I was Ready

December 17th 1990, up until this point everything just seemed like preparation for what was to come. My hair was a satisfactory heavy metal length, I had the jacket, the t-shirt, the jeans, boots, belts, badges and accessories (rings, bracers etc), my ear was pierced and I was off to see Maiden play at Wembley. I felt I had reached heavy metal perfection.
I think there were four of us on that trip, Simon, Andy, Rob and myself. To be honest it was quite an uneventful night, with the exception of one little accident.
Anthrax was not at the top of any of our must see lists but we made sure we got there in time to see the whole show, these were the big boys, we didn’t want to miss anything. Our seats were to the rear left of the arena so our view was a tad limited (“is that somebody on the stage?”, “what stage?”) and the miserable marshals at the entrances would not let us take drinks into the seating area, so we necked as much JD as was coolly possible and made our (wobbly) way to the seats. Surprisingly(for me at the time) Anthrax were bloody brilliant, enough that we bought P.O.T. within the next few days, Iron Maiden played as well as they always seem to live, with Bruce Dickinson instructing us all to go buy Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter and stop Cliff Richard from taking the Christmas number one yet again (and we did it but the BBC still played Cliff as number one on top of the pops that Christmas).
A little incident brought home to me the quality of my singing voice, we’re at a heavy metal concert with thousands of smelly, beefy, long haired, unshaven metallers and their boyfriends singing along to Iron Maiden and somebody near shouts at me “shut the fuck up you can’t sing for shit” or something to that effect, well that told me.
Getting out of Wembley arena was also an experience, faced with epically long queue my friends and I decide it would be good idea to climb over the perimeter fence and take a short cut to the station. all goes well, no security yelling at us and we almost all over, I’m the last, as I reach the top I place my foot on the wire fence and swing my other leg over, the heel of my boot snags on the top and I topple over, a six foot drop straight on to my face in front of an audience of hundreds, man was I so embarrassed, not just my mates laughing at me but half the metal heads in London, I doubt if there is anyone else out there who remembers it but I do. Cut down in my moment of glory.
And my jacket did not even get scuffed.