Tag: Heavy metal

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A marriage made in Deafheaven

 

 

San Francisco band Deafheaven performed at the Ground Theatre in Singapore’s *SCAPE installation on Monday, July 15th.  I was introduced to their music several years ago when I heard their acclaimed 2013 album Sunbather.  Some have categorized Deafheaven’s sound as ‘blackgaze’.  This means it combines the screeching vocals and apocalyptic edge of black-metal music – the subgenre that began in the 1980s with the likes of Bathory, Mercyful Fate and Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s greatest-ever metal band Venom, and gained notoriety in the 1990s with Norwegian black-metal bands like Burzum and Emperor, some of whose members were not adverse to burning down churches and murdering each other – with the more reflective, swirly, dreamy sound of the 1980s shoegaze movement that embraced bands like Ride, Lush, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver and the masterly My Bloody Valentine.

 

Initially, I have to admit, that sounded to me like a marriage made in hell.  However, when I listened to Sunbather, I was pleasantly surprised.  I found its songs intense but also captivating.

 

© Sargent House

 

Fast-forward eight years to 2021, and Deafheaven released their fifth and most recent album Infinite Granite.  This took the bold step of toning down the black-metal element in their sound, with singer George Clarke providing ‘clean’ – i.e., non-growly – vocals, and emphasizing the shoegaze component.  Infinite Granite got some excellent reviews in mainstream outlets.  In the Guardian, for instance, it was given a five-star rating and praised as ‘rock at its most majestically beautiful’.  However, not all of the heavy-metal world was taken with its less abrasive approach.  In his monthly roundup Columnus Metallicus in The Quietus, for example, Kez Whelan described it as Deafheaven’s “most drab, soulless outing yet, a conveyor belt of clean, perfectly pleasant but entirely unexciting jangle pop that sounds uncannily like an assortment of American Football B-sides.”  Ouch.  You spurn heavy metal at your peril.

 

Anyway, not knowing what to expect, I went to the Ground Theatre on Monday evening.  The venue was surprisingly cavernous, with a high ceiling, and though the gig was sold out the premises looked like they could have accommodated a bigger crowd.  The disparate elements in Deafheaven’s sound was mirrored by the variety of T-shirts being worn by the audience.  In addition to the bog-standard heavy-metal T-shirts (like Slayer), I saw Goth (Siouxsie and the Banshees), electronica (Crystal Castles) and, yes, shoegaze ones (Slowdive).  Though I’m not sure what the lady in the Heart T-shirt was expecting.

 

 

The support band tonight was a Singaporean outfit called Naedr, who allowed me to sample another hybrid subgenre I’d heard about, but never before experienced live – they proclaimed themselves a screamo band.  Screamo, according to Wikipedia, “is an aggressive subgenre of emo… strongly influenced by hardcore punk.”  To be honest, Naedr sounded pretty metallic to my ears.  But I enjoyed them.

 

Before the main attraction came onstage, I tried to position myself appropriately – close enough to the stage to get a decent view of the band and feel the full force of their music, but not so close that I got sucked into any moshing that might break out among the more excitable spectators at the front.  I have nothing against moshing, but I’m a frail old man now and my body can’t handle such violence.

 

And then Deafheaven’s five members emerged into the stage-lights and got down to business.  It was an impressive performance, helped a lot by George Clarke’s antics as front-man.  He leered, glared, pointed and gesticulated fiercely at the audience, looking rather like the actor Matthew McConaughey – a younger, messianic and rather demented version of him.

 

 

The first part of their set consisted of older numbers, including Sunbather, the title song from their groundbreaking 2013 album.  I should say that when they started playing material from Infinite Granite, namely the songs In Blur and Great Mass of Colour, and Clarke’s shrieking black-metal vocals suddenly gave way to conventionally sung ones, the tonal shift was jarring.  But I found their new stuff as hypnotic as their old stuff.  It was a gig where it was best to switch off your forebrain and simply immerse yourself in the tide of noise advancing out of the speakers.  That was true of both the more aggressive and the less aggressive songs in the band’s repertoire.

 

And, though I didn’t hear anyone in the crowd complaining afterwards, it was probably sensible that they kept the hardcore metallers happy by ending the gig with Dream House – the stormer that was the opening track on Sunbather back in 2013 and that first marked Deafheaven as a band to take notice of.

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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.

 

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Hungry like the Alpha Wolf

 

 

I remember sometime in the 1990s reading an interview with the late, legendary radio DJ John Peel, who was an enthusiastic proponent of extreme heavy metal.  Peel talked about the oddness of going to see a band like the aptly-titled Extreme Noise Terror and realising that he was three times the average age of the punters in the auditorium.

 

That was exactly how I felt a week-and-a-half ago when I went to Singapore’s Aliwal Arts Centre to attend a gig by the Australian metalcore band Alpha Wolf.  Such was the youthfulness of those around me, and such was my own feeling of decrepitude, that I wondered if I should just send myself up, impersonate Steve Buscemi in the popular Internet meme (taken from a 2012 episode of the TV show 30 Rock) and declare, “How do you do, fellow kids?”

 

Metalcore, Wikipedia informs me, “is a fusion genre combining elements of extreme metal and hardcore punk… noted for its use of breakdowns, which are slow, intense passages conducive to moshing.”  A list of metalcore bands I’ve found on the Internet contains such names as Killswitch Engage and the Dillinger Escape Plan, bands whose albums have resided in my record collection for many years.  Wow, I thought, I’ve owned metalcore music without even knowing it was metalcore! 

