It was forty years ago last Saturday that Black Sabbath's debut album was released. So it's forty years ago last Saturday that heavy metal was invented. I can't let the passing of such an important anniversary (well, it's important to me) go without being marked. So may I direct you to my heavy metal blog for the lowdown on, to nick a phrase from The Beatles' statue in Liverpool, 'four lads from Aston who shook the world'.
As an aside I watched a BBC documentary about heavy metal recently. Ozzy was on there explaining how they came up with the sound; they used to rehearse in a room opposite a cinema that happened to be showing a horror film. They looked on the crowd queueing up outside and decided that people liked being scared, so decided to make scary music. At their early gigs playing this music, according to Ozzy "Chicks would run out screaming, so we looked at each other and said 'This scary music's working a treat, isn't it?'" Priceless.
6 comments:
Are you excited about the forthcoming Heavy Metal Brittania? Diamond Head are very, very bitter.
I'm going to explore that other blog later. Love a bit of the 'eavy stuff myself.
FC - Diamond Head are bitter, are they? They didn't ought to be considering the massive royalties they must receive for the four of their songs that Metallica have covered and released.
Simon - I've not updated it for about a year, I really must do something about that...
Trouble is they are bitter because people only know them for those four songs, among other reasons.
I have the DVD of that 1970 Paris concert. One thing that struck me is that, when the camera pans to the audience it's full of hipsters and students who no doubt called themselves "revolutionaries". It looks like the audience for a Jean-Luc Godard film. Then I realised: the heavy metal audience didn't exist at that time! Black Sabbath must have spent their early days playing to people who were expecting them to sound a bit like The Yardbirds.
Yep, quite right Thumper. I have a video (yeah, a video cassette. I'm SO 1980s, aren't I?) of Led Zeppelin performing on a Danish In Concert-style TV show in 1969. Plant's shaking his mane of hair furiously along to How Many More Times?, Jimmy Page is in his finest silks bowing his guitar to Dazed and Confused while John Bonham is being John Bonham. While all this is going on the student-y audience just sit meekly cross-legged on the floor nodding their heads gently in time to the music.
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