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

Metal fans occasionally like to argue over what was the first ever Heavy Metal song. Often the answer is ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks. It’s got a rhythmic fuzzy guitar line and is clunky and unsupple; it piledrives. But the Kinks obviously weren’t Heavy Metal, so what bands can you call Metal? And are there different types? There are loads of different types, so here are a few handy pointers:

The Scorpions – Classic Heavy Metal from Germany

Def Leppard – New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM)

Meat Loaf – Panto Heavy Metal, but no-one likes him, he’s too fat, and uses too many keyboards

Slayer – Thrash Metal (slightly frightening)

Bon Jovi – Kind of Heavy Metal (especially if you are a girl)

Europe – (as above)

Marillion – Prog Rock (we tolerate them because we think they bring us intellectual credibility)

Genesis – (as above, for those slightly older)

Poison – Glam Metal (completely different from 70s Glam)

Michael Bolton – Heavy Metal (when he first started, believe it or not)

Led Zeppelin – Heavy Metal (though it pains me to say it)

Bryan Adams – Not Heavy Metal (but we like him anyway because he keeps it real)

Thin Lizzy – Trad. Arr . Irish Heavy Metal

Iron Butterfly – Heavy Metal with an Organ

If you think I’m being free and easy with my Heavy Metal tagging, I don’t care. It’s how artists were perceived by Metal fans that’s important here, not what their music actually sounded like. If Metal fans tended to like something, then whatever it was, it was allowed into the fold. Pretty much anybody could record a piece of pop fluff, but so long as it had a cranked-up guitar in there somewhere, no matter how low in the mix, or one of those solos (you know, a whiny one), then Metal fans would give it the collective thumbs up and allow themselves to buy it, or at least watch it endlessly on shitty pop TV; often it was the only way Metal could get anywhere near the charts.

At the absolute far end of Metal’s acceptability were Roxette, the Swedish Eurythmics of the late 1980s. Their music was primary-colour Euro synth-pop with shouty choruses, however because their portly guitar player had vaguely rock hair, wore his big rock guitar low, pulled the right shapes, made Os with his mouth and wore a tasselled leather jacket, some of us kidded ourselves into thinking we could actually hear a guitar in there, so in some quarters Roxette were tacked sheepishly on to the very edge of the Metal landscape. Kerrang! magazine would review their singles. They slated them, of course, but acknowledged their existence nevertheless. They weren’t so bad.

When Samantha Fox burst from Page Three on to our stereos, she too had the good sense to apply some ‘raunchy’ guitar to her miserable repertoire, with the same effect – grudging acceptance from the Metal community. At least she was ‘keeping it real’, with ‘proper instruments’. She also wore lots of denim, which helped slightly. There was even a time when Kate Bush was considered borderline Metal, but I’m still not sure why. I think it might have been a simple sex-object thing. Maybe it was just because she had really long hair. Or because she crimped it.

Heavy Metal is essentially a club, a gang with an allegiance to a musical and social set of values. It might be frowned upon by society at large, but that’s something that binds Metal even more tightly. Metal has always retained a dubious conservative mindset – black or gay Metallers are rare indeed. I’m not claiming the whole Metal community are a bunch of Daily Mail readers – heaven forbid, only most of them – but as a movement, and right through its 30-odd year history, those not of a WASP predilection have tended to align themselves somewhere else. They take one look at this bunch of clowns and for the rest of their lives say to themselves, ‘well, at least I’m not one of those … ’ Metal fans know that people say this about them and they resent it; this partly fuels the ‘nihilism’ mentioned in the Collins Dictionary definition. This conservatism probably stems from Metal’s lack of outside stimuli from other musical or social trends; its bonding conformity has tended to squeeze out any progress society might have made since Metal’s inception, so ever since it has revolved around the old-fashioned ideals it’s always felt comfortable with.

The closest Metal has ever come to genuine inter-racial embrace (ignoring revered icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Phil Lynott, etc. who were unique individuals and succeeded despite rather than because of, the prevalent racial perception) was in the late 1980s, with the sudden appearance of Funk Metal and the all-black band Living Colour. These four chops-laden dudes from New York knocked down doors the genre had assumed would remain closed for ever, were tentatively embraced by an ethnically parched community, and fundamentally altered the rock landscape for the better. They set the pace for a glut of non-white rockers, who now had the freedom to express themselves within a format they had always loved but had nevertheless felt excluded from all these years. A few months down the line from Living Colour’s hit single ‘Cult of Personality’, every Metal band in the world had shoehorned a turgid funk track or two into their set, and were claiming Sly Stone and Funkadelic as deeply influential to their music. Funk was Metal’s ‘next step’ for a while – another blast of life-maintaining oxygen like the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (an exciting young vanguard of leather and perms in the late 70s that included Iron Maiden and Tygers of Pan Tang), the arrival of Guns n’ Roses in 1986, and the revolution of Thrash Metal, popularised by the likes of Metallica in the mid-80s. These arrivals kicked Heavy Metal’s perpetually fat and lazy arse and forced it into different directions – or at least kept us busy objecting to them. Metal would have died long before without their cumulative influences.

Homophobia is an accusation that one can direct much more easily. Heavy Metal has always been almost comically heterosexual, professing a collective horror at the antics of the homosexual pop fraternity and the gay community in general, which is ironic when you think about the basic trappings of the genre: long hair, tight leather trousers, phallic symbolism, make-up, bondage gear – the look is steeped in sexual ambiguity. The magnificent irony of this came in 1998, when the lead singer of arguably the ultimate Heavy Metal band, Judas Priest, left the group and outed himself live on MTV. Throughout his career Rob Halford had dressed in leather peaked caps, shaved his head and showered himself in blindingly camp iconography. Yet the sound of the Metal community’s jaw hitting the floor on his confession was loud indeed, and delightfully naïve. As with Freddie Mercury, it was suddenly all so obvious. Halford had even alluded to it in his anthem ‘Hell Bent For Leather’. But how were we supposed to tell from that?

Rob standing outside his mum’s house in Birmingham.

The most obvious visual sign of allegiance to the Heavy Metal cabal has always been in the long hair. In many ways it’s all you ever really need to demonstrate your purity, your unarguable virility. Short-haired Metallers always protest about this, but that’s only because they’ve been told they can’t have long hair by their parents or their bosses. Long-haired Metallers know this only too well and will always feel superior about it. Occasionally you get long-haired Metal musicians who cut their hair to be clever. They always grow it back again, though, unless they’ve done it because of baldness, in which case they wear a big hat, or a bandanna, or both at once with some sunglasses.