Malleus Trollheartus: Heavy Metal Heaven

[Trollheart]

I don't get it. Surely if you come to a forum you should have a basic grasp of Latin, or at least, words I've made up? All right then if you insist: malleus is Latin for hammer, and trollheartus is an ancient word that first comes to us from the famous codex called Eh Fabricus Meo Suckeria, which I think means, roughly translated, this is absolutely true, I did not make it up and if you say I did that's libel and I'll see you in court. Roughly. Look, it's a perfectly cromulent word, so can we stop arguing about it? Okay then, so this is basically Trollheart's Hammer, or the Hammer of Trollheart, which means you can forget your acoustic, violen-led love ballads and songs about dancing the night away, cos here it's all heavy, all metal, all the time.

Except, of course, when it isn't.

Thing is,while Progressive Rock was my first love, from an early age I was also a Metalhead, though there were only certain types of metal I listened to. Nothing "extreme" appealed to me, particularly the vocals. If a singer screamed, screeched, roared or grunted, hissed or shrieked or was otherwise unintelligible to me, I didn't want to know. Iron Maiden, Saxon, Virgin Steele – I was all over that shit. Power Metal, NWOBHM, Progressive Metal of course, Symphonic/Gothic – all these subgenres I could listen to. But throw a Thrash or Speed Metal album my way, or a Doom or Death one, not a chance. I was, I guess to some extent, a Metal lightweight (an aluminium Metaller?) or any other derogatory or derisory name you wish to call me. I liked Metal, but only some Metal.

Then I grew a pair, opened my ears and listened to others who knew a lot more about metal than I did, and finally began to appreciate the Metal I had disregarded and written off. Over a period of three years I decided to delve deeper into the Metal that had been, up to then, unknown to me, and ran Metal Month, which was exactly what it says on the tin: a whole month dedicated to Metal. Initially, this consisted of a month of basic reviews of albums, but during Metal Month II this was expanded  greatly, widening the scope, both of what I listened to, and of what I wrote, so that there were dedicated sections to particular subgenres, featured artists, examinations of Metal across the world, and a whole lot more. I'll be reprinting what I consider the best parts here, spread out over the journal.

Now, there's no way I would presume to consider myself an expert on Metal at this point, but at least now when someone says "Ulver" or "Blut Aus Nord" or "Darkthrone" to me, I know what they're talking about and can remember the music they play. Subgenres that have been a mystery to me – Black Metal, Viking Metal, Doom Metal, Death Metal to name but a few – are slowly beginning to give up their secrets and allow me to enjoy them. No longer do I shudder when I hear a death growl or a screech, and stop the track. It's still not my preferred form of vocals, I admit, but I've learned to appreciate all the "extreme" vocals and not only endure them but actually, well, not enjoy them exactly, but let's say appreciate them. I don't run off screaming into the night when I hear Emperor, for instance, let's put it that way.

Here I will be sharing my relatively newfound love of Heavy Metal, and inviting you to come along as I continue my education in this varied and diverse subgenre of music. This won't though just be a parade of album reviews, though there will be plenty of them too. I have a lot planned, and as usual, some of it may actually come to pass. We might even get the odd heavy metal ballad in there, you never know. There will be a linked table of contents so that finding the article you want will be a lot easier and it will be constantly updated as I add new stuff.

Anyone is of course welcome to comment, suggest, even maybe participate if they wish. I'm always open to recommendations, though how soon I get to them depends on my workload, which as usual is quite heavy. Metal.


I would also like to warn any purists against telling me that this or that album/artist is not metal. I will be researching all the stuff I put in here, but in general if it has "metal" in its description and if I can find the band on any of the main metal sites, it'll be considered acceptable to be featured here. You may argue that, of course, but don't expect to change my mind.