 

Meanwhile, when I looked at Alpha Wolf’s Wikipedia entry, I discovered that they’d taken their name from the 2011 Liam Neeson thriller The Grey, which is about the survivors of a plane crash in an uninhabited part of Alaska being picked off one-by-one by a pack of hungry wolves.  At one point, Neeson’s character, a wolf expert, explains that the beasts are led by a fearsome ‘alpha wolf, which is apparently the Alien Queen of the lupine world.  However, as the band come from Tasmania, I wonder if their name was also partly inspired by their island’s most famous extinct animal, the Tasmanian wolf.

 

 

One nice thing about the Alpha Wolf gig was that support was provided by not one, nor two, but three local bands.  It fascinates me that a place as famously orderly and respectable as Singapore can produce so many bands specialising in the supposedly disorderly and disreputable genre of heavy metal.  Those support bands were Tariot, Tell Lie Vision and the self-described ‘progressive metalcore’ Aggressive Raisin Cat, whom John Peel would probably have awarded a session on his BBC Radio 1 show on the strength of their name alone.  All three gave their sets their best shot and won the crowd’s appreciation.  My only quibble was that Aggressive Raisin Cat didn’t have an image of a raisin, or indeed, a cat, projected onto the backdrop behind them while they played.  Instead, there was a weird-looking spinning crisp.

 

 

The venue proved a rather austere place.  It was just a space with a stage at the front, and a mixing console and a merchandising stall in the back corners.  There wasn’t a bar, which meant that liquid refreshment had to be procured from the nearest branch of 7-11, which took a while to find, and led me to unfortunately miss some of Tariot’s set.  In between performances, most of the crowd would seep out onto the street outside to chat, smoke and imbibe a little – despite Singapore’s reputation for strictness, drinking in public is permitted until 10.30 pm.  Then, as soon as they heard the next band’s musicians striking their first chords, they’d hurry back inside again.

 

I’ve seen some videos by Alpha Wolf on YouTube, where they performed belters of songs like Black Mamba and Akudama, though thanks to the limited acoustics in the box-like, concrete-y confines of the arts centre auditorium, some of the shape and structure of those songs got lost a bit.  Still, the intensity of the headliners’ show couldn’t be faulted.  From the amount of moshing and crowd-surfing going on, and the fact that by the end of the set there seemed to be more folk on the stage than on the floor below, it was clear that Alpha Wolf had given the punters their money’s worth.

 

Just before the proceedings finished, a cake-and-candles were brought onstage for the celebration of someone’s birthday – I couldn’t see very clearly from my vantage point at the back of the venue, but the birthday-boy might have been the singer with Aggressive Raisin Cat – which struck me as a sweet, final touch.  What a nice bunch of lads, I thought.  To put it another way, despite the aural bombast, Liam Neeson should have nothing to fear if this Alpha Wolf was at his door.

 

© Open Road Films

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Live bands behaving badly

 

© Warner Bros.

 

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water.  They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000).  They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts.  Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are.  We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music.  Who likes rock music?  Nine people, brilliant…”  And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…”  Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

 

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then.  Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

 

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection.  Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it.  But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it…  Or just cancel your appearance.

 

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area.  That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen.  I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment.  As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

 

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder…  What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

 

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s.  Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Mari

 

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming.  Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity.  “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!”  At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in!  Well done!”  Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.”  I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!”  My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me.  “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!”  I decided I should make myself less conspicuous.  This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd.  I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

 

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour.  Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

 

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall.  Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!”  But it was hardly the crowd’s fault.  The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit.  Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage.  The band continued to fume about the experience later.  A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

 

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves.  In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue.  Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!”  I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Nakagami

 

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers.  This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul.  The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge.  At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him.  In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off.  He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

 

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band.  In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes.  The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage.  The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes.  Then they buggered off too.  And then there was a riot.  Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape.  Well, a bit better.

 

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic.  It showed onstage.  (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years.  If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”)  At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key.  It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

 

© Creation / Astralwerks

 

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted.  Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000.  While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!”  That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them.   So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!”  Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’.  (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke.  His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories.  That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

 

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008.  Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich.  “What a knobhead,” I thought.

 

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill.  Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes.  The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act  to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on.  Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs.  Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers.  “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Frank Schwichtenberg

 

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform.  The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them.  Sometimes you get what you want in life.  Sometimes you don’t.”

 

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly.  This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene.  And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them.  In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…”  Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK!  F*CK!  F*CK!”

 

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years.  Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved.  Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year.  They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set.  Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again.  Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

 

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act…  I might pay money to see that.

 

From twitter.com / © Cadell’s Ltd / Entertainment Ltd 2003

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Anvil show their mettle on metal

 

 

Warning — this post contains spoilers for Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

 

2008’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil is surely one of the best rock-music documentaries ever made.  It unflinchingly charts the multiple mishaps that befall Toronto heavy-metal band Anvil during the early 21st century.  Two decades earlier, Anvil had seemed on the cusp of making the big time – for instance, they’d headlined the 1984 Super Rock Festival in Japan alongside Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and the Scorpions – but then they’d faded into obscurity.  However, they never stopped playing and recording, albeit for small (sometimes non-existent) audiences and a very limited fanbase.  Watching The Story of Anvil, I got the impression that the reason for the band’s lack of success was simply a run of bad luck, both catastrophic and comical.

 

For its first 20 minutes, I found The Story of Anvil hilariously funny.  It was as amusing as the legendary spoof ‘rockumentary’ This is Spinal Tap (1984).  Indeed, it seemed ironic that Anvil’s drummer had the same name as This is Spinal Tap’s director, Rob Reiner.  Well, almost – Robb the drummer has two ‘b’s in his first name, whereas Rob the director has one ‘b’.

