Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  One reason for metal’s accelerating popularity in the eighties was MTV. Like Duran Duran’s yachts-and-models lifestyle, the excess of metal bands’ live shows translated beautifully to the florid new medium. Generally, the more excessive the act, the better they sold. ‘Don’t forget,’ said Bon Jovi’s A&R man Jerry Jaffe, ‘most of this genre of music … is the lowest common denominator entertainment. It’s bread and circuses for the common people. Record companies are trying to make money. In the same way that Porky’s made money, a record company can make money on Mötley Crüe.’

  Secondly, the late-eighties metal generation was explicitly about sex and horror-movie props – denim was abandoned as bands appeared in high heels, fishnets, heavy make-up and long back-combed hair. This was cross-gender rebellion that picked up more female fans than metal had ever had in the seventies. It didn’t hurt that Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach, Guns n’ Roses’ Axl Rose and Jon Bon Jovi were very pretty. There was also a glossiness to eighties metal that simply hadn’t existed before. British band Def Leppard created their 1987 album Hysteria, a transatlantic number one, as a state-of-the-art recording that would make as much sense to someone in Tunisia as it would in Idaho or Shrewsbury. Metal’s rootlessness, like disco’s, appealed to the misunderstood outsider. With singles like ‘Animal’ (UK no. 6, US no. 19 ’87) and ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ (UK no. 18, US no. 2 ’87) – using new pop synths and Mutt Lange’s mainstream eighties production – Def Leppard showed how many of these outsiders there were in the world: Hysteria sold twenty million copies.

  Though it could now be heard on TV soundtracks and ad jingles, metal once again took up the rebellious middle ground it had staked out in 1970. ‘A kid puts on a Judas Priest or an Iron Maiden or a Motörhead shirt and it makes a statement,’ said Def Leppard and Metallica manager Cliff Burnstein.2 ‘Hall and Oates don’t make a statement.’ The kid’s statement was the equivalent of painting his room black. The kid’s manifesto was ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.’

  In the late eighties and nineties, partly as a reaction to the comic-strip excesses of glam metal – now caustically renamed ‘hair metal’ by its detractors – Slayer, Anthrax, Metallica and Megadeth ditched the movie props, went back to Sabbath’s crepuscular roots, pioneered thrash metal, and became the genre’s biggest-selling acts; they were treated with great reverence for their darkness, speed and musicianship. ‘I could relate to punk lyrics,’ said Metallica singer James Hetfield in 1987. ‘They were about me, rather than that “Look at me riding a horse, with a big sword in my hand” typical HM fantasy crap.’ Like dance music, the scene developed further splinters (speed, death, doom, black), all the while becoming more and more distanced from mainstream pop. Heaviosity through speed and volume meant that thrash soon found itself, like Oi! before it and gabber to come, chasing its own tail: ‘When people first started copying us it was a real compliment, but now we have to get away from the speed metal tag, ’cos all these bands have jumped on the bandwagon,’ Hetfield complained. ‘The NWOBHM bands each had their own sound and feeling, but you can’t tell the difference between most of the new thrash bands. It’s fucked. So you’re the fastest band in the world … so what? Your songs suck.’

  Metal embodies modern pop’s conservativism. While it has continued to evolve and keep up with technology, it has also rewarded durability and consistency. An excessive lifestyle is prized as much as musical merit, but redemption through rehab gets gold stars too. Aerosmith were handed a lifeline when their 1976 hit ‘Walk This Way’ (US no. 10) was covered by Run-DMC. They resolved to hit the clinic, cut ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’ (US no. 14 ’87) and then a monster ballad called ‘Angel’, which was co-written by soft metal’s secret weapon, Desmond Child.3 By 1989 Aerosmith were proud to be seen working out on exercise equipment during a promo documentary for their latest album, Pump. It sold seven million copies. Mötley Crüe had an even more extreme take on the metal lifestyle: bassist Nikki Sixx was declared legally dead from a heroin overdose in 1987 before he was revived by two adrenalin shots to the heart. A couple of years previously their singer Vince Neil had been drink-driving when he slammed his car into oncoming traffic; his passenger, Hanoi Rocks’ drummer Razzle, was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. Mötley Crüe’s 1989 album Dr Feelgood was their biggest seller, a US number one whose success the band put down to collective sobriety.