[Trollheart]

Wild Cat - Tygers of Pan Tang - MCA (1981)


I don't really think I can recall another instance of a band starting off as total heavy metal/rock and changing so completely into an AOR/soft-rock outfit, but that's exactly what happened with the Tygers of Pan Tang, who had a great chance to be one of THE heavy rock bands of the early eighties, and threw it all away. When I first heard Wild Cat, their debut album, I was completely hooked. This was headbangin' stuff, but with enough melody to stand out from the likes of Motorhead, Saxon et al. In fact, the first I heard of them was the single "Suzie Smiled", and then I HAD to get the album. My brother ended up getting it, and becoming a loyal Tygers fan, but I was crestfallen when they released the followup, Spellbound, as it just wasn't what I had expected. It was nothing like the debut, and as their career went on it went from bad to worse. But enough of the history lesson. Let's concentrate on this excellent debut, and try to put the subsequent mistakes behind us.

The album kicks off with some heavy drumming courtesy of Brian Dick, with the growling guitar of Robb Weir as "Euthanasia" gets us going, and although it's not in the same class as some of the later songs, it's a solid rocker that leaves you in no doubt as to what to expect. The swaggering vocals of Jess Cox typified the Tygers' sound, and I feel they really lost something when he left after this album. For me, he WAS the voice of the Tygers, and cheap imitations just didn't cut it. Much better is "Slave to Freedom", with some great axe work by Weir, and solid bass from Richard Laws, who on the album went by the name of "Rocky". This is one of the longer tracks on the album, and gives Weir freedom to indulge in the solos he was to repeat throughout the album, and other later ones, when allowed his head. It settles down into a nice sort of bluesy groove halfway through, but of course that doesn't last and we're soon into the dirty, heads-down rock and roll that was the Tygers' trademark.

Look, let's be clear about one thing: the Tygers weren't - originally - about subtlety. They didn't write deep lyrics, they didn't do complicated keyboard solos (mainly cause they didn't use a keyboard player!) and they didn't do ballads. Every song on this album is either fast, or just slightly less fast. The Tygers didn't do slow. But as an honest metal album, you'd search to find one as good. The rockin' continues with "Don't Touch Me There", and if there's a charge to be levelled at Wild Cat it could only be of a lack of variance in the songs: most sound relatively like the others, with a few notable exceptions. But then, when they're songs of this hard rockin' quality, who cares?

One of the best tracks on the album is "Killers", also the longest, at just over six and a half minutes. The tale of gunslingers in the old West, it's a powerful, riff-laden rocker that kicks off with a great bassline from Rocky, before he's joined by Robb's snarling guitar and the whole thing plays out like the best of Thin Lizzy, with some truly spectacular solos from Robb, clearly enjoying himself as a modern-day desperado, swapping a Colt 45 for a Fender Strat. Things speed right up at the end, as the whole band goes a little crazy, one trying to outdo the other for speed, before it all comes to a powerful end.

"Fireclown", again introduced on Rocky Laws's bass, shows that the Tygers have some ideas in their lyric-writing book, as this is based on a science-fiction novel written by Micheal Moorcock, called, you guessed it, Fireclown. I should probably also mention that the band got their name from another Moorcock book (forget which one), in which an island is called Pan-Tang, so they were obviously fans of his work. Another plus for them, as far as I'm concerned! The title track could probably be a bit more memorable, but it does have some nice echo effects, and another great Robb Weir solo. Shades of the old seventies band, the Sweet, in there too. Personally though the best track for me is the one that got me into this band, "Suzie Smiled". Okay, it's nothing terribly special, another hard-rocker, but it was the first time I heard THAT guitar sound, and THAT voice, which totally turned me on to the Tygers, so it'll always remain my favourite.

The album ends on another long track, "Insanity" just beaten out by "Killers" as the longest track by a few seconds. More great solos, ch ugging guitar and thundering drums carrying along a track which really brings the album to a steamhammer ending, the way it should finish.