 

But as the disappointments, disagreements and disasters mount up, as the viewer is subjected to a relentless series of empty concert venues, booking mishaps, record label rejections and scenes where singer / lead guitarist Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow gamely struggles on with his day job, which is delivering trolleys of pre-packaged, catering-company meals through Canadian blizzards, the film stops being funny.  As the fact sinks in that Anvil is a real band, not a fictional one like Spinal Tap, whose middle-aged members are striving to do the thing they love in the face of massive and soul-destroying odds, the film becomes rather tragic.  Particularly gruelling is the scene where, trying to scrape together some money to fund the recording of a new album, Kudlow takes on one of the worst jobs on earth, as a telemarketer.  When it comes to giving people unwanted phone calls and trying to persuade them to buy unwanted products, he’s as successful at it as I would be – he’s miserably crap at it.

 

As the film neared its end, I found myself pleading for the band to have one, just one sustained piece of good luck.  When they’re invited to perform at a three-day music festival in Japan, it looks like the good luck has finally arrived.  But no, they’re then informed that they’re scheduled to play the very first slot on the very first day, coming onstage in the morning when it’s unlikely that most of the audience will have turned up yet…  By this point, I’d concluded that The Story of Anvil was an exercise in utter nihilism, warning about the folly of trying to chase your creative dreams and not accepting your fate as a catering-company delivery man or (in Reiner’s case) a construction worker.  However, in a final twist, the documentary shows the band trudging despondently onstage at the Japanese festival, just before noon, and discovering to their joy that the auditorium is in fact packed with appreciative fans.  Talk about a cathartic finale.  I exhaled such a huge sigh of relief that I almost deflated over my cinema seat.  (Though now that I think about it, and having lived in Japan, I could have told Kudlow and Reiner that you can always depend on the Japanese to show up on time.)

 

It probably wasn’t how they’d wanted to re-establish their name, but The Story of Anvil was such a critical and commercial success that the band got their second wind on the back of it.  Since then, they’ve played at major heavy-metal festivals like Download, Hellfest and Wacken Open Air, provided support for the likes of Metallica and AC/DC and had their songs featured in the soundtracks of movies like It (2017) and TV shows like The Simpsons (1989-present).  Currently, the band is on its Impact is Imminent tour, the East Asian leg of which brought them to my current abode, Singapore, a week ago.

 

 

The weather that evening was the sort of thing that could have appeared in The Story of Anvil as a bad-luck factor stopping an audience from attending one of their gigs.  It’d rained torrentially since the start of the afternoon and there was still no sign of it easing off when I arrived at the venue, the Esplanade Annex Studio, just before eight o’clock.  At least the rain-drenched view outside the studio, of Singapore’s skyscraper-choked Central Area on the far side of the waters where the Singapore River reaches Marina Bay, had an evocatively Blade Runner-type vibe.

 

I was dreading what I’d find when I entered the Annex Studio.  An empty or near-empty auditorium, signalling that the Curse of Anvil had returned?  Or a strictly regulated, typically Singaporean venue with row upon row of seats, where there was no space to get up, move around and shake a leg – imagine having to sit during a heavy-metal concert?  Or worst of all, a combination of both, a place packed with seats but devoid of people?  Thankfully, the interior was seat-less and, while it wasn’t full yet, it seemed to be filling at a steady pace.  I was also pleased to see that a makeshift bar had been installed in a back corner, courtesy of Singapore’s premiere heavy metal-themed pub, the Flying V Metal Bar on Coleman Street.  Among the offerings on its menu were ‘Iron Maiden Trooper Beer’.  Well, with a name like that, I just had to sample a pint of it.  And then I sampled another pint.  And then I sampled another….

 

 

There was a decent-sized crowd present when the support band, local outfit Deus Ex Machina, came on and performed a well-received set.  I liked how the standard heavy-metal T-shirts, long hair and beards sported by 80% of the band contrasted with the appearance of the singer, who had a sensible haircut and was in a sensible short-sleeved shirt and looked like he’d just arrived after a (slightly dress-down) day at the office.  This being Singapore, perhaps he had.

 

Then Anvil came onstage and it was immediately clear how much love there was for them in the room.  While they opened with their instrumental number March of the Crabs (which wasn’t inspired by pubic lice or even by the horror novels of Guy N. Smith, but by Kudlow’s observation that his hand had to move crab-like up and down his guitar strings as he played it) from the 1982 album Metal On Metal, Kudlow wasted no time in leaving the stage and joining the audience below.  At which point, he disappeared amid a sea of adoring fans and amid a forest of arms holding smartphones aloft to film him.

 

 

There ensued 90 minutes of gloriously old-school heavy metal, the tunes interspersed with crowd-pleasing banter from Kudlow.  He got a knowing and affectionate cheer when he introduced one song as being about sticking with your dreams and never giving up, which obviously he knew all about.  He also delivered an anecdote about an encounter with the late, legendary Lemmy, though to be honest his Lemmy impersonation sounded more like Dick Van Dyke’s chimney-sweep in Mary Poppins (1964) than the famously gravelly tones of the frontman of Motorhead.  Generally, after the indignities they’d suffered in The Story of Anvil, it was a tonic to see them up on stage 15 years later, thoroughly enjoying themselves – even if a moment where Kudlow and bassist Chris Robertson saluted each other got a bit Alan Partridge-esque.  The gig also demonstrated what an excellent drummer Robb Reiner is.  A couple of times during the film, he’d been shown at the end of his tether and threatening to quit the band.  Well, I’m glad he didn’t.

