly authoritarian Poland of Andrzej Duda. Actually, politically, Nergal has proved to be a bit of a knobhead in the past and once gained notoriety for wearing a ‘black metal against Antifa’ T-shirt, so it’s ironic he’s become a martyr in the struggle against the forces of extreme, right-wing knobhead-dom.

 

Behemoth first caught my attention when I listened to their 2018 album I Loved You at Your Darkest, which begins with a choir of creepy children chanting, “I shall not forgive… Jesus Christ… I forgive thee not…”  Thereafter, the album is a brilliantly Wagnerian parade of tunes with such titles as God = Dog, Ecclesia Diabolica Catholica and If Crucifixion Was Not Enough.  Can’t imagine why those pious Polish politicians don’t like them.

 

© Earache Records

 

Cult of Luna

Proof that, musically, Sweden has considerably more to offer than just Abba, Swedish doom metal band Cult of Luna serve up tunes where big, booming slabs of guitar lumber ominously along, accompanied by hollering and shrieking vocals, creating a sound that suggests a world teetering on the brink of collapse while simultaneously being strangely exhilarating and even uplifting.  The earliest album of theirs I’ve heard is 2003’s The Beyond, the most recent one 2021’s The Raging River.  Though there’s evidence of development and exploration between the two, the basic template is reassuringly the same.

 

Electric Wizard

Hailing from County Dorset, England, the original members of Electric Wizard bonded in the 1990s over a shared love of horror films, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the music of legendary Brummie metal band Black Sabbath.  It was from the titles of two Sabbath songs, Electric Funeral and The Wizard (both 1970), that they devised their band’s name.  For me, they just seem to get better and better – from early albums like Dopethrone (2000) and Let Us Prey (2002) to their most recent opus, Wizard Bloody Wizard (2017), which contains the deliriously catchy track Necromania.

 

In fact, someone has stuck a fan video for Necromania on YouTube, its visuals stitched together from such lovable old horror-movie schlock-fests as The Dunwich Horror (1969), Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), All the Colours of the Dark (1972), Baron Blood (1972), Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). It captures the essence of Electric Wizard perfectly.

 

© Roadrunner

 

Gojira

Several bands have named themselves after Godzilla, Japan’s favourite, radioactive-breathed, city-destroying kaiju, including Godzilla in the Kitchen and Bongzilla.  In my opinion, the best of the bunch is the one using the giant reptile’s original Japanese moniker, Gojira.  This French death / progressive metal outfit combines shrieking vocals, wailing guitars and thunderous drums – courtesy of drummer Mario Duplantier, whose sound suggests the footfall of the giant lizard itself – with a surprising degree of melody.  Well, the melodiousness is perhaps not so surprising, giving that the bandmembers cite Led Zeppelin as a key influence.  The 2012 album L’Enfant Sauvage made me fall in love with Gojira, although their most recent one, Fortitude (2021), is pretty good too.

 

Melechesh

I first heard of the band Melechesh through the artist John Coulthart, whose blog I read regularly and who’s designed the covers for their albums, including 2015’s album Enki.  Soon afterwards, I saw Enki on sale in a record shop and bought it out of curiosity.  It’s a great album, its storming metallic sound embroidered with such eastern-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern instruments as the sitar, bouzouki, saz and bendir.  Melechesh, it transpires, are the propagators of ‘Mesopotamian metal’ which, according to their Wikipedia entry, aims to “create a type of black metal incorporating extensive Middle Eastern influences mainly based on Assyrian and occult themes.”  They formed in Jerusalem in 1993 but later relocated to Europe.  In the mid-1990s, the city authorities in Jerusalem accused them of ‘dark cult activities’, which probably didn’t encourage them to hang around in Israel.

 

© Nuclear Blast

 

Orchid

One afternoon I was in the FOPP record shop on Edinburgh’s Rose Street and the guy behind the counter decided to play a heavy metal album over the store’s PA system.  “What’s this?” I demanded, intoxicated by the album’s old-school sound – although as this was Rose Street, I may have been slightly intoxicated already. “It’s The Mouths of Madness,” he replied, “by Orchid!”  Then he produced another copy of the album, recorded in 2013, which I bought on the spot.  I would have remarked: “ORCHID – obviously stands for OZZY Osbourne / RAINBOW / the CULT / Rob HALFORD / IRON Maiden / Ronnie James DIO!”  But I wasn’t able to think that fast.

 

As I’ve suggested, San Francisco metallers Orchid wear their influences on their sleeves, but especially the influence of Black Sabbath.  Now while Black Sabbath, with their doomy sound and the occult preoccupations of their song-titles and lyrics, have been a huge influence on heavy metal generally, later bands have taken that sound and those preoccupations and made them more extreme and exaggerated. But Orchid are reminiscent of Black Sabbath as they were, in a purer, simpler form. I don’t mean that they copy the original band’s songs. Orchid sound like Black Sabbath in their early 1970s prime, if they ‘d existed in a parallel universe where they’d been able to churn out a few extra albums. Similar riffs, but not the same riffs.

 

© Sinister Figure

 

Reverend Bizarre

As far as I can tell, quaintly-named doom-metal outfit Reverend Bizarre are the only band on this list who no longer exist. They disbanded in 2007, having produced three albums during the noughties.  I own two of those, the excellent In the Rectory of the Reverend Bizarre (2002) and II: Crush the Insects (2005).  Sounding like  a sludgier, more primordial version of Electric Wizard, this Finnish band was notable for, among other things, its vocalist, the also quaintly-named Albert Witchfinder.  He eschewed modish doom-metal growling and shrieking and mainly just crooned forebodingly.

 

Wolves in the Throne Room

Their name may conjure up images of Game of Thrones, but Wolves in the Throne Room come from the relatively un-sword-and-sorcerous environs of Washington State in the northwestern USA.  One of their objectives (to quote Wikipedia again) is “channeling the ‘energies of the Pacific Northwest’s landscape’ into musical form.”  Thus, their song titles contain such words as ‘fields’, ‘fog’, ‘lightning’, ‘rain’, ‘rainbow’, ‘stars’, ‘storm’ and ‘woodland’ and their sound has been described as ‘atmospheric black metal’ or ‘ambient black metal’.  But there’s still enough ‘black metal’ present in Wolves in the Throne Room’s formula to prevent them sounding serene and bucolic.  I have three of their albums – 2006’s Diadem of 12 Stars, 2009’s Black Cascade and 2011’s Celestial Lineage – and think they’re all blisteringly brilliant.

 

Having finished writing this blog-entry, I now feel an urge to listen to the above nine bands’ albums again, at maximum volume.  I’ll probably be deaf afterwards, but at least then there’s no danger of me hearing the new Abba album.

 

© Southern Lord