Look, I'm not going to make any false claims here. You're not going to find anything amazingly new here, nothing that's going to make you want to tell everyone about this album, but in a time when so many rock bands were more AOR or glam-rock than metal, the Tygers stood for pure, honest, down-to-earth no-nonsense metal, and it's such a pity their story went the way it did. Once Jess Cox left and John Sykes got into the band, things went very much the other way and the Tygers became a far softer, radio-friendly band, resulting in their eventual disbanding in 1983. Well, to be fair, there were some really nasty factors that contributed to this, mostly label pressure and an attempt to make the band into something they were not, nor wanted to be, as well as disagreements within the band and changes to the lineup, not to mention some disloyalty on the part of Sykes.

But the fact remains that if you look at the subsequent albums, Spellbound shows their symbol/mascot, the tiger, on top of a mountain, looking somewhat trapped, while the next one has him somewhat incongruously doing a "King Kong" atop a building, swatting at little planes (Tiger Moths, I believe!), and by 1982 he has been well and firmly caged. Here, he is free, wild and roaring unfettered on the album sleeve, a challenge to all comers, a beast to be feared. This tiger was not about to be caged, not in 1980!

Wild Cat is how the Tygers should have been, and how I want to remember them. Purchase or stream, hit play and listen to them roar!

TRACK LISTING

1. Euthanasia
2. Slave to Freedom
3. Don't Touch Me There
4. Money
5. Killers
6. Fireclown
7. Wild Catz
8. Suzie Smiled
9. Badger Badger
10. Insanity

[Trollheart]

Long live the King - Narnia - 1999 (Nuclear Blast)

Christian rock bands, huh? Definitely not my cup of tea. Normally. I don't profess to being a practicing Christian - I do my best to be a good person, but I don't swear allegiance to any god, and definitely not to any religion, least of all catholicism. So when I hear a band who make a living praising God in their lyrics, I usually run the other way. I would think I'm not alone in this. Were God (assuming, for the moment, that  He exists) to walk in to the Rock and Metal Pub and order a beer, I don't think too many of us would be sitting at the bar with him. We're used to more, shall we say, dark elements making up our rock and metal music. I was brought up on the likes of Maiden, Sabbath, Dio and Whitesnake, and hey, even Manowar, and these guys seldom mentioned the G word: usually their lyrics and images paid homage (jokingly, loosely or in some cases, seriously) to t'other side. Hey, as AC/DC told us once: Hell ain't a bad place to be!

Well, it probably is, but let's be honest: there was and is much more fun to be had singing about the Devil and Hell and damnation and flames and demons, than there ever was extolling the virtues of Heaven, angels, choirs and Jesus. It's just how it is. And bands who decided to throw their lot in with the Almighty tended, in the main, to get laughed at, and not considered by serious metal fans.

Well, all that changed for me when I heard Narnia for the first time.

To be perfectly honest, I just thought they were another metal band, and the Narnia in their name referred to the CS Lewis books (which it does), but then, examining those a little more closely, the books are very heavily slanted on the side of Christianity, in a way other fantasy novels are not. So when I first heard "Gates of Cair Paravel", the short introductory opening track to Long Live the King, I was impressed. Great keyboard work, cool guitars, solid drumming. This is going to be a good album, I thought.

And I wasn't wrong, though I would have to seriously change my entrenched opinions, as it happened.

"Living Water" kicks off then, and it's a humdinger, a great metal track that would not be out of place on any Iron Maiden or Van Halen album. It's only when vocalist Christian Lijegren sings "I met Jesus Christ/ He's the Son of God" that I did a doubletake. Oh no! These guys were CHRISTIAN ROCKERS, or indeed, worse, Christian Metallers! But wait, don't turn off that track yet. What's that incredible guitar and keyboard solo going on as I try to process this new information? Holy fuck, that's good! So maybe it's a Christian song, but maybe it's just this one. Let's wait and see. Man, that track is power metal at its very best! For God-botherers, these guys are amazing! So let's stick with it. For now.

Oh yes, this is much more like it! A stomper, cruncher, thumper, call it what you will, but the power of "Shelter through the pain" can't be denied. Just listen to guitarist Carljohan Grimmark play - oh no! What was that Lijegren sang? "Lord give me shelter/ Every night, every morning." Maybe it's just a generic "lord". But no, there he goes again: "Oh my Lord/ From Heaven above." Nope, it's definitely the Lord he's talking about!