 

 

The closing number was probably their best-known song, the title track of Metal on Metal, which was the one featured on The Simpsons and which kicks off with the memorable lines, “Metal on metal / It’s what I crave / The louder the better / I’ll turn in my grave!”  After which, Kudlow couldn’t resist descending into the crowd again.  This time, it seemed like everyone in the venue managed to take a selfie with him.  Well, not everyone.  I didn’t want to break my phone-camera by taking a picture of my bleary, aged, worse-for-wear features.  But I did make a point of going up to him, shaking his hand and thanking him and his band for a job well done tonight.

 

It’s a job he’s still doing, against the odds, and a job he obviously loves.  A lucky man – at last.

 

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Only a few Duff moments

 

 

I’ve had a hellishly busy week.  That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

 

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12th.

 

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth.  I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot.  (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”)  Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

 

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts.  Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.”  Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

 

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy.  And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor.  The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

 

I had to work on November 12th until six o’clock.  As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material.  This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness.  But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

 

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late.  I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor.  Presumably much needed.

 

 

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray.  Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration.  Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart!  Keep your legs apart!”

 

Most of the stadium is roofed over.  Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements.  The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real.  Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening.  The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting.  Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage.  Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked.  Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

 

 

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money.  Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and…  The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement.  The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action.  From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction.  And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared…  Axl Rose!  Duff McKagan!  Slash!  Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

 

 

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky.  But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again.  McKagan looked admirably lean and mean.  As for Slash…  Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing.  He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

 

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too.  Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990.  He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008.  This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’.  So where was Dizzy?  Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off?  It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember.  I snatched a picture of the moment.  Here’s Dizzy!

 

 

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise.  Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night.  The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though.  It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs.  There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding.  That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

 

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy.  I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start.  But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

 

And then there were the ballads.  I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge.  Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times.  When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

 

 

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever.  Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it.  Maybe the band would forget to play it?  But no.  Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started.  At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads.  This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991).  At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

 

 

But enough of the negatives.  What of the positives?  Well, there were plenty.  Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc.  Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

 

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973).  Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously.  For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

 

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969).  The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes.  Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show.  Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s.  An all-round top bloke, then.

 

 

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

 

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear.  They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself.  Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

 

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion II.  Get in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting.  It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said…  Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…”  If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

 

Oh well.  You can’t have everything, I suppose.

 

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert.  After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again.  Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief…  Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens.  Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did.  Thanks, guys!

 

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Lanka metal

 

 

One recurrent thought I’ve had during Sri Lanka’s recent slide into economic and political calamity is: “Christ, I hope all the heavy metal guys are okay.”  Here’s an updated version of some material I put on this blog in the past about the Sri Lankan heavy metal scene, which helped keep me musically sane during my eight years in the country.

 

When I arrived in Sri Lanka in 2014, I accepted there’d be certain things I’d gain from the move and certain things I’d lose from it.  Among the gains would be the following: sunshine, warmth, delicious spicy food, lots of interesting Buddhist and Hindu temples to explore, access to gorgeous beaches, access to the equally gorgeous Hill Country of the island’s interior, and a chance to see an occasional elephant.  Among the losses…  Well, I assumed one thing absent from my new life in Sri Lanka would be the opportunity to hear my favourite musical genre played live.  No, I definitely didn’t expect to attend any heavy metal gigs there.

 

Indeed, I imagined the only live music I’d come across would be (1) traditional Sri Lankan music – absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course; and (2) cover versions of the Eagles, Bryan Adams and Lionel Ritchie played by hotel bands to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters in the country’s holiday resorts – absolutely everything wrong with that.

 

But one of the pleasantest surprises of my years in Sri Lanka was the discovery that the country has actually a thriving heavy metal scene.  Lanka metal is really a thing.  Here’s a quick round-up of my favourite headbangers on the island.

 

 

Let’s start with probably my favourite Sri Lankan band, Paranoid Earthling.  Their Wikipedia entry describes them as a ‘grunge, experimental, psychedelic, stoner rock, heavy metal’ band from Kandy.  They started life in 2001 and one of their assets is their spandex-wrapped vocalist Mirshad Buckman, who has the enviable double-advantage of looking a bit like the late, great Ronnie James Dio and sounding a bit like the equally late, great Bon Scott.  Well, to me, anyway – admittedly after I’d downed a few pints.

 

I saw Paranoid Earthling several times and Buckman’s attitude was always entertaining. My first experience of them was in a Colombo pub called the Keg in 2017, when Buckman led the band onstage with a welcoming cry of “How ya motherfuckas doin’ tonight?” Whereas the last time I saw them was at a concert called Colombo Open Air 2019, held just before Christmas on the premises of the quaintly named Otter Aquatic Club (actually a private club with swimming and other sports facilities, just off Bauddhaloka Mawatha in Colombo 7).  During Open Air 2019, Buckman was in a memorably grumpy mood and railed between songs against the Sri Lankan media and the low standards of its journalists.  I’m glad he didn’t glance behind him.  Otherwise, he’d have seen a flashing screen at the back of the stage, advertising the concert’s sponsors, who included the Ceylon Today newspaper.

 

Among Paranoid Earthling’s best songs are Open up the Gates with its twiddly, thumping guitar sound; the punky, foot-tapping Rock n’ Roll is my Anarchy; and Deaf Blind Dumb, which borrows its stompy bits from Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People but is still a blast played live.

