I don't make heavy metal music. I guess if I had to label what I do in my band, Sweet Billy Pilgrim, it would be with something wince-inducing like 'progressive ambient pop' written in a tasteful calligraphic hand on expensive washi paper and tied with jute cord to a bonsai tree, probably by a vegetarian.
What I listen to - almost exclusively at the moment - however, is Heavy Metal. And when I say 'Heavy Metal', I'm not suggesting I Get Rocked by Girls, Girls, Girls in Paradise City, or even things getting Slippery When Wet after November Rain. I don't even mean those 90s nu-metal casualties, curled foetally on the floor of that room they all seem to share; the one with the bad plumbing and cockroaches, remembering that time they got dumped by a girl.
No, I've been looking underneath that big rock, at dark, glistening shapes that writhe and grope their way blindly from the light. There's the cursed blackened doom (their words) of bands like Khanate and Burning Witch, the tectonic realignments of Sunn O))), Litany and Krallice's apocalyptic gallop, Meshuggah's piston-precise attack and the ADD spasms of Down I Go and Gorguts. I'm talking about Black Metal. Doom Metal. Funeral Doom. Sludge Metal. Grindcore. Metalcore. Spazzcore. Death Metal. Technical Death Metal. Math Metal. Gore Metal, anyone ?
It's like an inverted Stairway to Heaven... heading downward... only, all that glitters is the lethal grin of an axe, or the chill of surgical steel, or the reflection of moonlight on bared teeth.
As far as I remember, my dark Charon, leaning on his oar and waiting to lead me into the Stygian gloom, cowled in Rothmans smoke, was Martin from next door. He was eight years my senior, had a leather biker jacket and supported a football team, all of which were impossibly glamorous as far as this ten year old was concerned; awareness just dawning, as it was, that not all trousers had to have an elasticated waistband, and that girls weren't just boys with better hair. He had that je ne sais quoi. But then, so does almost everything except Battle of the Planets and Top Trumps when you are ten and it's 1982.
What made my head spin more than the fag smoke and Hai Karate filling his living room whenever his mum was out, were the sleeves of the first three Iron Maiden LPs, which had taken up permanent residence on the lid of their Sony Music Centre. I needed to know what that grinning... thing was, and - more importantly - what kind of music it might listen to. I couldn't know what category the Number of the Beast might refer to in Top Trumps, but I was pretty sure that Peter Shilton wouldn't stand a chance against it.
When I finally got my own Iron Maiden album for Christmas a few years later (on cassette, which may have been a bit less of a drama for my parents to buy in Woolworths), it felt like one of the first things I'd ever owned; and more than that, in choosing it without (indeed, in spite of) the gentle intervention of my elders, for perhaps the first time I'd consciously reached what grown-ups seemed so arrive at so casually: a decision. That that moment involved an undead ghoul transformed into an Egyptian god, and the thrill of a WWII dogfight recreated with pirouetting guitars rendered the whole enterprise that bit more edgy.
In the intervening years, I've worked my way through lots of music, but even when we spend some time apart, there comes a day, often when I'm lost in the ecstatic drift of some beautiful modern classical music from Estonia, or savouring the granular flickers of some glitched-out jazzy electronica from Scandinavia, when every cell in my body seems to rise up and scream, 'fucking STOP THIS NONSENSE NOW !' And that's when I know the time has come. For Metal. Nothing else will do.
In starting to writing this, I became impatient. I wanted to get to the bit where I explain what it is about all that unremitting ugliness, violence and extremity that appeals. Now I'm here, it feels a bit like being caught with a rope around my neck, stark naked; an orange in my mouth, masturbating furiously whilst standing on a chair. And by that I mean to say that I could probably justify my behaviour quite rationally and scientifically, but when all's said and done I'm still a naked man with an erection, standing on chair.
Terrible meta(l)phors aside, the extreme fringes of metal are where I go to escape the ambiguity and grey areas from which so much of contemporary culture seems to emanate. Don't get me wrong, grey areas are not a bad thing. Indeed, I often think of myself as the Marco Polo of greyscale. But sometimes, I just want to commune with my inner caveman, even just for five or six riff-heavy minutes. And, make no mistake, even the most sophisticated extreme metal is just that; caveman music. At some primal level, kick drums and low-end bass rumble are migrating herds of mammoths and guitars the bony cries of circling prehistoric birds above them. Eventually we hear man's inchoate fury rising from frozen earth, up to as-yet unnamed gods... because he's left his fucking front door keys in the house again.
In my favourite Metal songs, dynamics are something that happen at the beginning and end of the song, or perhaps in the micro-silences between lightning fast beats. Technique is all, because control is everything. The palette of sounds I tentatively dip fine horsehair brushes into as I'm writing music, becomes a jack-hammer on a hydraulic arm. Lyrics rarely deal in doubt or abstraction. This is this. That is so. Melody withers beneath the solar flare of blunt force.
See ? It sounds awful, doesn't it... [spits orange out].
But there's a trenchant purity in all of this that I think is beautiful if you look hard enough. In the same way that when I drive past an oil refinery, I see something in those brute symmetries that touches the same part of me as trees and grass and clear blue skies. It's the basic human need to feel something that all good music nourishes, but our rage never earns the same entitlement as our sadness, say, and it's that part that occasionally needs wringing out of our bones before our inner Basil Fawlty threatens the shrubs of suburbia, needlessly.
Metal, for me, is that skull-ringed hand, reaching into my chest. In the tortured cadence of detuned power chords and the anguished, wounded-ox howl of the vocals, I'm forced to invoke the full force of the C-word: catharsis. Suddenly, it doesn't matter so much that I've locked myself out. My inner caveman and I have bumped shoulders and shaken hands. We light a fire, and discuss high protein diets and Loose Women as we watch the sun soften and melt across the horizon.
And as I look across the burning shells of cars, deafened a little by the cries of the damned, I know I'm old enough to know better, but all this wretched torment fills me with joy.
Suggested listening:
Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve
Meshuggah - Chaosphere
Krallice - Diotima
Down I Go - Tyrantcore
Sunn O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions
Gorguts - Obscura
Ascend - Ample. Fire. Within.
Electric Wizard - Dopethrone
Spawn of Possession - Noctambulant
Black Boned Angel - Verdun