Okay, so now many of you are probably saying, what's the big deal? If the music is good, what does it matter that the lyrics praise God? To be honest, you're right, but at the time I really struggled to continue with the album, as, being a non-believer, I don't like to listen to the opinion of others - well, I don't like to be pushed towards the view of others; you know, the old conversion idea - on religion and gods, especially through music. That's not why I listen to rock music. But in the end, the pure quality of the music won through, and I defeated my demons (see what I did there?) and went on to thoroughly enjoy this album.

So, differences settled then, there is no praise high enough for this band, and this album, the only one of theirs I've so far heard, though I have the rest of their discography to listen to. The musicianship is first rate, with excellent keys work by Martin Claesson, and the stupendous guitar work of the aforementioned Grimmark. It's kind of like listening to one of those eighties heavy metal albums we used all to love, stuffed with squealing guitar solos and thundering drums, powerful vocals and a keyboard player who sounds like he has been taking lessons from Rick Wakeman.

"The Mission" is a little less impressive, a little ordinary, but "What You Give is What You Get" pulls things back on track. It's kind of hard for me to evaluate the lyrics, as they're pretty much all of the "repent-and-be-saved" ilk, which makes them both samey and unimaginative, and also outside my experience, and I feel unqualified to pass judgement (no pun intended!) on them. The rhymes are a little obvious though, and I would certainly say that, even my own preconceptions and problems with them aside, the lyrics are the weak point of Narnia's formidable arsenal. Of course, if you're into this sort of thing you'll probably love it, but I would rather hear songs about cars, battles, love,  even mystical rainbows to weird lands than repeated warnings that I'm going to go to Hell.

I suppose it's a measure of just how good this album is that I'm prepared to champion Narnia's cause, despite my aversion to their lyrical content. But it is that good, you just can't avoid it. That's not to say of course that every track is excellent, but as a pure metal album this really works as a cohesive unit. "The Lost Son" is a good solid rocker, with drummer Andreas Johansson really getting to express himself, and the title cut is a bombastic, storming brute of a track, with growling guitars and heavy, powerful drumming as Lijegren affirms his fealty to God's cause: "I wanna live, wanna fight/ Yeah long live the King."

In all fairness, Narnia are not constantly trying to ram God down your throat, just staying true to their own beliefs, and it's only "Dangerous Game" that comes across as almost unendurably preachy, as Lijegren warns of the dangers of turning away from God: "Dangerous game/ You're playing with your soul/ Devil's game/ You're under his control." Rrrighttt.... Annoyingly, it's one of the best tracks on the album, with a really cool harpsichord-type intro and then careening along at breakneck pace, with the obligatory guitar solo from Grimmark, and some fine, ferocious drumming from Johansson. Damn! They almost make you WANT to turn to God! Who said heavy metal is the Devil's music?

"Star over Bethlehem", the longest track on the album, unsurprisingly celebrates the birth of Jesus, on the back of a heavy drumbeat, choral organ and whirring guitar, and there's no doubt as he sings that Christian Lijegren means every word. "I see the world with different eyes/ The Son of God has changed my life/ He is salvation." You can't deny, listening to it, that it's a real metal epic, one of those heavy crunchers that just marches along like an unstoppable army.There's a real sense of majesty, power and indeed awe about the song as it flips the finger at Satan, and yeah, I can see rockers punching the air to this, either unaware or uncaring what the message in the song is.

A nice little medieval-type outro called "Shadowlands" closes the album. I guess it brackets the album between it and the opener, "Gates of Cair Paravel". It finishes the album on a lower key note than I would have preferred, but it seems oddly appropriate, somehow.