  Australian group AC/DC ended up as the biggest metal group of all by dint of never changing their look or their sound one iota. They were entirely without ornament, their songs were pure riffing, their drum sound was more basic than the Dave Clark Five and louder than Led Zeppelin and, outside the studio, they made Mötley Crüe look like lightweights. Their singer Bon Scott died in 1980 after a night’s drinking at the Camden Palace. Five months later AC/DC, now with Scottsoundalike singer Brian Johnson, released ‘Back in Black’, dedicated to his memory. It became the second best-selling album of all time. So why stop at a tribute? Three decades later they are still going, still selling hundreds of thousands of albums, still using the exact same musical palette. They haven’t written a song in thirty years that anyone could name, but people still wear the T-shirt.

  Like country, metal has travelled on a parallel path to modern pop, occasionally scoring a heavy presence on the charts, and occasionally leaving traces of its influence on other genres. Def Leppard’s Hysteria was produced by Mutt Lange, who, ten years on in 1997, applied a similar, vaporous rock sound to his wife Shania Twain’s country album Come On Over and was again rewarded with huge crossover sales – both albums were UK number ones. So metal is not as autistically quarantined as indie or punk. It can adapt (after punk with NWOBHM, after new pop with glam metal, after grunge with doom metal) and it’s unlikely that anyone in a metal band would suffer guilt pangs from selling out, though – again, like country – people are very serious about the music’s history and tradition.

  Country, however, is a centuries-old music that has been adopted by and adapted to modern pop’s electricity. Metal only came into being around 1970. How has it survived and thrived? What is its continuing allure to new generations?

  One key draw – certainly in the NWOBHM era – was metal’s respect for tradition. For teenage boys in 1980, the fact that much metal came from a source with a stamp of classic-rock quality – Zep, Purple, Sabbath – gave them confidence to follow the new bands without fear of peer embarrassment. Also, the musicianship – say, Ritchie Blackmore’s noodling with Rainbow – was something for them to aspire to. These musicians demanded to have their poster on your wall, their patch on your denim jacket. Radio 1’s Friday Rock Show, presented by the authoritative Tommy Vance, was a fifty–fifty mix of old and new bands, which was much more comforting than the year-zero approach of punk. It remained gently rebellious, not because it had any real sense of danger or revolution but because it was despised and sneered at by non-believers. Metal’s heritage strengthened the fan’s resolve. This respect for tradition and camaraderie hasn’t gone away – even now, Metallica regularly bring Diamond Head, their favourite NWOBHM act, on stage as guests.

  There’s humour, too. Metal is rarely knowing or ironic,4 and is gloriously unapologetic about its bluster and silliness. Steve ‘Dobby’ Dawson was the bassist in Saxon, one of NWOBHM’s biggest successes with ‘Wheels of Steel’ (UK no. 20 ’80), ‘747 (Strangers in the Night)’ (UK no. 13 ’80), ‘And the Bands Played On’ (UK no. 12 ’81) and ‘Never Surrender’ (UK no. 18 ’81). Dawson worked out basslines which enabled him to punch his fist in the air at the same time – he knew it was ludicrous, but not so ludicrous that fans would feel they were being taken for a ride.

  Then there’s sex. In the eighties metal lyrics and album covers – even band names such as Split Beaver – appealed to pubescent boys not tall enough to reach for the top shelf. Take Whitesnake. Their song titles (‘Slide It In’, ‘Slip of the Tongue’, ‘Slow and Easy’) and the Liquor and Poker tour offered teenage boys a fantasy not reflected in r
eal life. This earned them a few UK Top 20 hits in the NWOBHM era, but when singer David Coverdale replaced his hoary bandmates with younger, American, better-looking musicians in the eighties they stepped up to another level. Along with the sequencers that updated their sound on ‘Here I Go Again’ (US no. 1, UK no. 9 ’87) and ‘Is This Love’ (US no. 2, UK no. 9 ’87), there was now poodle-haired eye candy for the girls too, and – just so the boys didn’t feel short-changed – Coverdale’s wife Tawny Kitaen regularly appeared as a vixen in their Duran Duranstyled, vaguely erotic videos.

