Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Even so, both Prince and Madonna hit a crisis as the eighties turned into the nineties. Neither had embraced either hip hop’s golden age or the house and techno revolution (which revolved much slower in its homeland).6 Both were seen entirely as eighties icons – they didn’t have Michael Jackson’s prehistory to loosen their ties to that specific decade. Both decided to ratchet up their output.

  In Prince’s case, this meant reminding everyone of why they loved him in the first place. He remained stubbornly himself, sticking to the landscapes he knew best, sure of his own greatness. First he recorded, then pulled, an album – The Black Album. It was bootlegged heavily but was still spoken about more than it was heard. Then he made a third movie, Graffiti Bridge, in 1990. It was an almost exact replica of Purple Rain, with Prince as the moody singer, sitting on his motorbike, pouting like a lady. All at once, things fell apart. The Black Album filtered through and turned out to be quite tedious, all dry-hump funk. Graffiti Bridge was a greater error as it was such an overground failure. There were no good songs, Prince looked old, his hair was horrid. Everything about it seemed lazy. For somebody so forward-looking, it was a catastrophic error of judgement.

  Madonna, similarly, lost her sense of timing. In the space of what seemed like weeks, she released a career retrospective (The Immaculate Collection), a new album (Erotica) and a book of photographs called Sex. No matter what the new album contained, photos of the world’s biggest pop star in the nude were always going to trump it.

  You could argue a case for Sex being a political move in the culture wars of 1990. The same year saw Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes facing an obscenity trial; was this Madge showing solidarity with the cultural left? It could also be seen as the work of someone who was now being treated as a new strain of feminist by universities, one who was seizing the means of porn production. Or you could argue that she had nowhere else to go – Madonna was as ubiquitous as the Beatles had been; splitting up wasn’t an option, but dressing down was.

  Looking back, the Sex book feels like one of the most radical moves made by anyone in this fifty-year story. But in 1990 it was regarded generally by those open to it as bad art, as bad porn, and by those against it as a publicity stunt. Either way, releasing the Erotica album so soon afterwards was Madge overload and none of the singles from it reached number one. This is a shame, as it was her best album – ‘Justify My Love’ preceded it and was Madonna at her most sensuous, all spooked Mellotron chords, whispering rather than screaming. The title track was almost as good, a 98 bpm Balearic rhythm topped with a simple but dark three-note piano motif: ‘If I take you from behind, push myself into your mind …’ Well, it worked for me. Other singles from the album (‘Rain’, ‘Deeper and Deeper’, ‘Bad Girl’) were good solid disco pop, based around minor chords, and were notably more mature and less attention-grabbing than anything she’d done before. None of this mattered. She’d got her kit off and that was the entire Madonna story. The album flopped.

  How did these icons dig their way out of a hole? Prince got a bigger shovel. He toughened up his sound and added a few more cuss words for ‘Sexy MF’ (UK no. 4, US no. 66 ’92) and ‘My Name Is Prince’ (UK no. 7, US no. 36 ’92), both of which were useful additions to his catalogue, but it still felt like he was playing catch-up. In the eighties his music had been the story; in the nineties his battles with the music industry – writing ‘slave’ on his cheek, changing his name to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince – became the story, and it was a turn-off. By 1994, when he had a surprise UK number one (his first) with ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’, he felt like a relic.

  Madonna realised that no matter what she did after Sex, it would be an anti-climax. Besides, everyone save her hardcore fans had their knives sharpened. So she pretty much disappeared, a queen in exile as grunge and riot grrrl took the heat off her. She started her Maverick record label and signed Alanis Morissette, whose Jagged Little Pill album sold thirty-three million copies and moved the discourse of female empowerment on by proxy. By the time she returned with Bedtime Stories in ’95 she could play godmother to the riot-grrrl scene, and Courtney Love was glad to back her up. With fresh impetus, she cut Ray of Light and Music, both sonically super-modern; once again she was raising the bar for club-orientated pop. She wore the crown.

  1 A rare American exception, a new subgenre with genuine weight, was freestyle, a Latin-based electropop sound born in New York and Miami. Although the term wouldn’t be coined until a few years later, the definitive freestyle hit was Shannon’s ‘Let the Music Play’, a UK number ten in early 1984. The sound’s commercial peak came in 1987, when ‘Come Go with Me’ by Exposé, ‘Show Me’ by the Cover Girls and Company B’s ‘Fascinated’ were all major US hits. In spite of a general lack of competition, none meant a thing in Britain.

  2 Like Margaret Thatcher, who, as prime minister, never allowed another woman MP into the Cabinet, Madonna acted as if she was the only woman allowed in pop.

