Hair Metal: The Unforgiven

In Sam Dunn's Metal Evolution TV series, the presenter covers every type of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal you can think of, plus a few you can't. He shows enthusiasm for almost all of them: Power Metal, Progressive Metal, Shock Rock, even Grunge. All apart from one. At the start of the episode of Hair Metal he confesses that it's a form of Metal that we was never able to warm to. And he's not alone.

The first I heard of what would come to be Hair Metal was 1981 or so when Tommy Vance played songs from an album called Too Fast For Love by some American band called Motley Crue on his Friday Rock Show. They had been getting mentions for a while in Kerrang! and this must have been one of the first times they were played on the radio in the UK. God almighty, I thought to myself, this'll never catch on.

The thing is, I should have liked Hair Metal. After all, I was a fan of most of the genre's major influences. I loved the 70s Alice Cooper and Kiss records. (still do). I also liked Van Halen and Aerosmith. So, yes, I should have been a fan really. So why did I end up hating the bloody thing?

I think the main reason was the sound. Hair Metal records sounded really terrible with all that compression. Those thudding snares. Those squawking lead guitars. Perhaps the records were mastered to sound effective on FM radio (or on MTV), but there's something cold and shrill about them. And they don't sound any better thirty years on either. I've become quite forgiving about a lot of 80s music these days (I even own a copy of Rio by Duran Duran). But Hair Metal leaves me as cold today as it did back in the day.

Of course, the irony is I became a fan by proxy. So many of my friends became fans of these bands in the mid 80s that it was pretty much impossible not to become familiar with the latest David Lee Roth, Poison and Cinderella releases. I knew them all. And of course if you listen to any genre enough you'll find something you like. so the track below is from the only Hair Metal album I've heard that I think is really any good, Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation. To me, it's a collection of good songs that are strong enough to withstand Bruce Fairbairn's 80s production. the follow-up Pump was pretty good too, though after that I lost interest.

Goat

I regularly listen to the free CDs that come with Classic Rock magazine. It normally doesn't take me long, as I find myself changing tracks after a minute or so; there's a lot of new bands out there, and they mostly make records that sound like ones by the old bands that I already own. One thing I'm noticing is that the interesting stuff tends to be tucked away at the end, so you only get to it after you've waded through rubbish like Black Motorcycle Bourbon and Albatroth. Last month's CD had a song called Words by the Swedish band Goat tucked away in the cheap seats. It's wonderful, it sounds like Jefferson Airplane soundchecking with Venom's In League with Satan.

I've since downloaded their albums from eMusic and I'm hooked. The Guardian describes their music as "weaving together rock, Afrobeat, funk, chants and tribal drums into an intoxicating, psychedelic stew", but then The Guardian would. Actually, it's a fair description, though it makes them sound a bit dry and earnest. Which they're not, as you can probably guess from the picture above. I reckon they  look like what you imagine Slipknot would if they came from Brighton. 

The new album Commune is full of catchy riffs, chanted singing and time signatures that Frank Zappa probably had on his To Do list. Some of the songs have lyrics that could fit on a King Size Rizla, which may make sense as it's probably what they were written down on in the first place. The album is 38 minutes long and fairly flies by: Talk to God and Words kick things off in style, and To Travel the Path Unknown slows things down nicely Planet Caravan-style. There's a slight mid-album lull, before the wonderful Hide from the Sun gives the album its second wind and carries us to the end. It's great fun.

Bad Reputation

One of the things that I've noticed with bands is that after a while an image of them prevails that is often defined by just a couple of songs, some iconic images and a few key words. So the picture that is normally painted of Thin Lizzy is that of a gang of rabble rousers, largely because of The Boys are Back in Town. This is a shame because it overlooks their more soulful moments, such as Dancing in the Moonlight, Sarah and a personal favourite, Old Flame, from Johnny the Fox (and also the B side to probably their best single, Don't Believe a Word).

When musicians die young, it's tempting to imagine what they would have gone on to do had they lived. I reckon Nick Drake and Randy Rhoads would have gone on to greater things. Sid Vicious, probably not. What about Phil Lynott who would have been 65 today had he lived? It's tempting to think that his career was over. After all, his post-Lizzy band Grand Slam did nothing. Yet at the same time, he was in the Top Ten as late as 1985 with Out on the Fields. Would he have reformed Lizzy as a touring act like the Stones, playing the hits in arenas? Or would he have shown that he still had some creative juice, like Robert Plant? It's difficult to say, but that's the problem with speculating about Phil - there was always a bit more to him than you might expect.

The Summer of 1984

I bought a copy of the above record this weekend, the third one of the Now series. By coincidence, it was released exactly 30 years ago, on July 23, 1984. I never bought the Now albums back in the day of course, I was far too cool for that, with my Marillion and Dio records. So if we use this album to look back, what was the Summer of 1984 like?

It's better than I remember, to be honest. There's a healthy slice of good stuff: Thinking Of You, Two Tribes, Time After Time, White Lines, Robert de Niro's Waiting and Small Town Boy are all good songs to start with. One Better Day and I Want to Break Free aren't my favourite Madness or Queen singles, but I do like the albums they come from. Above all, I'm struck by how young most of the acts are. Someone looking at this in the summer of 1984 could have been forgiven for thinking that the future lay with Duran Duran and ZTT rather than The Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan, unless something happened.

Which of course, it did. By the end of the year we had Band Aid, and the Summer of 1985 gave us Live Aid, after which everything began to change. Moreover, within a few years, all the best music of the 60s and 70s was being reissued on CD. A young band at the end of the decade was duking it out with Pet Sounds and Revolver for rack space and pocket money.

So was the last summer before Live Aid the end of an era or am I reading far too much into a ragbag bunch of synth pop tunes? And what are your memories of the Summer of 1984?

Eddie Chimney

The proud gentleman on the left is Scott McGuire of Prospect, Illinois, who in December 1983 appeared in Kerrang! No. 58 after having redesigned his chimney stack to look like Iron Maiden's Eddie.

I know we're meant to shake our heads at the reckless eccentricity here (the article begins "Only in America!") but the truth is, I'm all for this sort of thing. In fact, the only downside I could see to this would be a desire to fill up your fireplace with old car tyres and other such muck so that you could get a good head of smoke coming out of the top.

(When I was growing up, if someone did manage to "put their lum up", usually by overloading their fire with coal, empty Domestos bottles and wet sticks, then half the neighbours would go out in the street to stand in the smog and watch. You took what entertainment you could get before the internet came along).