 

 

Slightly older than Paranoid Earthling are Stigmata, on the go since 1998.  I saw them perform a couple of small-scale gigs at the Floor by O bar, next to the grounds of Colombo Cricket Club, and at the 2017 Lanka Comic Con.  (In these much-changed times, I wonder if Comic Con will ever happen again.)  Stigmata are responsible for an impressive sound that, to me at least, combines the best of Iron Maiden and Sepultura, and their frontman Suresh de Silva is an intelligent, well-read and amusing chap – check out his twitter feed.  Other current Stigmata members include the splendidly named Tennyson Napoleon.

 

That said, I should point out that at Stigmata gigs you may have to wait a while between songs – because the garrulous de Silva does like to talk.  And talk, and talk…  Well, Sri Lankans generally seem to enjoy a good blether.  Totally unlike the Irish, of course.

 

 

For a heavier sound – death and black metal – check out the Genocide Shrines, whose ‘lyrical themes’ according the Metal Archives website include ‘tantra / spiritual warfare’, ‘death’ and, er, ‘arrack’.  I suppose after you’ve spent all day waging tantra and spiritual warfare, and staring death in the face, you need to relax with a glass of arrack.  Aside from their juggernaut sound, their most memorable feature is their fondness for wearing scary masks onstage, Slipknot-style.  Though I have to say I was a bit disappointed when I saw them live one time and at their set’s end they ‘rewarded’ their fans by taking their masks off and revealing themselves to be ordinary-looking blokes.  That spoiled the mystique somewhat.

 

Real old timers of the Lanka metal scene are Whirlwind, established in 1995.  I own a copy of their 2003 album Pain, though in my opinion their recorded material doesn’t prepare you for the impressively intense, immersive, even hypnotic sound they conjure up live.  I’ve seen them perform twice, at Shalika Hall – more on which in a moment – and at the afore-mentioned Colombo Open Air 2019.  Due to scheduling issues at the latter event, they hadn’t had time to do a proper soundcheck beforehand and were forced to give ongoing instructions to the audio engineer between songs.  They were understandably peeved, though I didn’t think this affected the quality of their music at all.

 

 

The other metal bands I saw during my time in Sri Lanka were Neurocracy, Mass Damnation, Abyss and a couple of young up-and-coming outfits who equally impressed and amused me with their boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them.  In between their songs they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…”  And then a minute later they were emitting blood-curdling throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F**k!  F**k!  F**k!”

 

Much of what I saw live was at the Shalika Hall on Park Road in Colombo 5, which wasn’t my favourite venue.  For one thing, it didn’t really have sidewalls.  Both sides of the auditorium opened onto small outside compounds with dilapidated toilets at their ends.  This meant the acoustics weren’t great because a lot of the sound seeped out into the night.  Conversely, and especially if you turned up at the wrong part of the evening, a great many mosquitoes got in.  There were also surreal moments when big bats flapped in from one side, crossed above the heads of the audience and flapped out of the other side – sights that’d be more appropriate for a goth concert than a metal one.  Needless to say, the place didn’t have a bar, though you could pop across the road and buy something at the liquor section of the local Food City supermarket.

 

 

The Otter Aquatic Club, which hosted the Colombo Open Air 2019 festival, my final experience of Sri Lankan metal, was a much better venue.  It provided a pleasant open courtyard with a covered stage for the bands and some other roofed-over spaces (including a makeshift bar) where the audience could shelter if it started to rain.  Meanwhile, the Club evidently made efforts to keep its premises mosquito-free because I didn’t see (or feel) one of the bitey wee bastards all night.

 

I was hoping more heavy metal events would be staged at the club but, of course, fate intervened a couple of months later with the arrival of Covid-19, which put the country’s live music scene into hibernation for two years…  And after that came the Rajapaksa-engineered economic and political collapse of 2022, which nearly left the country comatose.  Still, I’m seeing flickers of heavy metal life re-emerging now, with upcoming gigs advertised on a few of the above-mentioned bands’ Facebook pages.  Fingers crossed.

 

In the meantime, guys, thanks for leaving me with some fond, Sri Lankan live-music memories… and with an agreeable metallic buzz in my ears.

 

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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

A Lee-centennial

 

© British Lion Films

 

The British actor Sir Christopher Lee, who was born on this day exactly 100 years ago, was a man who embodied evil to generations of film-goers.  He played Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Scaramanga, Comte de Rochefort, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blind Pew, Saruman, Count Dooku, the Jabberwocky, the Devil and, in the 2008 adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, Death himself.  But up until his passing in 2015, I didn’t so much regard him as the embodiment of evil as one of the coolest people on the planet.

 

Lee did a lot during his 93 years and not just in terms of acting – though his movie resume was awesome, with some 275 titles to his name by the time he entered his tenth decade.

 

He was, incidentally, an incredibly literary actor too, because his massive film and television CV contained adaptations of stories by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Alexandre Dumas, Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Jules Verne.  In real life, he was step-cousin of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming; and by the time Peter Jackson got around to filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-2004), he could boast that he was the only member of the movies’ cast and crew who’d actually met J.R.R. Tolkien.  He was also good friends with Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1959), the fabulous Ray Bradbury, and posh occult-thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, whose potboiler The Devil Rides Out Lee would persuade Hammer Films to adapt to celluloid in 1968.  And he was one of the last people alive who could claim to have met M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in English literature.  As a lad Lee encountered James, who was then Provost of Eton College, when his family tried, unsuccessfully, to enrol him there.  Lee obviously didn’t hold his failure to get into Eton against James because in 2000 he played the writer in the BBC miniseries Ghost Stories for Christmas.