  3 ‘When Doves Cry’ was the first hit single to lack a bassline since Andrew Gold’s ‘Never Let Her Slip Away’ in 1978.

  4 Incredibly, Prince had recorded three ‘lost’ albums in the short time between Parade and Sign ‘O’ the Times: Dream Factory, Camille and Crystal Ball.

  Unreleased songs like ‘In a Large Room with No Light’, ‘Wonderful Ass’ and the legendary ‘Wally’ (which no one other than Prince, Wendy and Lisa seems to have even heard) date from this period – rarity and secrecy are a large part of Prince’s mythology.

  5 Madonna’s nouveau-riche husband Guy Ritchie was still a few years down the line.

  6 The notable exception was Madonna’s ‘Vogue’, a UK number one in 1990, on which she cleverly made the most of her cheerleading background. It’s meant to be a rap, but that ‘Grace Kelly, Harlow, Jean’ sequence is all about her suburban roots, and all the more endearing for it.

  53

  SOME KIND OF MONSTER: METAL

  In the mid-eighties you couldn’t move for shock pop tactics.

  The Rolling Stones and the Doors had telegraphed rebellion, but not in the same MTV-friendly way as Madonna. Her outrageous acts – singing about teenage pregnancy, kissing a black man while wearing a crucifix – were calculated to wind up both conservatives (‘Of course we’re horrified!’) and liberals (‘Of course we’re not shocked!’). Different genres developed their own media-friendly rebels, whether it was indie (the Christian-baiting, riot-inciting Jesus and Mary Chain) or hip hop (the Beastie Boys’ casual sexism and penchant for VW pendants). There was no real sense of danger, though, nothing that would see its perpetrators threatened with national service, or prison, or worse.

  The climate of predictable outrage was perfect for heavy metal, which had been around for more than a decade but hit a commercial peak in the mid-eighties with Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and, ultimately, Def Leppard’s world-swallowing Hysteria album. Metal is starter-pack rock. It works as both a gateway to other forms of modern pop, via volume, speed and power, and as a model of pure escapism – the roar of the fairground, the cheap thrills of the slasher movie, sex and horror. Besides, as off-the-peg rebellion, it’s a lot more fun than Bob Dylan or Crass. It seems indestructible, and has defied all musical cataclysms. It is also deeply conservative, with its own canon, its own heroes, a true metal code of conduct. Along with country, it’s quite likely it will outlast every other genre in this book.

  Metal had been born at the start of the seventies, when kids were given two choices over which form of heavy rock they liked. In Britain, this was roughly dependent on the number of O-levels they got. Grammar-school kids tended to go for the clever end, the progressive end, which got progressively cleverer until it imploded in a fog of maths in the mid-seventies. Metal was much simpler. It was formulated, which didn’t mean the musicians lacked technical ability (check Deep Purple’s ‘Fireball’ for early, highly dextrous metal) but did mean it was easier to follow. Progressive rock was an exercise in aesthetic subtlety; it was only there fo
r people who were willing to put the time in. There was nothing to get with heavy metal – it was loud, it pissed off parents, and it was largely working-class. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album came with a competition form: ‘In 10 words or less, explain why you love Black Sabbath’s music.’ Metal was not out to test your faculties, it was there to dim them, to blot out all that teenage shit with sheer volume.

  The NME’s Keith Altham had met Black Sabbath in 1971 and described them as ‘four typical Northern lads without pretention or affectation who are busily playing hard, exciting rock and enjoying themselves while others enjoy their music’. Altham was speaking from a London perspective when he described Sabbath as northern. Like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and John Bonham, they were from the Birmingham conurbation, and had a similar self-deprecating, down-to-earth camaraderie. The West Midlands was the birthplace of metal.

  Black Sabbath had acquired their name when Geezer Butler crashed one night at Ozzy Osbourne’s house. Ozzy lent him a Dennis Wheatley horror novel, which included a chapter called ‘Black Sabbath’; he left it on the bedside table and fell asleep. In the middle of the night, Geezer was woken by a noise and saw a hooded figure at the end of his bed. He woke up in the morning in a cold sweat, looked at his bedside table and, yes, the book had disappeared; Geezer has told this story a million times and it never seems to have occurred to him that the hunched figure might have been Ozzy in his dressing gown.

  Contrasting with beer boy Ozzy and his puff-pastry face was the continental look of guitarist Tommy Iommi. His matador moustache and penchant for wearing black gave him a stately look. He had lost two fingertips while working his last-ever shift in a sheet-metal factory before leaving to become a full-time musician; most impressively, he used hardened leather caps to replace them.