  Metal is as much a rite of passage as a genre of modern pop. It is about a state of being, of Being Metal. And listening to it confirms your metalness. Almost no other music has this raison d’être. This exclusiveness, the total immersion in the genre and its formula, is what gives metal its huge appeal. It spends a lot of time and effort pretending to be less learned than it is. ‘It doesn’t mean more or less than those old bubblegum acts,’ reckoned Jerry Jaffe. ‘Except the image is a little more striking.’ I love ‘Sugar, Sugar’, I really do, but I’m not sure I’d want to build my life around it.

  1 Thin Lizzy felt they had to bend to metal’s new rules to survive and released some of their worst singles, including ‘Killer on the Loose’, which was released as the Yorkshire Ripper terrorised women in the north of England. A happier result was that Slade’s career was revived after they played the Reading Rock Festival in 1980, opening their set with ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’. ‘We’ll Bring the House Down’ (no. 10 ’81) and ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ bore a strong NWOBHM stamp.

  2 Motörhead have sold more T-shirts than records.

  3 Child helped to add a melodic, commercial sheen to metal in the eighties. After giving Kiss their biggest hit to date with ‘I Was Made for Loving You’ (US no. 11 ’79), he went on to co-write hits for Bon Jovi (‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’, ‘Bad Medicine’), Aerosmith (‘Angel’, ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’, ‘Crazy’), Alice Cooper (‘Poison’) and Ricky Martin (‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’).

  4 British group the Darkness managed to appeal to an indie crowd with a sound that was pure eighties metal, but given a dusting of knowingness – something in singer Justin Hawkins’s voice had an element of ironic distance. Metal fans were equally keen, and this two-pronged approach gave the Darkness a number-one album in the UK with Permission to Land in 2003.

  54

  POISED OVER THE PAUSE BUTTON: THE SMITHS AND THE BIRTH OF INDIE

  English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water, nestling in green nowhere, armoured and effete.

  Vivian Stanshall, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End

  In 1953 a Florida student called Wade Buff wrote a song called ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’, and it was very small and very sad. It was about a boy who knows that his girlfriend is going to leave him the next day; he is unable – or unwilling – to go to sleep, watching her lying next to him, not wanting to miss a second of the limited time left in their relationship. No wonder he sounds so small and sad – the poor sap doesn’t want her to wake and see the tears in his eyes. Wade Buff was quite sure he had a hit on his hands, but no one wanted to know – the song was too maudlin, too amateurish, possibly too raw. So he assembled a bunch of college friends, they called themselves the Dreamweavers, and they recorded ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’ in a shed in Miami. Unstudied, patched together with vinegar and brown paper, it reached the US Top 10 and went all the way to number one in Britain at the start of 1956.1

  Not only was its production entirely independent, but its fey sound and defeated yet hopeful stance made ‘It’s Almost Tomorrow’ a good three decades ahead of its time: this was the first indie record.

  Indie is short for independent, and indie pop was born out of the British independent-record-label scene in the eighties. The greatest periods in pop tend to coincide with the pre-eminence of independent record labels. This is not exactly a coincidence: a genuine youthquake would be sure to excite the pop-hungry likes of Leiber and Stoller, Phil Spector, Andrew Oldham, Factory’s Tony Wilson and Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis, talented fans who would always be faster off the mark than the A&R men at unwieldy and lethargic major labels. The difference in the eighties was that the independent labels were frequently seen as being in opposition to the majors – they were opting out of the mainstream quite deliberately.2

  In 1983 new pop had started to wobble, and into the void stepped the decidedly pre-punk Rod Stewart (who scored his first UK number one in five years with ‘Baby Jane’) and Elton John (with the passive-aggressive splurt ‘I’m Still Standing’, a UK number four and US number twelve); Billy Joel’s album An Innocent Man was the radio soundtrack of the year. The British scene became dominated by video-driven acts like Eurythmics whose careers would be cemented for the rest of the decade by Band Aid and Live Aid. It was like punk, post-punk and new pop had never happened.