 

Before getting into acting in the late 1940s, Lee did military service during World War II, which included attachments with the Special Operations Executive and the Long Range Desert Patrol , the forerunner to the SAS.  He kept schtum about what he actually did with them.  Decades later, though, he may have unintentionally dropped a hint about his secret wartime activities to Peter Jackson when, on set, he discreetly advised the Kiwi director about the sound a dying man would really make if he’d just had a knife planted in his back.

 

His first years as an actor did not see much success, due to his being too tall (six-foot-four) and too foreign-looking (he had Italian ancestry).  During this period he at least learned how to swordfight, a skill he drew on when appearing in various low-budget swashbucklers.  During the making of one such film, 1955’s The Dark Avenger, the famously sozzled Errol Flynn nearly hacked off Lee’s little finger; although later Lee got revenge when, during a TV shoot with the same actor, a slightly-misaimed sword-thrust knocked off Flynn’s toupee, much to the Hollywood star’s mortification and no doubt to everyone else’s amusement.  Incidentally, I love the fact that Lee could boast of being the only actor in history who’d conducted sword fights with Errol Flynn and Yoda.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

And I’ve read somewhere that when he made the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade for Hammer Films in 1963, Lee taught a young Oliver Reed the basics of sword-fighting.  I’m sure fight-choreographer William Hobbs and the stunt crew who worked on The Three Musketeers a decade later quietly cursed Lee for this.  (Lee starred alongside Reed in the film, playing the memorably eye-patched Comte de Rochefort.)  From all accounts, the ever-enthusiastic Ollie threw himself into the Musketeers’ sword-fights like a whirling dervish, and eventually one stuntman had to ‘accidentally’ stab him in the hand and put him out of action before he killed someone.

 

In 1956 and 1957 Lee got two gigs for Hammer films that’d change his fortunes and make him a star – playing the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and then, on the strength of that, Bram Stoker’s famous vampire count in Dracula.  Apparently, Hammer wanted originally to hire the hulking comedic actor Bernard Bresslaw to play Frankenstein’s monster.  I suppose there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where Bresslaw actually got the job; so that the man we know as Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy (1965), Bernie Lugg in Carry On Camping (1969) and Peter Potter in Carry On Girls (1973) went on in that universe to play Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies and Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings ones.

 

Playing Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein and Van Helsing in Dracula was the legendary Peter Cushing and he and Lee would hit it off immediately, become best mates and make another 18 films together, in which for much of the time they did bad things to each other.  As a mad-scientist-cum-asylum-keeper in The Creeping Flesh (1972), Lee brought a monster to life and then, after the monster had attacked Cushing and driven him insane with terror, he coolly incarcerated Cushing in his asylum.  Whereas in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) Cushing chased him, as Dracula, through a prickly hawthorn bush – hawthorns are apparently harmful to vampires and the experience, Lee recalled in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977), left him ‘shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler’ – before impaling him on a sharp, uprooted fence-post.  Meanwhile, the 1972 British-Spanish movie Horror Express featured a decomposing ape-man fossil that’d come back to life, was possessed by an alien force and had the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs.  It was such an evil motherf***er that Lee and Cushing had to join forces, for once, to defeat it.

 

© Granada Films

 

Lee was famously uncomfortable about being branded a horror-movie star and about being associated with Dracula, an association that might thwart his ambitions for a serious acting career.  He did, though, play the character another six times for Hammer, and an eighth time in the Spanish production El Conde Dracula.  Tweeting a tribute to him when he passed away, Stephen King said, “He was the King of the Vampires.”  So sorry, Sir Christopher, but when the man who wrote Salem’s Lot (1975) says you’re the King of the Vampires, you’re the King of the Vampires.

 

As Dracula, he got to bite Barbara Shelley, Barbara Ewing, Linda Hayden, Anouska Hempel, Marcia Hunt, Caroline Munro and Valerie Van Ost.  Last-minute interventions by Peter Cushing in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) prevented him from biting Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley, which must have been frustrating.  Meanwhile, the 1965 movie Dracula, Prince of Darkness was the first really scary horror movie I ever saw, on TV, back when I was eight or nine years old.  I’d watched old horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), in which everything was discreetly black-and-white and bloodless, so I wasn’t prepared for an early scene in Dracula, Prince of Darkness where Lee / the count is revived during a ceremony that involves a luckless traveller (Charles Tingwell) being suspended upside-down over a coffin and having his throat cut.  The sight and sound of the blood splattering noisily onto the supposedly dead vampire’s ashes traumatised me.

 

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

 

Thanks to Hammer’s success in the horror genre, the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s saw a boom in British, usually gothic, horror filmmaking.  And during that boom, Lee did many memorable, often evil, things.  He drove his car into Michael Gough and squidged off Gough’s hand in Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965).  He forced Vincent Price to immerse himself in a vat of acid in Scream and Scream Again (1969).  He turned up as a snobbish senior-civil-servant type and tormented Donald Pleasance in Deathline (1972).

 

Lee was probably Britain’s most linguistic actor, speaking German, French, Italian and Spanish and also knowing a bit of Swedish, Russian and Greek.  Thus, he also found it easy to find employment making horror movies on mainland Europe, where the gothic tradition was raunchier, more lurid and looser in its plot logic than its counterpart in Britain.  He worked with the Italian maestro Mario Bava in 1963’s The Whip and the Body and on several occasions with the fascinatingly prolific, but erratic, Spanish director Jess Franco.  Despite Franco’s cheeky habit of shooting scenes with Lee and then inserting them into a totally different and usually pornographic movie – something Lee would only discover later, when he strolled past a blue-movie theatre in Soho and noticed that he was starring in something like Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970) – Lee held the Spaniard in esteem and championed his work at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so.  Since his death in 2013, Franco’s reputation has improved and art-house director Peter Strickland’s movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a tribute, in part, to him.