  Iommi gave Black Sabbath – and, in turn, all of metal – direction. One night he saw a queue around the block outside a Birmingham cinema for a Hammer horror movie; no one, thought Iommi, is making horror music. Let’s give the people what they clearly want. Black Sabbath’s music was perilously slow, Iommi’s power chords were murderous (guitar tuned down to accommodate his broken fingers), and Butler’s lyrics evoked evil and suffering without bothering to dig into Led Zeppelin’s book of Welsh mythology or clamber up Bob Dylan’s watchtower. Outside in the cold distance of 1970, metal’s wind began to howl. Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ was the original stoner-rock anthem, with a political slant that nobody, save maybe Richard Nixon, could possibly disagree with. It may have rhymed ‘masses’ with ‘masses’ in the opening couplet but it had huge appeal to boys left in the cold, by the 1970 chart pop of Pickettywitch and Edison Lighthouse on one hand and by brainiac prog on the other. Sabbath even scored a number-four hit single with the unusually mid-tempo, though still pitch-dark, chug of ‘Paranoid’.

  Sitting at number two in the same 1970 UK chart was Deep Purple’s ‘Black Night’, its A-grade riff borrowed from the Blues Magoos’ moody garage-punk hit ‘(We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet’ (US no. 5 ’66). Purple were a different proposition; they sounded like they were having fun playing together for a start, and they always left room in their songs for a Blackpool Tower organ solo from Jon Lord or an ear-burrowing Ritchie Blackmore guitar break. They took ‘horror music’ to another level with ‘Child in Time’ on 1970’s Deep Purple in Rock, a ten-minute epic about Vietnam with singer Ian Gillan’s unnerving, wordless high-pitched wail for a chorus. In Gillan they had the classic metal singer with his precise, clipped pronunciation, and his manly, manly voice: ‘There once was a woo-mun, a stra-a-ange kind of woo-mun, the kind that gets written down in hiss-toe-ree.’

  While hard rock would maintain its quality and status, heavy metal hit the rocks around 1972; in Britain, glam assimilated its riffs and power, and added light and glitter where there had only been darkness. In the States, Rolling Stones-based boogie acts like Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd flourished. The former were fronted by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry; their fans were labelled the Blue Army because of their liking for top-to-toe denim. Tyler and Perry were labelled the Toxic Twins because of their obvious desire to be compared to the Glimmer Twins, Mick and Keith, and because of their industrial-scale drug abuse. Perry ‘started studying the folklore of opium as a sacrament and really got into it’. Rocks in 1976 was their fourth straight platinum album, but during the sessions, in spite of Perry’s touching faith in narcotics as a creative source, he could barely play guitar for ten minutes without vomiting and needing a lie down. Tyler had become so paranoid that he recorded the rest of the band’s conversations. America’s hardest, rockingest band promptly fell off the map for the best part of a decade.

  ‘It is now 1976’, wrote Lester Bangs in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, ‘and heavy metal seems already to belong to history.’ Holding the hard-rock fort in Britain through the mid-seventies were Status Quo, who wore denim, filled stadiums and had a loyal blue army of their own. They also played heads-down, mindless boogie, relentless and unswerving, but Quo’s hard rock had more in common with Neu! or Kraftwerk than it did with the Stones or Aerosmith: ‘Paper Plane’ (no. 7 ’73) and ‘Down Down’ (no. 1 ’75) were their best singles, four minutes of drone and power chords welded to Francis Rossi’s nasal Surrey whine. The lyrics were entirely irrelevant, the repetition was every thing – the opening seconds of ‘Caroline’ (no. 5 ’73) could almost be Steve Reich.

  Queen appeared in an extended gap between Led Zeppelin albums and, like Status Quo, never went away. More flamboyant rock than pure metal, with a penchant for both the Beatles’ experimentalism (‘Killer Queen’, UK no. 2 ’74) and melodicism (‘You’re My Best Friend’, UK no. 7 ’76), not to mention cold funk (the low-selling Hot Space album in ’82), they were a singles hit machine that didn’t relent until singer Freddie Mercury’s death in 1991. Three- or four-part harmonies topped backing tracks that were more studio-sharpened than any catalogue this side of Todd Rundgren, and Mercury was rock’s most impressive front man since Robert Plant. Yet somehow they remained hard to pin down – the other three band members always looked bored, and this wasn’t a pose, they genuinely looked as if they were clocking in every time they took the stage or appeared on Top of the Pops. Unlike Quo or Aerosmith – let alone the Stones or Led Zep – they seemed entirely detached from pop. Beyond their hits, all anyone seemed to know about them was that Mercury had been born Freddie Bulsara, in Zanzibar, and that Brian May had built his own guitar, the Red Special, in a shed with help from his dad. It always seemed a touching detail for a group who otherwise seemed closer to a multinational company than a pop group.

