Seb Hunter - Hell Bent for Leather - Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict

1st round: Bob Dylan

2nd round: Samuel Beckett

3rd round: Tennyson (yes, he’s a fop and a nonce)

Final: The Beatles

He really likes The Beatles.

In response I installed my beloved Beach Boys at the top of the pile and started to ponder my remaining three stages.

‘Can I have Brian Wilson as a separate round?’

‘Definitely not, or I’d have John Lennon.’

‘Oh, I see.’

It was then that a horrible truth began to dawn. It grew in my brain until I couldn’t hold it in any more. Although I am very good on The Beach Boys and, indeed, my hero Brian Wilson, there was a subject that, if I was honest with myself, I knew more about than any other. And it wasn’t big, or clever, or cool, or relevant to anything at all useful in my or anyone else’s life (unlike Brian, of course). I covered my mouth with my hand.

‘Heavy Metal,’ I said quietly.

‘What?’ Andrew appeared confused.

‘My number one isn’t The Beach Boys. It’s Heavy Metal.’

‘Really? Heavy Metal? As random as that? No focus or specification? Just the whole thing?’

‘Yes.’ My head hung in shame. ‘The whole goddamn thing.’

‘You never told me about this before.’

‘It’s kind of a secret,’ I muttered.

‘So if you got to the final of Mastermind , you’d sit there in the black chair and when asked for your chosen specialist subject, you’d calmly reply “Heavy Metal”?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘That’s fantastic!’

It was true. And this book is all about what I have learned, and my charmless stabs at emulation.

And hey, before you say anything – I’m not proud.

I’m ten.

It’s 1981, a late summer evening in an underground common room at a boarding school in deepest Wiltshire. Someone is playing ‘Can-Can’ by Bad Manners on a cheap yellow record player and we’re all running around in a sweat, playing off the musical momentum, though hardly paying it much attention. And then comes my big moment, the only real eureka, blinding-light moment I’ve ever had. Some wise child peels off from the fray and clunks down AC/DC’s ‘Let’s Get it Up’, and that’s it for me. That was the light switch – the world suddenly became three-dimensional and my ears popped open.

It was so raw, so suggestive, that I had no idea how to react. This was a whole new set of rules for my body; a sudden and unexpected DNA tattoo. I stood motionless on the flagstone floor, beads of sweat hanging off my fringe, waiting for this skull-splitting rheum to end so I could calm down and return to how things had been before, but I never quite managed to get there.

‘Hey! Hey! What was that ?’ I stood open-mouthed over the record player.

By the end of the week, having heard ‘Let’s Get it Up’ a further 16 times, including the B-side ‘Back in Black (live)’, all other thoughts in my head had evaporated. I taught myself how to do this, fast:

Back at home that Christmas I knew exactly what I wanted. For the last few years my parents had been feeding my thirsty Star Wars obsession, however this year I’d requested just one solitary item: a cassette by AC/DC. My mother asked me where she was supposed to purchase such a thing and I was forced to admit I had no idea. So I spent an anxious Christmas morning worrying that I’d be getting yet more Star Wars figures and not the one thing I craved so badly. But halfway through the communal giving I was handed a tape-shaped package. Slowly I peeled at the wrapping until I could clearly see a gold cover and a picture of a giant cannon, and on the back cover – oh my God – the album contained ‘Let’s Get it Up’! I felt sick and slightly dizzy and my hands had started to shake.

My mother, sensing my existential distress, plucked the plastic box away.

‘“Let’s get it up”,’ I whimpered.

My mother frowned. ‘What do you think that means?’

‘It means …’ I paused. ‘Let’s all get it sort of “up” and have fun.’

‘Well, you’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that at all, it means something entirely different.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not telling you. Just be careful, that’s all, don’t go around saying that sort of thing in public. And “Put the Finger on You”? What do you think that one means?’

‘It just means putting the finger on you. I don’t know.’ She doesn’t understand , I thought to myself. She just doesn’t get it!

She ran her finger through the rest of the songs, muttering under her breath, and handed it back.

‘“Let’s Get it Up” means something rude. In fact, quite a lot of these songs sound rather rude.’

You’re mad , I thought, embarrassed for her obvious misunderstanding.

As soon as the Queen’s speech was over and the family had thanked each other for their biscuits and condiments, I interrupted proceedings by loudly demanding we play my new tape.

‘Everyone will like it!’

‘But Granny …’

‘Granny will like it too!’

My father raised an eyebrow. I had up until this moment been a thoroughly charming and dutiful child, so after a moment’s consideration, the cassette player was reluctantly dragged in from the kitchen.

With my back to my extended family, I slid the new cassette into the machine and covertly inched up the volume in preparation for AC/DC’s grand opus For Those About to Rock … (We Salute You) in all its corrosive pomp. As the guitars snaked out I turned, grinning and blushing heavily, and grabbed onto the aerial to steady myself. Then the bass began to throb and I noticed some awkward shuffling on the sofa. Next came the drums – crikey they were loud! I glanced at my scary Uncle Geoff and he’d started turning purple, but still I sensed a thrill of expectancy in the room. Then came the singing – or rather some wordless yelps like a rusty iron lung – and with it a sharp, horrified wince from the entire family. It was slowly dawning on me that perhaps not everyone would love AC/DC quite as much as I’d hoped. Finally, just as the chorus came blazing through (For those about to rock! We salute you!) and I was at the very peak of excitement, my father shouted ‘Enough!’, and my mother leapt at the eject button, and I was hastily sent upstairs by Granny.

My mother and father married in 1968. My mother was an artist and a teacher, and my father ran his own property development businesses. Three years later I came along.

And then two years after that, my sister Melissa.

I’m Rupert the Bear, Mel’s a mouse.

For the first six years of my life we lived in an old farmhouse in the Hampshire village of Meonstoke, surrounded by farms and fields, until my father grew bored with the country and discovered a gigantic run-down Victorian house in Winchester. It looked like it would need years of work but was irresistibly cheap, so he decided to buy it. We all slept on brown corduroy cushions in the drawing room for the first few months, while the electrics were recast, water was coaxed back through the miles of disused black pipes, and the child-sized gaps in the floorboards were hastily covered with lino. This was an amazing house: it had 30 rooms, a cool vaulted cellar and a giant warren of an attic. My sister and I liked to change bedrooms whenever we felt like it because there were just so many to choose from, while my mother painted huge colourful murals on their walls for our entertainment. My father meanwhile took this sprawling house to task, attacking it with sledgehammers and drills, knocking up arches through walls in a comedy hard hat. The garden was a giant overgrown jungle in which I constructed dens out of old beehives, played laser wars with imaginary friends, smashed a football against the green garage door and goaded our cats.