I have been very busy of late, not only have I finished a lot of home brew (I have something like 6 bottles of black berry wine, 6 bottles of kit red, 3 bottles of apple wine and 10 bottles of cider sitting in my shed) I have recently come into the possession of the diary of my great great grandfather whilst he was a love struck 25 year old on board HMS Raleigh in 1874. I am transcribing the diary and hope to stick on another blog. Like many other people I have caught the family history bug and have so far managed to trace some lines back over two hundred years. The diary is supposed to one of three but over the years the other two have gone missing.
Genealogy is very addictive so beware.

The kids have finally gone back to school, my eldest son starting secondary school a few days ago and already suffering stress from the homework overload. Poor sod. However, my daughter is happy with our new digital package because she can now watch kerrang TV, this is causing several conflicts within the household (cartoon network v kerrang v cbeebies v eastenders), personally I would rather read a book.

Back on the kerrang TV thing, I noticed that when they show the video to Greenday’s Jesus of Suburbia they pixel out all the cigarettes but openly show teenage sex, vandalism, domestic violence and drug use, how does that make sense?

For your education and entertainment the full on version

this did inspire me to try to figure out the whole "concept" behind the album, after several hours of rereading the lyrics and listening to the album I came to the conclusion its about disaffected youth and rebellion, well thats a no brainer, its a punk album.

Iron Maiden at Brixton

Iron Maiden are performing a one off gig at the Brixton academy on the 24th June in aid of the Clive Burr ms trust fund. I only found this out today and by the time I would have completed the necessary grovelling and begging to my wife to let me take my daughter I think all the tickets will have gone (assuming I could afford the wildly inflated prices that will be in demand). To see Maiden in a venue that is relatively small compared to where I have seen them play would just be amazing, and what a way to introduce the next generation to gigging. Que Sera Sera.

I would also like to say thank you to anonymous for not giving me something he hasn’t got. Cheers.

Drunken germ laden ramble

I have a stinking cold. I am trying to counter the symptoms using a tried and tested method involving alcohol and cheese and onion crisps, it doesn’t work but why pass on a good idea because it fails?
My daughter played me an “inspired by” CD for My Chemical Romance that featured Helloween, this has sent me digging through ye dusty old tape box again and I now have a load of stuff to listen through including Helloween (naturally), Cinderella, Motley Crue, Faith No More, Britney Fox and Aerosmith.
My kids are going to suffer.

I have almost finished my “Use Your Illusion” album and sometime later this week should have a justification for the track listing, this has been put together on a personal level that has little to with musical techno whatsits which are beyond me.

My youngest sister got married on Saturday and they had a metal band playing at the reception, it was a good night and my youngest son almost managed to pull the singer, she was somewhat taken with him though she had to turn him down on the account of him being only two, better luck next time son(just leave it fourteen years please).

My daughter was a brides made and she looked lovely, she made up for this however with a bout of teenage moodiness untl she was aloud to change back into knackered jeans and her nirvana t-shirt (I had to act pissed at this but its what I would have done).

the bride looked lovely too, and as the groom is now family I had better say he looked lovely also.

family outings

All metal heads want to be rock stars, it’s a given. I now formally pass my torch on to my children.
I do this for two reasons;1) I am getting to old and 2) I am absolutely talentless.

Why is this relevant? Even the coolest Hendrix/Cobain/Vicious wannabe has family; mums and dads can be such a drag on your street cred. How can you form the new Iron Maiden when your dad keeps telling you to cut your hair or you have to collect your little sister from the local catholic junior school, or worse still your mother is on your back about getting a job?

Before I got a full time job my mum insisted on dragging me shopping every Monday(it may have been Tuesday) to Asda’s in Tilbury, this I could handle and even after I started working I would still sometimes go with her just to try and be an embarrassment and to take the piss out of her friends. Family outings however where something different.

Only a few spring to mind though there must have been many more. There was a trip to Clacton organised by mum’s church, she made me dress fairly respectably (jeans and plain t-shirt) and I had to behave. After sitting on the beach for about half an hour I made my excuses(find a toilet) and left, my brother found me about two hours later wearing a sleeveless guns’n’roses t-shirt with “shit happens” stamped across it, some itsybitsy sunglasses and three and a half empty newky brown bottles. I had found a market stall that supplied the essentials and a shop selling bottle openers, what more do you need?
Needless to say I don’t think mum was impressed.
Another one was a trip to London zoo with my dad, brother and sisters. My dad was the last person I wanted to spend the day with but felt I had a duty to go(something to do with him paying for a tickets and us begging him to take us, seems to have forgotten we had asked him about two years earlier), my brother and I snuck off and spent ages trying to convince the lady in the shop to sell me some fags, I went all day with out a smoke, fucking great, nearly 19 and the bitch refused me, this after a lecture about not becoming a hippy and the usual haircut routine, stomping around a blazing hot stinking zoo, trying to be interested in a bunch of animals that I couldn’t give a toss about, and this was on a Saturday which I rarely got off work, I could have been somewhere else with beer.
Ditto a trip to the Southend air show, though on this occasion I bumped into my mates, left dad with the siblings (he can be quite understanding at times) and off we went to the cliffs pavilion to pay extortionate amounts of money for warm beer, seemed all the metallers had the same idea, it had an almost gig like atmosphere.

Its my turn now, I have the moody disinterested child in tow, though she has yet to discover alcohol, and it probably wont be long before child number two joins her.

name the year

when was this picture taken?

the next generation

So the next bunch of rock fans is with us. Last weekend was my mums 60th birthday, it involved a small gathering of family who though all live locally rarely see each other (we are very close). To my amusement it seems all the kids between 12 and 16 are EMO . My daughter, my cousins two kids and my youngest cousin were all dressed the part, converse shoes, fall out boy wrist bands, skulls and whatnot every where. What’s really funny is that none of them talked to each other, all related , all into the same music and each to their own misery bubble, one for each corner of the room so to speak.

I discovered my cousin(of the two kids) was also not so square as I had believed, I thought his closest relationship to rock was listening to queen or dire straits but he surprised me by gloating he is of to see muse later this year and saw green day last year. Bastard.

I like muse, or at least I like their latest album, it’s like the bastard lovechild of black Sabbath and queen doing the sound track to a spaghetti western set on mars. In fact I would say it’s my most listened to CD at the moment.

Just before Christmas I managed to get hold of another Wolfsbane CD, massive noise injection is one fucking funny live album, as a rule I don’t normally do live albums but Blaze Bailey’s dialogue with the crowd is just brilliant, who else can threaten to kill members of the audience if they don’t start dancing?

Getting back to my daughter, almost 13 and developing into quite the rock fan, she came down stairs on Christmas day in a Nirvana t-shirt, black converse and a tatty pair of jeans; it was like 1992 all over again. This week she has been trying to dye her hair purple or red, instead she just managed to make a mess of the bathroom, she has also started to buy kerrang (which saves me from having to do it) and is now stealing some of my more contempory CD’s (funny enough not the Wolfsbane though).

kerrang

Where would heavy metal be without its guardian and chronicler KERRANG?
There were other magazines but most of them have passed away into history or obscurity, Kerrang even outlasted Melody Maker. This magazine helped shape and influence a generation, and now its twisted manipulations infect another.

Today my daughter bought her first copy of Kerrang.
I am so proud.

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

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