 

Franco directed the later entries in a series of movies about Fu Manchu that Lee made in the 1960s, in which he played Sax Rohmer’s supervillain in un-PC Oriental makeup and spent his time barking orders at Chinese minions, who were usually played by Burt Kwouk.  As well as retaining some of the racism that was prominent in Rohmer’s books, the series generally wasn’t up to much in terms of quality.  However, the film’s endings have always haunted me.  Invariably, Fu Manchu’s secret headquarters would blow up and then Lee’s voice would boom imperiously through the smoke, “The world will hear of me again!”

 

© Eon Productions

 

In the early 1970s, Lee finally got opportunities to make the sort of films he wanted to make, including Richard Lester’s two Musketeers movies (1974 and 1975); the ninth official Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), in which he taunted Roger Moore, “You work for peanuts – a hearty well-done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension.  Apart from that, we are the same.  To us, Mr Bond.  We are the best…  Oh come, come, Mr Bond.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”; and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), regarded by many as the best attempt at bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing super-sleuth to the screen.

 

In that latter film, Lee played Holmes’s snooty brother Mycroft.  Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself several times, including in a couple of early-1990s TV movies with Dr Watson played by the impeccable Patrick Macnee, whom decades earlier had been Lee’s schoolmate at Summer Fields School in Oxford.  And he played Henry Baskerville in the 1959 Hammer adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had Peter Cushing in the role of Holmes.  But for some strange reason, nobody ever thought of casting Lee as Professor Moriarty.

 

In 1973, he also played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, a film that needs no introduction from me.  Actually, next year is the film’s fiftieth anniversary.  I trust the Scottish Tourist Board will celebrate this fact on May 1st, 2023, by lighting lots of wicker men, with lots of sanctimonious, virginal, Free Presbyterian policemen inside them, along the coasts of Scotland.

 

Later in the 1970s, no longer so typecast in horror movies and with the British film industry on its deathbed, Lee decamped to Hollywood.  He ended up appearing in some big-budget puddings like dire 1977 disaster movie Airport 77 and Steven Spielberg’s supposed comedy 1941 (1979), but at least he was able to rub shoulders with icons such as Muhammad Ali and John Belushi.  And he didn’t, strictly speaking, stop appearing in horror movies.  He was in the likes of House of the Long Shadows (1982), The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), The Funny Man (1994) and Talos the Mummy (1998).  Amusingly, Lee usually explained this by arguing that these weren’t really horror films.  The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf wasn’t a horror film?  Aye, right.

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

 

Though he never relented in his workload, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lee experienced a late-term career renaissance – no doubt because many of the nerdish kids who’d sneaked into cinemas or stayed up late in front of the TV to watch his old horror movies had now grown up, become major players in the film industry and were only too happy to cast him in their movies: Joe Dante, John Landis, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton.  Hence his roles in two of the biggest franchises in cinematic history, the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit ones, plus five movies directed by Burton.

 

When he was in his eighties, Lee must have wondered if there were any territories left for him to conquer – and he realised that yes, there was one.  Heavy metal!  He had a fine baritone singing voice but only occasionally in his film career, for example, in The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), did he get a chance to show it off.  In the mid-noughties, however, he started recording with symphonic / power-metal bands Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar and soon after he was releasing his own metal albums such as Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, which had contributions by guitarist Hedras Ramos and Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner.  He also released two collections of Christmas songs, done heavy-metal style.  The festive season will never seem the same after you’ve heard Lee thundering his way through The Little Drummer Boy with electric guitars caterwauling in the background.

 

© Charlemagne Productions Ltd

 

Obviously, the heavy metal community, which sees itself as a crowd of badasses, was flattered when the cinema’s supreme badass – Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, etc. – elected to join them and they welcomed Lee with open arms.  They even gave him, as the genre’s oldest practitioner, the Spirit of Metal Award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods ceremony in 2010.

 

So: singing heavy metal, speaking eight languages, being perhaps the 20th century’s greatest screen villain and, probably, bayoneting Nazis to death.  Was there anything this man couldn’t do?  Well, it seems the only thing he couldn’t quite manage was to live forever.  Mind you, for someone who spent his cinema career dying – even when he penned his autobiography in his mid-fifties, he reckoned he’d been killed onscreen more than any other actor in history – but kept coming back, it feels a bit odd to be writing about Christopher Lee in the past tense.

 

Actually, if anybody wants to congregate in a Carpathian castle after dark and perform a blood-soaked ritual to resurrect the great man, I’m up for it.

 

From the Independent

Posted on

Happy World Goth Day 2022

 

© Halperin Productions

 

Does the sun seem to be shining a little less brightly, or a little more darkly, today?  Does the air seem unusually clammy, redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the bleak December’ rather than the cusp-of-summer May?  Do the people walking past on the street seem to be sporting a tad more kohl eyeliner than normal?  Are you staring at your TV, unsure if the pudgy, chaotic, tousle-haired figure you see on the screen is indeed Boris Johnson and not Robert Smith?

 

If the answer is ‘yes’…  Well, this is probably because today, May 22nd, is World Goth Day.  According to Wikipedia, the idea of having a day dedicated to the planet’s blackest-clad subculture ‘originated in the United Kingdom in 2009 initially as Goth Day, a smaller scale celebration… inspired from the broadcasting of a special set of shows on BBC Radio 6.’

