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HOME was a small town called Stanford-le-hope, A.K.A. Stanford and Corringham. It was two villages that had grown together to form a poxy little town with nothing to offer, if you wanted to do anything you had to get out. Check out the Knowhere site to get a good impression of what it was like. My favourite quote about Stanford’s best building is “the banks so you can get money to use the trains to get out”.
Despite the slating it gets it has a place of fondness in my memory, its nothingness has its own charm, a sort of indifference to the world around it. Stanford moves further away each year, not physically but temporally, maybe that’s growing up.
Stanford’s activities for the young metaller included: walking about drinking newky brown, sitting about in a park drinking newky brown, sitting in somebody’s house drinking newky brown, getting the shit kicked out of you, or going somewhere else.
Somewhere else would be Basildon’s Round Acre, Southends cliffs pavilion or Esplanade bar, or London. The round acre was a hut near a roundabout near the town centre of Basildon, its still there and it probably still does the same sort of thing; local bands for local kids. Southend is a bit more upmarket when it comes to bands I’ve seen the Almighty and Red Dogs at the Cliffs and Pearl Jam, Terrovision and Naughty Naughty at the Esplanade. London speaks for its self. Stanford had nothing to offer until 1994 when the Luna club opened (it may have been 1995) but by that point I was doing the father thing and had no money or time to spare. It was also about this time that some friends and I decided to form a band, we called it Bastard and we were shit, but it was fun.
1995 saw everybody move away, and that included me( and my sprog), I still have family and friends who live there and it will always have a place in my heart.

Gun

Another tape dug out, another tape to listen to. Gun. I think this was another band we had seen on headbangers ball but I could be wrong, and now I do not know what inspired me to buy it, Taking On The World is shit. It sounds like a slightly heavier Simple Minds, its not badly done its just as my daugter put it “boring” and I couldn’t agree more. At some point I also bought the single Steal Your Fire from one of the follow up albums.

“Scottish rock band (from Glasgow) who first came to public attention in 1989 with their striking single "Better Days," a powerful driving rock thrash which stopped just short of the top 30”

Driving thrash? Bollocks.

I don’t care what happened to these guys.

Jack Daniels

JACK DANIELS, just say it and the memory of the taste taunts you. That distinctive bottle in the hands of all those metal heroes, all those t-shirts and badges, lighters and tumblers, the sight of it behind the counter, out of reach and out of price range, just what a couple of seventeen and eighteen year old metallers needed to get pissed. “Thunderbirds please”, it was loads cheaper.

Just to show you how important it was:
Martin lived with his mum near a sheltered housing complex, I got to know him much better many years later but in those few encounters in 89-90 he impressed me with two things, one: the biggest collection of fantasy and sci-fi books I’d seen and two: the top of his wardrobe was covered in empty JD bottles. I bumped into him when he started going out with a girl I new from work about ’98, “hey I know you” I said, he looked confused, “you had shitloads of empty JD bottles on your wardrobe”, “yeah, I did, who the fuck are you?”

Jack Daniels, Jack or JD, it was important, it wasn’t the best, it wasn’t the strongest, but it was important. It still is. It was my luxury tipple up until 1995 when all the dope smoking dance music tossers started drinking it, I moved on to scotch. People still insisted when I asked for whisky on getting me JD, it started to piss me off. My little sister still bought me a bottle every Christmas until last year when I said I’d prefer a single malt or at least a scotch of some sort, I said I don’t really like JD anymore. It was terrible, I missed that bottle so much I’m still a bottle out of sorts, maybe I’ll go buy one tomorrow and try to redress the balance.

Sorry Jack, I promise to make it up to you

Wolfsbane

I'm sure I had this poster
Because of Blaze Baileys defection to Iron Maiden I more or less new the fate of Wolfsbane. Simon and I first came across them on mtv’s headbangers ball (a neighbour taped it for us) in 1989 and he went and bought Live Fast, Die Fast and taped it for me (I still have the tape and its got Whitesnake on the other side but lets not talk about that), a few years later I bought Down Fall All The Good Guys. Again the arrival of alternative rock blinded me to the release of the other albums, that and the fact nobody else could stand them.