I guess the real lesson learned here is that the music is its own power. It doesn't really matter what the singer is singing about, if you enjoy the musicianship and the arrangements, the solos and the intros and the outros. I learned this with the music of Josh Groban, some years ago. Half the time I didn't understand what he was singing - or even in what language - but I loved his music, and grew to really love the songs. So my advice here is similar: ignore the lyrics if you can/will, or let them wash over you and hey, maybe they'll change your life. Me, I can now easily listen to this album without worrying about the religious side of it, but it took a little internal struggle for me to get there. It may not take you as long, or you may not have that struggle, but if you do, please do your best to persevere, as it really is worth it.

I feel like saying now, having listened to the album, "Glory Hallelujah, I have seen the light!" I haven't, but I feel like saying it. Considering I was thinking of not listening to the whole album originally, I think I've come a long way.

Long live the King. If he exists. Maybe.

TRACK LISTING

1. Gates of Cair Paravel
2. Living Water
3. Shelter Through the Pain
4. The Mission
5. What You Give is What You Get
6. The Lost Son
7. Long Live the King
8. Dangerous Game
9. Star over Bethlehem
10. Shadowlands

[Trollheart]

CHAPTER I
NATIVITY IN BLACK: WELCOME TO THE MACHINE


In general, it could be said that Rock (with a capital R, yo!) has always been a disruptive influence. Heavy metal's great-grandparent, rock and roll, shocked the buttoned-down, conservative, family-values-oriented parents who believed their kids should be listening to the music they grew up on - bland, inoffensive, safe, though paradoxically probably railed at by their parents at the time as being too loud, not music etc. Suddenly, that damn gee-tar was at the forefront of things, people were dancing "very inappropriately" and lyrics were, well, questionable at best. Singers were encouraging lewd behaviour and all but open rebellion. Surely the world was coming to an end?

And now, of course, we in the twenty-first century look back at the "shock value" of the likes of Buddy Holly, Tommy Steele and of course The King and laugh at how such mild behaviour could have provided so many sleepless nights for worried mothers and fathers, but back then it was all new. And it continued to be so, as decade followed decade and rock and roll, never the prim and proper lady that the thirties and forties would have it be, stayed out all night, had dubious and numerous amorous liaisons in dark alleys and ended up giving birth to a whole brood of new children, with sub-genres such as rockabilly, new wave, progressive rock, indie rock and lots of things prefixed with "alt" stalking the streets with a dangerous look in their eyes, on the prowl for new converts, wooing away the impressionable young from the safe and warm clutches of mainstream music.

For a time, one mad, slavering monster scared them all off those streets, but as the brightest candle burns for the shortest time, punk had its day, left its indelible mark on music and then more or less slunk back into some dingy bed-sit, there to grumblingly supplement its dwindling income as it became less popular by taking in lodgers, and invariably from these sweaty copulations came bastardised forms of punk, such as ska punk, celtic punk, hardcore punk and the dreaded pop punk. Having left the battered and bleeding corpse of progressive rock gasping its last on the corner of some street where the cops don't dare go - it would take another three or four years before it would recover, but it would really never be the same - punk crouched in its grotty studio apartment and watched, Gollum-like, with envious, dark eyes as its better-looking and better-sounding half-brother went on not only to thrive, but to come to dominate much of the music scene of the following decades, and on into the new millennium.

Punk may have been dead, or badly wounded, the harsh bitter laughter of the wounded prog rock ringing in its ears at the irony, but metal was on its feet and bracing itself to take on the world. Itself an offshoot of two major parents, the Blues and Hard Rock, heavy metal would go on to define a generation, loudly, and put into harsh and often obscene words the disillusionment of the young with the world in which they lived. Prog rock may have shied from telling it like it is, or even living in the real world, but metal was down and dirty, banging its empty glass on the bar and dragging a leathery sleeve across an equally leathery mouth, nodding to the barman before heading out into the night to look for trouble.