  Scattered around Britain in 1983 were a small number of refuseniks who had grown up listening to John Peel and reading a music press so articulate that it was commonplace to buy records on the strength of a review. For this generation, groups like the Fall, Josef K, Orange Juice, Subway Sect, Young Marble Giants and the Television Personalities – none of whom had ever had a sniff of a hit – were of great historical and political significance. They had sold thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of records, and each of them had suggested a different possible future for pop. They had scored hits on the independent chart, launched in 1980 by a group of independent labels and distributors,3 and printed every week in the NME. Geoff Travis’s Rough Trade label had provided the first number one (Spizz Energi’s ‘Where’s Captain Kirk’) and several other singles in the first Top 30. ‘We used to do our own Top 10s in the shop,’ he recalled, ‘but they were personal taste. The first independent charts were very important. It was significant if the Fall’s LP was number one, it gave you a sense of achievement. We were happy in our own world – there was a logic and beauty to it. And the real world’s taste is so terrible.’ Within weeks, the nascent Smash Hits began to publish the chart: to pop kids raised on Top of the Pops and the Top 40, this was a parallel universe of music you had never heard of. The song titles and band names conveyed vast mystique: ‘Get Up and Use Me’ by Fire Engines; Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Seconds Too Late’; ‘Simply Thrilled Honey’ by the thrillingly named Orange Juice. At number five was the Cramps’ ‘Drug Train’. There could never be a song called ‘Drug Train’ in the real chart, whose corresponding number five that week was ‘Feels Like I’m in Love’ by Kelly Marie.

  Three years on came the fallout from the new pop experiment. Some observers were appalled that Kajagoogoo’s flimsy, post-new pop ‘Too Shy’ hit number one in the spring of 1983, while Vic Godard had given up on pop to become a postman. The last survivors of a lost battle, they had nothing to lose and decided to set themselves up in direct opposition. If Radio 1, Top of the Pops and even Rough Trade – now concentrating funds on Scritti Politti’s soul-meets-critical-theory Songs to Remember – were out to reject them, then fuck them, they’d create an alternative pop world.4

  ‘They have their own clothes, language, in-jokes and fanzines,’ said Caroline Coon of 1976’s punk-rockers. ‘There is both healthy camaraderie and competitiveness.’ Taking the first spring of punk rock as a base, a British network of geographically isolated groups, gig promoters, labels and fanzine writers coalesced between 1983 and 1985. They made contact via the Royal Mail. There was a high level of collaboration and co-operation. Unlike post-punk, there was no intense urge to be brand-new, but there was an intense urge to be intense. The model, musically and visually, was one of the best post-punk labels, Postcard Records.

  Started by camp, acerbic Glaswegian Alan Horne in 1979, Postcard had packaged everything with considerable style: a great logo (kitten bashing drum), a free postcard (usually of the group, smiling) and a slogan – ‘the sound of young Scotland’. Was Horne being arch? Almost certainly, but either way it was true. Postc
ard’s first release had been ‘Falling and Laughing’ by Orange Juice, so called because the name simultaneously sounded ‘fresh’ and was the most ridiculous they could think of. Edwyn Collins sang like a drunken calf, but he was a deftly romantic lyricist at a time when romance was in short supply.5 Guitarist James Kirk was clearly self-taught. Part of the thrill of Orange Juice records was how close they came to falling apart completely before, always, climaxing with a flourish around two minutes thirty. Postcard had also been first to sign Aztec Camera, basically a front for sixteen-year-old Roddy Frame, who wrote sweet love letters (‘Just Like Gold’, ‘Pillar to Post’) that tried to define feelings he was really too young to feel. And Josef K completed the roster, the most clearly contemporary of the three, darker, slightly atonal: they had broken up in 1981, bowing out with ‘Chance Meeting’, an extraordinarily emotional record that sounded like a brass band playing in a broom cupboard.