I was disappointed when Bailey joined Maiden ('94 or '95?)for two reasons, first, even though by this point I had stopped listening to Maiden, I thought Bruce Dickinson was an integral part of the Maiden sound and without him would not work, and second I lamented the passing of Wolfsbane. Unseemly ambition had destroyed yet another great band.

Live Fast, Die Fast appealed to the teenage me because it relished in the difference between us, the metallers and them, the mainstream.
Downfall All The Good Guys worked at a slightly more thoughtful level but both albums were about booze so that was good, I’ll have to try and track down the others to see what they’re like.

Quireboys

So my quest has begun to find out what happened to the bands I liked in my early days as a rock fan.

Let’s start with the Quireboys. Last week I dug out a tape of A Little Bit Of What You Fancy and thought to myself this should be a laugh, boy was I wrong, not only did I enjoy the album more than I probably did first time round my wife even liked it. It was one of those bands that released its follow up in my hazy period of 1992-1994, alcohol, grunge and alternative rock would have pushed the release of Bitter, Sweet & Twisted into the unknown for me, and anything that followed would just be ignored (I couldn't afford anything till 1999 anyway). To be honest I thought this band had disappeared in the very early 90’s . I remember my mum saying they sounded like rod Stewart when I first played it and I found that quite offensive at the time, guess she was right though. There was almost a fight over this album when some friends and I tried to gain control of the record player at my mate Ricks 16th birthday party, I managed to play about three songs before it was removed and they would not let me put anything else on "too heavy", Rick ended up being a Slayer fan within the year.

The band appears to be in its second incarnation, and have toured this year. These are just the sort of guys I would expect to end up playing in Southend which was our Heavy Metal Mecca back in ’89-’93, I will have to watch out for them (if I’m allowed out that is).

killing time

I really need to get out more.

My daughter has introduced me to yahoo videos, and my wife and I have spent hours looking for stuff we hadn’t seen in years or in some cases never seen at all. That was until it dissolved into a battle between me playing Rammstein and her playing Richard Ashcroft. My daughter just looked on in disgust.

The collection of music on this site does not always make sense, they have loads of stuff for a band I thought would be pretty obscure (e.g. faster pussycat) and than have very little on another who are far more influential (sex pistols).

Still good fun though

Gig time

So autumn is almost upon us and I feel the need to go to a gig.
The general consensus is that it should be a boy’s night out, so we need to pick something our wives and girlfriends will not like or at least are indifferent.
This limits the choice considerably, here is what’s left:
Motorhead 25/11
Papa roach 02/10 (iffy)
Graham Coxon 25/10 (my missus likes him though)
Lordi 31/10 (come on you know you would)
Jet 08/11 (my missus again)
Thunder 22/11 (again iffy)
Lost prophets 09/12
New model army 17/12 (seen four times already but they fookin’ rock)
Iron maiden 22/12 (seen twice but brilliant)

So there you go, I fancy Motorhead myself.
W.A.S.P. are touring the country in the same period but not playing anything in London which is our nearest place likely to host a decent show, gutted.