Blues itself was a kind of rebellion, I feel. Almost exclusively the territory of black musicians, it was these one-time slaves and still second-class citizens of America snarling, shrugging or just shaking their heads at their treatment by their fellow men, and putting that slowburning anger and resentment, with a heady touch of rueful acceptance, into simple, honest music based on folk tunes and gospel, and showing the White Man that this was something they could do: this was their music, and Whitey better stay the hell away from the Mississippi Delta, cos he weren't needed down here no way no how!

And when blues began to disseminate itself across America, and from there exported across the ocean, everyone could not only see that black men could play music, but wanted to emulate them. This was exciting stuff. Even Elvis himself was turned on to it. It was, therefore, no surprise when the emerging white musicians playing what was termed hard or heavy rock, or even psychedelic rock, a kind of holdover from the hippy flower power days, but amped up to the max and more concentrated on the state of consciousness (or unconsciousness!) and how to achieve that then the love part, turned to blues to augment and embellish their sound. And less of a surprise when some of those hard rock bands decided to go even harder, and forged the blueprint for what would become heavy metal.

The question being asked here, and which I will try, in my fumbling fashion, to answer, is what was the idea behind heavy metal? Was it created just to be loud, different and rebellious? Well yes it was, but the best music is always made with a view to some idea, theme or aim being in mind. Protest music, well, protested the war in Vietnam, social and gender inequality, and so on, while folk music harked back to a gentler time and strove to remind us of our past and traditions. Disco/soul/funk had one overarching message: have yourself a good time, while goth rock advised the very opposite: not quite kill yourself, but not far from it. And punk just wanted to burn everything down, in its sights the bloated monster of progressive rock, which itself advocated a more serious and dedicated approach not only to music but to lyrics too.

So what did, and does, heavy metal stand for? What's its message, what do the bands who play it want to teach us, if anything? What, in the parlance of their time, is their deal?

While the genesis of metal is still debated - some looking back to certain bands of the fifties, some citing later bands like Deep Purple and Vanilla Fudge, some swearing it all began with Hendrix - almost everyone agrees as to who the first true metal band was. It probably wouldn't be quite fair or accurate to say that they created heavy metal - after all, they really only built on ideas already there - but they did fashion a whole new way of interpreting the music that had gone before, twisting and warping it into a shape that suited their way of life, their vision and their aspirations, and opening up a whole new world for the young people, who were, once again, impatiently waiting for the new messiah.

As summer began to fade and August bade farewell to 1969, ushering in the darker, colder days of September, the world heard the first mewling cries of the band who would become the godfathers of heavy metal ring out with dark and terrifying purpose on a stage in Wokington, England. An inauspicious place for the coronation of heavy metal royalty perhaps, but soon Black Sabbath were guesting on the influential John Peel's radio show playing to a national audience, and a few months later the cornerstone of metal was hammered into place as they released their debut, self-titled album.


Black Sabbath was like nothing that had ever gone before, and would, some time later, inspire the sub-genre known, appropriately enough, as doom metal. While everything up to then had been basically upbeat - Led Zeppelin singing about a whole lotta love and pipers leading us to freedom, Free drawling that it was all right now, and even the doomily-named Blue Cheer (said to be one of the progenitors of metal) covering Eddie Cochran's bittersweet "Summertime Blues" - Sabbath spoke and sung of the darkness in humans, the dreariness of the world and the inexorable and unavoidable march to the grave. The music was dour, heavy and loud. The very first three notes of the eponymous track that opens the debut album (a tritone known as "The Devil's Interval") ring out and grab you like black hands fastening around your throat. For most of the song, this three-note backdrop does not change, but pulses on like some evil heartbeat, the slow, measured plod of time marking off man's existence and counting down to his death, and Ozzy Osbourne's nasal, almost whining delivery complements the music perfectly. It's dark, it's scary, it's crushingly slow - something nobody else had even thought to attempt, music always seeming to need to be something one could dance to - and above all, it's god-damn heavy.

