Pioneers

An old boss of mine had a line that he would use whenever someone was trying to sell him an idea on the basis that if we went down a particular direction, we would be "pioneers".
"I don't want to be a pioneer", he would reply, "I know what happened to the pioneers; the indians filled them with arrows."

The clip above is from a Black Sabbath concert in Paris in 1970, which has been knocking around on DVD for a while now. When I first saw this concert, what struck me was the audience. You get a good look at them at the start of this clip, as the cameraman helpfully pans across the cinema in which the show takes place. It's not a heavy metal audience. Instead, it's a bunch of French hipsters, who look a lot like the 1968 students from Bertolucci's The Dreamers. You can imagine that they had turned up to see what this new English rock band sounded like; the one that the music press was saying were even louder than the Yardbirds. Louder than the Yardbirds! Ce n'est pas possible! They probably showed Zabriske Point afterwards.

But of course it's not a heavy metal audience. There were no heavy metal audiences before Black Sabbath. No denim jackets with back patches. No studded wristbands. No air guitars. None of the above. Sabbath must have spent the first 5 or so years of their existence playing the likes of N.I.B. and Black Sabbath in front of crowds of bemused hip young things wondering what the devil was going on. That couldn't have been as easy as it sounds. They must have taken a lot of arrows.

Fly, on your way, like an Eagle

You may have already seen this doing the rounds of the internet but I'm sure you won't mind seeing it again. Three thoughts struck me while watching it:

First, Flight of Icarus is a damn good pop song. That's right: pop song. It rattles along impressively and the chorus is full of hooks. The ABBA lads wouldn't have kicked it out of bed, that's what I'm saying.

Secondly, it's refreshing to see kids actually enjoying themselves in a music video. Let's face it, whenever you see children in a music video, the odds are that they're there, swaying along self-consciously,  to prop up some drippy ballad about world peace, the environment or - worst of all - Christmas. They seem to be having a lot more fun here, throwing metal shapes and playing air guitar (and check out the cardboard guitar on the left of the front row - it's 1979 all over again).

The last point that occurred to me was that, back when this came out in 1983, if a primary school child turned up wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt they would most likely have earned a trip to the Headmaster's office pretty sharply. Now look. You can't say that nothing's changed for the better in the last 20 years.

Page 3 Metal

(Warning: contains images of red underwear)

As Kerrang got up and running in 1981, it was only a matter of time before metal bands realised that a full colour magazine dedicated entirely to them offered up possibilities that smudgy old black and White Sounds never could. One of the first to exploit this was Judas Priest, who in Kerrang no. 10 in February 1982 appeared in a photo spread with Penthouse Pet Cheryl Rixon. You can see it below (warning: it's maybe NSFW. Unless you work for Silvio Berlusconi).

Looking at it now, it's kind of endearing that Judas Priest - an established band that had toured the world - when given the chance to indulge their sexual fantasies came up with something that could have appeared on The Benny Hill Show. I bet they even had a cup of tea afterwards.

What's interesting about it all it is that it caused a fuss. The letters pages in subsequent issues were notably full of letters complaining about the sexism of the photo spread. One reader complained that:

In one foul swoop Kerrang! has plummeted from being 'The Times' of heavy rock to being the 'Daily Star'. No wonder heavy rock is damned for being sexist if the critics see this sort of trash.

Thankfully, the editors never acted on the suggestion below from X, a "Sue Barker lookalike":

Now the way I see it, that was done solely for the pleasure of the male readers. To make it fair and give some pleasure to the female readers, you should've had Priest romping around in their undies in the final picture.

You get the feeling that the Kerrang editors, who probably cut their journalistic teeth with the strippers and dwarves at Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin press launches in the 70s, didn't realise that this was now the 80s and things were changing.

At the same time, it was all publicity, and other bands were hardly going to let Priest get all the centre spreads. Certainly not the ambitious and well-managed Iron Maiden, and you can imagine that Rod Smallwood was on the phone to the model agency as soon as he saw the pictures. The result was the centrefold "Maiden's Maiden" that appeared in the very same issue as the letters quoted above.

There's something a bit desperate about this picture. You can imagine the model wondering to herself how it got to this. From almost making it onto the Kenny Everett Video Show to posing in red drawers while being groped by an Iron Maiden roadie wearing a rubber latex mask.

Of course, after all this excitement, Kerrang then realised that attitudes were changing and decided to grow up, stopping this malarkey and focusing on the music. Only joking. Of course they didn't. Future issues gave ample space to great talents such as Lee Aaron, Bitch and Pandora, all testing the tensile strength of elasticated fabrics.

Barbaric Gardians & Bestial Malevolance

I was on the road last week. Well, when I say "on the road", I mean I was on a trip for my work, but given the subject matter of the blog, I think I should say on the road, so that you imagine me rattling along in the back of a transit van drinking Scrumpy Jack, instead of sipping over-priced coffee on an inter-city.