 

So, to mark the occasion, here’s a playlist of my dozen favourite Goth tunes, with YouTube links.  (My apologies for any ultra-irritating YouTube advertisements that might pop up at the beginning.)

 

© Cleopatra

 

First up is the Goth-dancefloor fixture Adrenaline by Liverpudlian band Rosetta Stone.  Actually, when I think of all the Goth nights I attended in my youth in places like Edinburgh, Norwich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this is the only tune I remember the DJs playing.  Yes, I know they must have played other stuff, but this is the one song that accompanies my memories of those events.  (Maybe they did play Adrenaline all night long, in a Gothic variation on that Father Ted episode where Ted and Dougal organise a charity disco and then realise they only have one record, the Specials’ Ghost Town.)

 

I’ve heard many authorities declare that Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the greatest Goth song of all time.  But by way of something different, I’ll offer this tune instead, which is a cheeky riposte to the venerable Bauhaus anthem: Bela Lugosi’s Back by the fabulously titled Lesbian Bed Death.  I love how they’ve peppered the song’s video with footage from that hypnotically weird and dream-like movie White Zombie, which had Lugosi as its villain back in 1932.

 

© Polydor

 

I’m a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I thought on this playlist I’d include something from the formidable SIouxsie Sioux’s other band the Creatures, which she formed with fellow Banshee and one-time husband Peter ‘Budgie’ Clarke.  I’ve had a fondness for the Creatures ever since seeing them perform a storming set at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in 1999.  This is called Pluto Drive and listening to it always lets a few tingles loose on my spine.

 

© The Mission

 

A band I saw in Edinburgh during the same period, though this time at the city’s Liquid Rooms, was the Mission.  Now it was customary that when the Mission played their most famous number, the Led Zeppelin-esque Tower of Strength, their die-hard fans – who were known as ‘the Eskimos’ – would climb on top of each other and create a human tower in the middle of the auditorium.  Well, not so much a tower as a pyramid, with lots of Eskimos on the floor forming its base, and smaller numbers of them forming the higher levels that tapered up to its apex.  This was easy to do during the Mission’s heyday in the 1980s, when those Eskimos were mostly lean, lithe and light teenagers.   However, by the late 1990s, the Eskimos had got not only a wee bit older but also a wee bit heavier… And I watched the building of that human Tower of Strength with some trepidation.   Predictably, the whole thing soon wobbled and toppled over.  But at least no Eskimos were hurt.

 

Anyway, here’s the song Belief from the Mission’s 1990 album Carved in Sand.  I don’t know why this song isn’t better known, as I always thought it was an epic, relentless thing epitomising the band at their bombastic best.  (Though some unkind critics would probably reword that as ‘at their bombastic worst’.)

 

Similarly, I don’t know why this next tune, Number One by the German outfit Clan of Xymox, isn’t better known either.  It soars in an impeccably synth-y way.

 

I’d like to think that if, besides being tested for the ethnic groups you came from, your DNA could be tested for the musical sub-cultures you belonged to, my DNA would show a strong ‘Goth’ component.  However, also being a fan of heavy metal, I’d hope that it showed a big ‘metalhead’ component too.  Thus, my next two choices lie in that fascinating area where the two genres, Goth and heavy metal, overlap.  First, here’s the wonderfully sepulchral – thanks to the band’s vocalist, the late Peter Steele – Everyone I Love is Dead by Type O Negative.

 

© Music for Nations

 

And here’s the finest goth-metal band to ever hail from Country Suffolk, East Anglia: Cradle of Filth.  Their song A Gothic Romance: Red Roses for the Devil’s Whore follows a tried-and-trusted Cradle of Filth formula, starting with a civilised, classical-music opening, but rapidly descending into howling, pounding, guitar-mangling chaos.  As ever, the croaking / shrieking vocals of Suffolk icon Dani Filth are at the forefront.

 

Now it’s time for another Goth dancefloor-stomper.  It’s hard to resist Doctor Online by industrial Norwegian outfit Zeromancer, a song I assume was inspired by the infamous, euthanasia-supporting Doctor Jack Kevorkian, aka ‘Doctor Death’.

 

Canadian band the Birthday Massacre are smartly named.  The word ‘birthday’ suggests glowing candles, ornately decorated birthday cakes and, generally, the magical happiness that people associate with childhood memories of their Big Day; while the word ‘massacre’ suggests, well, blood, darkness and death.  That juxtaposition sums up Goth perfectly.  And here’s their song Happy Birthday, whose vibe nicely blends that sense of child-like wonder with sinister premonitions that something bad is going to happen.

 

© Beggars Banquet

 

Returning to Bauhaus for a moment, I find this solo effort by their celebrated frontman Peter Murphy, Cuts You Up, poignant and rather lovely.

 

The young band Savages – okay, that’s young by my standards: they formed in 2011 – are described in their Wikipedia entry as a ‘post-punk, noise rock, alternative rock’ outfit.  That description sneakily avoids using the ‘G’ word…  But come on.  I defy anyone to listen to their song Husbands and not think of Siouxsie and the Banshees at their imperious best.

 

Finally, how else could I finish this post but with a link to the greatest Goth anthem ever, the Sisters of Mercy’s majestic, thunderously operatic This Corrosion?  Be warned – this is the 11-minute remix.  By the end of those 11 minutes, after you’ve been bludgeoned into submission by singer Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison’s caterwauling vocals, by producer Jim Steinman’s celestial choirs and Wagnerian guitar-squalls, and by that never-ending chorus of “Hey, now / Hey, now now…”, you will be begging the Sisters for mercy.

 

© Merciful Release