IRON COOKIES FROM ISLAND NATIONS

IRON COOKIES FROM ISLAND NATIONS

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

By Penny Valentine

My friend Nigel looked at the queue winding its way two blocks round the Rainbow Theatre and made his pronouncement: “Bored punks who never got into real New Wave, lost rockers and new young hippies.” The crowd—over 80% male, looked pretty ordinary to me. No special sort of dress, unless jeans are a whole new uniform identity I’ve missed the word on, no long hair, no studded leather and not a bike to be seen. “Ah well,” said Nigel and nodded wisely to himself leaving me feeling that the second heavy metal outburst may well be upon us but it hasn’t got a visible identity yet. The boys queueing for Gillian tickets didn’t look like they’d give anyone sleepless nights...

A month ago two rival factions of British Hell’s Angels fought it ouf in a forest outside London. One gang leader was shot up pretty badly and a court case ensued which proved to a fairly startled the public that the organized bike brigade still takes things pretty seriously and their faction warfare isn’t a thing of the past or the prerogative of America. We urbanites aren’t that well acquainted with bike gangs. They seem to thrive better in near-rural areas, somewhere between London and the real countryside, in the grey matter alongside motorways. All the court reports dwelt on the muckiness Qf the rival gangs and particularly the unwashed, “sneering,” I believe was the word most often used, attitude of the bikers’ grilfriends who came to support those accused mainly by yelling in court.

Rockers never went away. They continued to bang their heads to greasy jukeboxes in motorway cafeterias. There are still punks into leather. The fashion industry had a bash as reviving leather trousers around January and it didn’t do too badly, though it never really caught on. When the music sociologists forecast a hippie revival last year they were thinking more about their lost Jefferson Airplane than this...

The new HM revival is with us.

Def. Leppard’s On Through The Night is currently No. 15 in the album charts, just ahead of Sammy Hagar, Rush and Van Halen and just below their only other British contender, Status Quo. Leppard seem a good pointer to the new approach to HM. Still a blend of head banging and hippie lyrics, but it’s now permissible to lay back for a track or two. It also seems OK if you have a spoken introduction to a lyric that makes no effort to hide the fact that you have received a more than adequate education. It seems pertinent that vocalist Joe Elliot is referred to not as a singer but as an instrumentalist, someone who plays their ’‘throat” according to the Leppard’s sleeve.

For a successful HM band Def Leppard are surprisingly subtle. The new HM is still drum-bound with that sound that is the product of flailing biceps and foot action. Cymbals are not there to be skimmed but whacked. And whacked they are. Joe Elliot revives Robert Plant’s famous stance with mike stand as as extension of, in this case, his rather rotund young physique (Meat Loaf is, you understand, a permissible favourite with HM fans). Perms are de rigeur for these new young British HM’ers (makes me want to rush out and have a quick straightening job done on my head tout de suite) and with bass and two guitar line-up to complete, I fear the worst—the return of the guitar hero could be the next big revival.

The thing about the new HM is it’s as reactionary as it ever was. Not just in the phallic symboF ism that has always beset HM—the pictures of massive trucks, the appalling guitar as sexual organ syndrome, the hefty words like steel, warrior, fist, maurauder, that litter the ads for HM bands. This over-rides the music like all packaging. It speaks fiercely of a world I thought we’d left behind, a world of apocalypse and clout and thump.

Clout and thump is with us all the time here. The Blair Peach case has opened in court a year after the schoqlteacher was killed on an antiNational Front demonstration and on the second day there’s already been a trail of stories of how the police charging with batons beat the hell out of anyone within arm’s reach. The Tory government is closing hospitals as fast as you can say blood transfusions The poor are getting poorer. Pickets are arrested daily as the newspaper printers’ strike gains momentum. Old Age Pensioners are no longer to be allowed to claim some of the money spent on “Home helps” (people provided by local authorities to do odd, domestic jobs for them because they’re bed-ridden or ill or just too damn old and weary) back from the government and will presumably now be left simply to starve to death. The other day we were only half-joking when we all discussed the feasibility of our cellars holding out against nuclear fallout. We hear that you’re going through a feverish religious revival and a burst of patriotism. It figures.

“Wasted,” “Rocks Off,” “It Don’t Matter” sing Def Leppard. Musically their feet are on the ground (in the ground?) like HM always was, but the new HM’ers still have a touch of that original mystical neck ache if this album’s anything to go by:

The sun, the moon, the darkened sky

It’s burning up the sky, it’s burning up the sky

On the first day of the month, in some distant year \

The whole sky froze golden.

A blinding light, the sun had died

A new moon took it’s place

There’s a new sense—can HM’ers be ecologists too? Good. The hippie outlook is in there with a vengeance—not a stone’s throw from Jon Anderson’s visions for Yes, but with music that belongs to Free and Zeppelin. Softer than Sabbath. So women, who in HM music have always had a hard time, now emerge with only the slightest nod to a new conciousness. Women on Def Leppard’s album emerge as -mixed up as them (“Sorrow Is A Woman”); as sassy as them — or more— (“Rocks Off”) as flashy as them (“It Don’t Matter”: “Now in your big flash motor and your wild reputation you’re ready to hit the streets/Winking at the boys, yeah heading for the noise/Got the world at your feet). All heroines to the traditional rock lyric.

The new HM, like the old HM, has no surprises. Set in familiar chords, building with repetitious sequences... hi ho.

In March the audit of circulation on the British music trade papers (Melody Maker, NME, Record Mirror and Sounds ) came up with a surprise. The figures cover last July to December and prove that while NME continues to lead the field in a fairly unassailable position, Melody Maker has slipped with an audience moving its allegiances either to nothing at all or towards Sounds. The latter, always a brash and fairly crude reflection of the next trend, was the first paper to really go with punk in the early days (even the NME took to it more cautiously). Losing sales at the same time punk declined as a market force it then turned to an early foretaste of HM round two. And it’s this over-riding emphasis that has produced its current high sales figure.

Out there somewhere are hundreds of thousands of HM’ers paying out money but not yet easy to define. Sounds continues to reflect the post-punk new HM era by sending up women’s liberation, gawping and salivating over pictures of nude women guitarists and generally coming on like a music version of Fungus The Bogeyman (you haven’t read that yet?—what’s the matter with you?). They’ve cornered the ad market for HM touring bands and albums, they even have a special HM chart. Their small ads are a good indication of the changing face of things. While tentative punk and mod ads still litter comers of columns the majority of the money is changing hands on the following items: t-shirts for Motorhead, Zeppelin, Rush, the Stranglers, and Black Sabbath, leather waistcpats, studded belts, HM and hard rock belt buckles and anti-Mod badges. The personal columns contain the following pleas: A. Laurent in Liverpool, into HM, “seeks males for friendship”; a 19-year-old biker from Manchester is looking for a mate “for friendship, gigs, rides, etc.,” and two “shy” (?) HM males of 18 “rqgjjire two long-haired HM females for friendship and gigs” in Bradford. Meanwhile the second issue of HM’s own magazine Rock Steady is just out with a special Led Zeppelin feature.

TURN TO PAGE 63

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

Oh bondage up yours indeed. It seemed more than a little ironic that when my copy of new Euro-HM’ers Krokus arrived through the post from Ariola the other day I couldn’t play the first two tracks. Someone had munched a vicious bite from the outside vinyl rim. Still, I could play as much of Krokus as I’d want to and the message seems clear enough. Where do all HM musicians go when they die? To live in a rock and roll sky! Of course they do. ^