Anyway, while I was there, I had some free time and found a second hand record shop to browse in. Among my haul from this was a vinyl copy of Black Metal by Venom. I was never a big Venom fan back in the day, so it was good to finally pick up a pretty battered copy of this record. Look, that's it up there.

Later on that day I was sitting in a cafeteria having a coffee and I decided that I'd dig out the records I bought to have a look at the damn things. Now, at this point I realised that a vinyl copy of Black Metal is pretty conspicuous when you take it out in public. Then, I noticed that at the table next to me was a family, a young couple with two little children, the younger of whom was in a pram right next to me. At this point my imagination started running away with me. Could this 1982 Venom album from Neat Records, with its spelling mistakes on the back cover, cast a malignant spell over this baby? I decided to put it back in its carrier bag before the cafe shook from Carmina Burana, trusting that the couple of millimetres of polythene would protect the child from any dark influence of Cronos ("rabid captor of bestial malevolance"), Abaddon ("barbaric gardian to the 7 gates of Hell") or Mantas (below, "grand master of Hades and Mayhem". And white leather trainers). What can I say? The coffee is strong over here.

That got me to thinking that the demise of vinyl has reduced the potential for your favourite bands to cause you awkward moments with their product artwork. Kids of today downloading their music will never have to worry about their mum seeing their copy of Lovehunter" or the guidance teacher walking in when they're giving a friend their copy of "Reign in Blood". I think they're missing out.

Te Estoy Amando Locamente

The term "Flamenco Rock" probably makes most people think of the Gypsy Kings. Nothing wrong with them of course, after all their version of Hotel California is much more fun than the original. However, when flamenco and rock first met head on back in the mid 70s, the result was very different indeed, and that's what I'd like to talk about here. So, ladies and gentlemen, take a seat - not that one, the cat likes to sit there - and pour yourself a glass of manzanilla, because I'm going to tell you the incredible but true story of one of the most remarkable bands that you've probably never heard of: Las Grecas.

Las Grecas - Amma Immi (Gipsy Rock, 1974)


Las Grecas were Carmela and Tina Munoz Barrull, two sisters of gypsy descent who grew up in the dirt poor outskirts of Madrid in the 60s and 70s. When their father left home, Carmela and her younger sister starting performing flamenco in some of the local tablaos, and soon folk were talking about these pretty gypsy girls who would sing flamenco in unision, something that was then practically unheard of. CBS signed them up, and then had a great idea: they teamed them up with some of their best rock session musicians to see what would happen.

The results probably surprised even them. Their first single, Te Estoy Amando Locamente ("I'm loving you Crazily" - sounds better in Spanish) stomped its way up the charts Wuthering Heights-style to the No. 1 position in 1974, where it stayed for 5 weeks. Grecamania gripped a dusty old Spain in the dog days of Franco's regime, and their first album, Gipsy Rock, was both hugely successful and influential - the flamenco guitarist Paco De Lucia used the decending melody of the hit single as the basis for his best known piece, Entre Dos Aguas.
They were stars. They bought a beige cadillac and an apartment in one of the more chi chi areas of Madrid. The second album, Mucho Mas, was also pretty good, but then the hits started to dry up. They released two more albums and finally called it a day in 1979. Five years. not a bad innings for the 70s.

Las Grecas - Bella Kali (Gipsy Rock, 1974)


It would be nice to end the story here. In a parallel world much happier than our own, Las Grecas lived out their lives happily in comfortable obscurity. In our world however, their lives were tossed into a maelstrom. First of all was the old story, they were swindled out of money. After sacking their manager, they found themselves effectively blacklisted by the industry. They couldn't work and they were broke. Carmela was the first to snap, trying to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills and then posing naked for a gossip magazine.Then Tina started suffering mental health problems. She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and in 1983 tried to kill her sister, attacking her with a knife, plunging it into her shoulder. She spent the next 9 years in and out of prison and hospitals and was often seen wandering the streets of Madrid homeless. She died in 1992 at the age of 38.

There's no happy ending I'm afraid. In fact, it ends in farce. Carmela tried to return in the 90s without much success, with a new singer replacing her late sister. Then, the said singer then ended up somehow registering and obtaining the rights to the name Las Grecas. She currently performs under this name with another new singer, neither of whom had anything to do with the original group. There's no business like show business.

Gipsy Rock is available on iTunes and has also just been reissued on vinyl. You can also find a couple of compilations under the name Por Siempre Grecas on Amazon. As always with these compilations, Vol 1, which covers the early years, is the one to go for. You can see them performing the big hit on some godawful Spanish version of Top of the Pops below.