Time magazine 1991

1991 here’s what Time magazine has to say

"Metal musicians play to the alienated fantasies of a mostly white, young and male audience by portraying themselves as disillusioned outsiders who have turned their backs on a corrupt civilization. Dressed like renegade bikers, they sing anthems to the rebellious and the wild, or wild at heart. Outrageous behavior is more than a pose for many of them, notably Skid Row's lead singer, Sebastian Bach (ne Bierk), whose on-the-road antics have included tearing up hotel rooms and striking a concert spectator with a bottle that he hurled into the audience.
"Things have come full circle," says Bach, a Canadian who sang in church choirs before finding his true calling in the Toronto club scene. "In the '70s pop was more hip, and now the energy of punk has come into heavy metal. Punk was a socialist thing, and metal was a capitalism thing." Yet both are sneeringly anti-Establishment. In Slave to the Grind, Skid Row proclaims, "Can't be the king of the world/ If you're slave to the grind/ Tear down the rat racial slime."
"We're not going to f---- in' sell out like the mainstream," vows Bach. "The kids can see through the phoniness." No doubt. Which could raise a ticklish problem for bands like Metallica and Skid Row, which presume to voice the disaffection of middle-class youths while earning fat-cat salaries. To stay on top of the heap, metal's messiahs may have to figure how to keep both their millions and their edge -- or risk becoming long-haired rebels without a cause."
Oh really?Strange how attitudes have changed since then, I can no longer tell the metaller from the goth from the emo from the whatever, just age I guess. 1991 you could tell what somebody listened to just by looking at them, after that it all changed and the boundaries blurred

losing my metalness

Wikipedia defines heavy metal as “a thick, heavy, guitar-and-drums-centered sound, characterized by the use of highly-amplified distortion”. That works for me. I never quite got my head round all the subtle differences between the subgenres, I was probably the only New Model Army fan who listened to Motley Crue and the only Levelers( I know its not metal) fan who listened to Rammstein. Im not saying I liked everything, I don’t, I only play Slayer when I want people to leave.

Sometime around 1993 or 94 everybody’s taste seemed to diversify, one started to listen almost exclusively to the Doors (why I don’t know), another sold his CD collection to fund his partying lifestyle, others drifted away or got so fucked up we wanted nothing to do with them. It was during this period that I think I lost my metalness.
Late ’92 I moved out of mums and into the wide wide world, the next 18 months are somewhat fuzzy but by February ’94 I had started to listen to indie, drunk through my savings and become a father. I think I lost at the beginning of this period not at the end, because I also lost my indieness at the end. Losing my indieness was entirely the fault of Oasis, bastards, I fucking hate Brit pop for what it did to the alternative music scene, and it put so many of us out of touch we never got back in.

Becoming a father never really had an impact on my music taste until recently, my daughter now being a twelve year old Emo/grunger/goth type has rekindled my interest while I try in vain to explain where her music comes from (she refuses to listen to the Ramones). Now I have discovered that most of the collection I amassed between ’89 and ’94 is unplayable or inaccessible, my record deck is packed away in a cupboard somewhere and most of my tapes are beyond reach in some dark recess. I have made a vow; I work near an HMV, its time to update.

it begins

Somewhere along the way I lost my metalness. I’m not sure exactly where but I have a suspicion. But that’s not important, what’s important is I have found it again.
But lets start at the beginning

Sometime in late 1988 or early 1989 while staying up far too late watching TV I discovered a little ditty called paradise city (where the girls are green and the…..) by a band called guns’n’roses. So what you might say, so what indeed. I came from a musically starved home, my parents never let me watch top of the pops until they divorced in 87, mum never listened to anything other than radio four and dads record collection consisted of a shadows LP, two Jim Reeves records, somebody called Dana and some James Galway, oh and one Bob Dylan single he apparently stole from my aunt. My own music collection up till this point was limited to Complete Madness and the Top Gun soundtrack, so that’s what.

Back to guns’n’roses. My idea of rock and heavy metal at the time was a dark, dark place, all satanic and hairy, everything my parents despised and I was not the rebelling type, the thought that I might actually like a metal band was frightening, so I suppressed it.

Summer 1989 my mum forced me to get a job over the summer holidays, it was here that I hooked up with a mate from school I hadn’t seen for a year and discovered he was into Iron Maiden, I asked and he gave. Number of the Beast. Can a tape change your life? It was also about the same time I stated to hang about with a guy called Simon who I met through a mutual arsehole and he was also getting into Maiden, I was trapped, with only each other for company we started our journey into mayhem.