But most importantly, back then, it was different. So different that it could, and must for those who heard it the first time almost fifty years ago now, have seemed as if the players had come from another planet, arrived on Earth to deliver this strange, wonderful, terrifying musical vision of the world in which they found themselves. It spoke not to the record companies, or the trends of the day, or the values espoused by the parents, but directly to the listeners, to the kids, to their frustration and anger at the world, to their need to speak out, to rebel, to fight back. It was subversive, it was unapologetic, it was confrontational.

It was trouble.

But though Sabbath became dogged by accusations that they worshipped the Devil and promoted hatred against Christianity, such notions were based on a total misunderstanding of the ideas behind the music. At heart, rock and roll is theatre, and none so much as metal (well, maybe prog). While many of the later metal musicians would believe, some fervently, in what they wrote about, or the positions taken through their music, for many more it was simply a tool, a way to attract listeners and fans, a way to get gigs and a way to stand out from the crowd. Not quite a gimmick, as such, but certainly something they used to promote their music and demonstrate why the kids should pick up their album from the record shop as opposed to anyone else's.

And that's all Sabbath were doing. Of the four of them, I have read that at least three are religious (Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler are Catholics while Ozzy is Church of England) and none of them seem to have had any intention of bringing down the Church, getting young kids to sell their souls to Satan, or anything like that. You want church burnings, Varg Vikernes is your man! But not Sabbath. Certain people, of course, make up their own minds, usually without even bothering to listen to the music or talk to fans of the band, and a name like Black Sabbath, which seems to corrupt the name of the holiest day of the Christian week, was bound to attract bad press. In reality, Sabbath were originally called Earth, but hearing there was another band using the name, they settled on Black Sabbath after taking the name from an old Boris Karloff movie. This, too, explains the genesis of their themes. As Tony Iommi watched the crowds queue for the movie, he realised that people would pay to be scared, so maybe they, under the new name Black Sabbath, should try scaring them. And of course it worked.

It's never really possible to know what an artist was thinking or what they meant when they wrote a song, and even if they tell you, they could be covering up the truth. Hell, sometimes even they don't know themselves! Freddie Mercury claimed, up to his death, that he did not know or could not remember what "Bohemian Rhapsody" was about! So there's no way to be sure, but it's come to my notice that the opening lines of "Black Sabbath", though seeming to describe an encounter with the Devil (and confirmed by Geezer Butler) could be, even subconsciously, recalling the horror of the factories in Birmingham.

In the sixties, especially in an industrial town like Birmingham, opportunities for work would have been very limited. Unemployment would be high, and those who did get work could really only look forward to a life on an assembly line, working in the heat and the dark, like ancient blacksmiths at a forge, sweating the day in and boozing the night out after the whistle went to end the work day. Tony Iommi certainly worked in one, which was where he had the famous accident which led to his distinctive guitar playing, itself a benchmark for the slower, down-tuned riffing that would characterise doom metal. Ozzy also worked, among other jobs, in an abattoir, quite fittingly. You have to use your imagination, of course, but it's not hard to see these factories, huge, stern, dark chimneys belching thick black smoke into the air, turning everything grey and black, and spreading a pall of darkness across the city, as a sort of gateway to Hell. If you consider that as a teenager this was all you had to look forward to, this was your future, then the opening lines do make a sort of twisted, scary sense.

"What is this that stands before me?"
asks Ozzy, and yes, it's the dark figure Butler speaks of having seen at the foot of his bed after he had been reading a volume of occult lore, but it could just as easily be the thoughts of a young boy, or a young man, as he stands in front of the huge, forbidding gates of the steel factory, gazing up at the stacks disappearing almost into the low, angry thunderheads hanging overhead.

"Figure in black, which points at me".
That could be the foreman, blackened with soot and ash and grime, wiping his dirty hands on his equally dirty trousers, standing at the factory gate and beckoning the youth forward, like a grinning (meant to be a welcoming, friendly or gruff smile but looking to a terrified teenager like a death's-head grin) demon inviting him to step over the threshold into Hell. Behind him, the dark interior of the factory, lit by occasional spurts of flame as tongues of fire from the forge or the smelter puff out, hissing and screeching like the wails of the condemned souls of the damned.