  Thin Lizzy, an Irish act with a penchant for phenomenally exciting singles, were easier to warm to. They broke through with a heavy folk hit (‘Whisky in the Jar’, UK no. 6 ’72), but 1973’s ‘The Rocker’ (‘I’m a rocker! I’m a rocker!! I’m a roller too, baby’) became their anthem, amped-up power pop without a wasted second. And in the red-hot summer of ’76, as an alternative soundtrack to Demis Roussos’s feta cheesecake ‘Forever and Ever’ (UK no. 1), they gave us ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ (UK no. 6). It sounded like the band were riding bareback through the city walls to deliver us cool water and cold beers, to lay waste to Demis and the Rollers and J. J. Barrie, to everything puny on Radio 1.

  Neither Thin Lizzy nor Queen turned out to be any kind of signifier, just isolated hard-rock cases. In the late seventies, though, fired by punk’s energy and volume, metal unexpectedly returned. Kids whose older siblings were into punk but who loved the noise and the parent-baiting swearing were attracted to metal’s survivors (Sabbath), latecomers (AC/DC), hard-rock weirdos (Motörhead) and, especially, to a bunch of pub acts who would soon be christened the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or NWOBHM: Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, White Spirit, Diamond Head, Samson, Saxon, Tygers of Pan Tang. Many were compiled on an album called Metal for Muthas, which reached number twelve in the UK album chart but felt bigger. This time around, post-punk played the role of progressive r
ock, the clever kids’ choice, with goth as some kind of mediator. Metal wouldn’t fade away again – this time it would crystallise into distinct scenes. As with country, all of these factions considered themselves to be keepers of the flame: my metal is more metal than your metal.

  Almost every NWOBHM singer sound ed like either Robert Plant or Ian Gillan; it was as if the Tories had invited impressionist Janet Brown to a party conference to recite a Margaret Thatcher speech. Yet another Birmingham band, Judas Priest – who had been hovering in the background since the mid-seventies – became the most popular of this crop in America, while East London’s rough-edged, faster-paced Iron Maiden were the biggest in Britain. Their debut ‘Running Free’ (UK no. 34 ’80) burned faster and fiercer than any other NWOBHM record; eventually, Iron Maiden would score the UK’s sole raw-metal number one, ‘Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter’, in 1991.

  Any UK Top 20 from 1980 or ’81 would likely feature at least one metal hit; a good percentage came from Deep Purple splinter groups: Rainbow (‘All Night Long’, ‘Since You’ve Been Gone’, ‘Can’t Happen Here’); Whitesnake (‘Fool for Your Loving’, ‘Don’t Break My Heart Again’); and Gillan (‘New Orleans’, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, ‘Trouble’). There was no longer any room for Thin Lizzy’s mid-seventies subtleties.1 The look, for fans and bands alike, was now unwavering – off-blond curls, denim, leather, gothic script. Though there was a glamour attached to metal’s front men, which made it more exotic than other contemporaneous teenage noise, metal was still about wearing a uniform – like mod and Oi! – with the audience as part of the performance. And when the fans turned sixteen, they moved on.

  America was slower to develop its own metal bands, but by the early eighties, as Britain embraced NWOBHM, US metal began to manifest itself as a glam variant: Alice Cooper, Sweet and the New York Dolls were touchstones for Twisted Sister, Poison and Mötley Crüe. UK glam had barely registered stateside in the early seventies, as it ate up the British charts. Some American metal acts like Great White (Ian Hunter’s ‘Once Bitten Twice Shy’) and Quiet Riot (Slade’s ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ and ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’) raided the British glam hits of a decade earlier, scoring US Top 10 hits and, in Quiet Riot’s case, almost five million album sales. The Americanised Ozzy Osbourne – fresh out of Sabbath, and now biting the heads off bats on stage – became a role model with his new, softer band, Blizzard of Ozz. Make-up was worn, and Ozzy came across as a demonic counterpoint to Adam Ant. ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘Mr Crowley’ gave Blizzard of Ozz American hits in 1980; with guitarist Randy Rhoads’s choppy melodic riffs and Ozzy’s voice double-tracked and harmonised over synths, Blizzard of Ozz were closer to Foreigner’s adult-orientated rock than Black Sabbath’s murk. Metal’s sales figures went higher and higher.