"Turn round quick, and start to run. Find out I'm the chosen one."
And despite an initial impulse to get the hell away from this awful place, the terrible, numbing, deadly realisation that this is it: this is where you will spend at least your formative years, the place to which you will go every morning and leave every night, only to return the next day. The place you will work, and slave, and probably grow to hate, but which will be your only hope of earning enough money to support yourself and maybe, maybe, if you're very lucky, provide you the means to escape from all this darkness, horror and drudgery.

Your own personal Hell.
Welcome, my son, welcome to the Machine.

The rest of the lyric bears this out, even if it's only my own loose and surely wrong interpretation:
"Big black shape with eyes of fire
Telling people their desire.
Satan sitting there, he's smiling:
Watches those flames get higher and higher."

And of course the final cry "Oh no God! Please help me!"

Even the end section fits:
"Is it it the end my friends?
Satan's coming around the bend.
People running cos they're scared
The people better get and beware!"

All of this, to my (rather twisted, admittedly) mind feeds into the idea of a young lad going or being taken to his first day at the factories, the crushing realisation that there is nothing else out there, that this is all there is, and this is as far as he will go. The factory opens up like a huge black mouth, flecked with flames and gouting smoke, ready to swallow up him, his desires, his dreams and his future.

And look further on into the album; you can make the same (probably wrong) assumptions.
Second track is "The Wizard" (kid wishes a wizard would spirit him away from this bleak, grey reality) then "Behind the Wall of Sleep", which you could imagine being the young man, exhausted after a day's hard work (and probably a night's harder drinking) catching some sleep before the morning dawns. "NIB" does NOT stand for "Nativity in Black", but let's ignore that and go with common urban myth regarding the song, and assume it does. The birth of a dreary, boring life from which there is no escape? Then there's "Evil Woman", which, while a cover, does warn of the dangers of being attracted to the wrong girls, something a youth working in the factories would no doubt be drawn to, while "Sleeping Village" writes its own interpretation and finally "Warning" also needs little analysis.

Now, of course, all of this is subjective, my opinion and almost certainly exists only in my head. But the point is that the music being written by Black Sabbath, and those who followed initially, was all about not escaping the real world, as in prog rock or even pop music, but in facing and accepting that world, though not without a fight. As I said at the beginning of the piece, rock has always been about rebellion, and no genre more so than metal. With metal, there was the opportunity to stick a real two fingers up to the world, and say, in the later words of Dee Snider and Twisted Sister, "We're not gonna take it!" Apart from punk, metal would be the most rebellious of genres of music, and because of its uncompromising attitude, its flipping the bird to the establishment and its flouting of authority, and its general revulsion of the charts and popular trends, would earn itself the ire and enmity of almost all other music fans, critics and authority figures. It would become known as "the Devil's music", and even before it really had a chance to take its first snarling breaths would be in danger of being aborted, when the suicide of a nurse in the USA would be linked to Sabbath's second album, Paranoid. The lawsuit was dropped, but the image stuck, and down through the years and decades everything from school shootings to terrorist attacks have been blamed on heavy metal.

But though the music of Black Sabbath did provide an outlet, a voice for the disenfranchised, a deafening roar of anger and resentment that would echo across all the industrial towns of England, crossing borders and reaching even the more affluent parts of the country, flying on wings of rage and purpose across the sea to land in Europe and later America, eventually circumventing the entire globe, there was one thing missing. Sabbath spoke of certain themes - dark, scary and usually ignored - but apart from the odd song like "War Pigs" or "Hand of Doom", they did not provide any solutions, or even any real guidance. In one way, Sabbath's roar, though loud and angry, was impotent. They could not tell the kids how to fix the world they found themselves in. They could only decry it.

But later bands would come along who would have a very good idea about what the kids could do to fight back against this life they hated, and some of them would be very vocal, some of them even espousing dangerous ideas, some of them confirming the fears that had been roused when Black Sabbath strode out on stage that August night.