Читать книгу Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter - Страница 11

As my boarding school was what felt like a hundred miles away from Winchester, and my parents couldn’t afford the fees any more, I sat exams to try and get into Winchester College for free, but failed them with flying colours. So at 11 years old I took another exam and got into a school in Southampton for free instead, just ten miles down the road, which meant I could catch the train there every day. Money was suddenly so tight that we were forced to move into a much smaller terraced house, and it suddenly felt as if we were all living on top of each other.

By this time I had worked my way methodically through the Maiden œuvre, pausing only briefly to return my cassette of Killers because Bruce Dickinson, the singer, sounded nothing like he had on Number of the Beast. That was a tricky conversation in the record shop, believe me. I went back a few weeks later, in disguise, and bought it again after I found out they’d changed singers between albums.

It seemed to me that Iron Maiden were slightly more serious than AC/DC – no gimmicks, no dirty words, no flat caps; just a lot of long hair, leather and Spandex, and songs with epic themes. AC/DC functioned on three chords and thinly veiled sexual metaphors, but Iron Maiden were all puffed chests, complex guitar solos and songs about the wind and flags. They were operatic and overblown and I was extremely excited by their blustering cutlass sound. Alex and I did the Maiden – we raced through it, constantly trying to outdo one another with Maiden facts and figures which we often just made up.

But our friendship wasn’t to last. Our schools were miles apart and my plunge into Metal’s rich belly was starting to pick up pace. One day outside the school gates some incredibly cool kid played me some Judas Priest on his Walkman. The snippet I heard was enough; it was awesome. To me, the Priest sounded like the future, so the following week I burst into Winchester’s Metal-friendly Venus Records and bought Defenders of the Faith. Aside from the impressive hulking robot monster on the sleeve, the album’s aural innards gleamed with razor-sharp sounds. The guitars were so heavy and fast! The singing was like molten shards of glass! The lyrics were about how great Heavy Metal was, and how we were right and everyone else was wrong! And in the picture of the group on the back, not only were they wearing just leather, they were also completely covered in studs and rivets. This was easily the greatest record ever made, and, despite the fact that one of the group had short hair and one even had a beard, these were the coolest bunch of guys I’d ever seen.

I bought up a few of their records from the 1970s, but became slightly disillusioned as parts of them weren’t heavy enough, especially Sad Wings of Destiny, with its great big flouncing angel on the front. Still, I knew that allegiance was particularly important in Metal, so despite their ballads I felt sure I was the Priest’s number-one fan in Hampshire. I pored over their chequered history, filling the space reserved in my head for traditional academic subjects with facts about beardy Ian Hill’s bass technique (there wasn’t one), the making of the seminal British Steel album (it didn’t take long), and the controversy around the Stained Class album and an American teenager’s suicide. I was genuinely shocked to find no Judas Priest entry in my father’s complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica; I even went so far as to compose my own, which I posted to the compilers for use in the following year’s edition, but my father refused to buy the whole set again so I don’t know whether they put it in or not.

Nobody seemed to appreciate my precocious charm at this huge new school in Southampton. It was swallowed up by the screaming playgrounds and the echoing wooden halls, and my complete lack of street wisdom played into all kinds of hands. I made friends with a few other Winchester first-years, but as a group we were easily capsized, and I clung harder to the Heavy Metal dinghy in my head. I wasn’t bullied, just trampled underfoot, so I spent more and more time carving out the logos of my favourite bands on my exercise books, which, I was sternly informed, was naughty, and to stop it.

Heavy Metal was taking me over. In fact, I couldn’t get enough of it out in the real world so I decided to invent my own imaginary band. I named them, cryptically, ‘ER’, and gave them the most convoluted, soap-operatic career curve in the history of Metal. Singers quit, axe gods were mysteriously fired, and a trail of humiliated part-time synth players littered their chequered career. ER’s canon of around 25 albums was the very peak of my early teen imagination; even today, their memory still holds the residual weight of a genuine musical entity. My long daily walk to the station, and then from the station up to school and back again, consisted of me surreptitiously muttering out the life and times of ER under my breath, twitching at invisible instruments as I slouched. I’m not exaggerating when I say that for each of those imaginary masterpieces I had designed artwork, song titles, lyrics, pyrotechnic guitar solos, song times, tours, setlists and gatefold double live albums.

Their logo was shit though.

My social life improved in my second year when I discovered a pupil a year younger who was also from Winchester and also liked Heavy Metal. He was disreputable, and his name was spelt disreputably: Marc.

Marc was radical in his musical tastes. He liked Whitesnake and Ozzy Osbourne, both of whom were crossed off my list of potential bands to get into because they used keyboards. He liked some Iron Maiden too, on the side, because at that time you just did. Our age difference wasn’t a problem since he was twice as streetwise as I was; he introduced me to a glut of bad habits including masturbation, lying about ejaculation, and spitting. I was already a proud smoker and had worked my way up to Marlboro within a matter of weeks, having started on packets of ten menthols and the occasional stolen Silk Cut from my father. Marc and I clouded the smoking compartments on the train to school each day and practised smoking poses in trees behind Winchester Station before we went home.

One weekend, sensing ourselves as grown-ups, we decided to take the train to Southampton to buy ourselves our first Heavy Metal T-shirts. This would be the first time I was to wear anything not selected and purchased by my mother, so I’m not keen to elaborate on the clothes I was wearing at the start of this journey, except to say that I had a pretty cool Batman shirt that I liked to wear a lot, which had big, pointy, bat-like collars.

We marched down Southampton High Street with open minds over which particular T-shirt we were going to choose in HMV. It was 1984, the summer of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and it was difficult to find a T-shirt that didn’t resemble a billowing white sheet proclaiming ‘Frankie Say …’ something we didn’t understand. We eventually uncovered a few piles of black shrink-wrapped treasure, laid them out over the racks and filtered out all the smalls we could find. After much dithering, I chose a Judas Priest one and Marc got two Maiden ones. We rushed over to the park opposite and pulled on our new T-shirts and suddenly we were cool, suddenly I was a sexual animal, suddenly I cared about my hair. We strutted very slowly back to the station, eyeing up older girls along the way, one more thing that Marc had shown me how to do.

A week later I acquired a denim-style jacket (actually my mother did – charity shop, black corduroy, baggy armpits), which meant that Marc and I were now officially Metal. It was becoming hard to tell the difference between ourselves and any passing member of, say, the Maiden, and we didn’t change our clothes for almost two months. Passing similarly attired young fellows in the street, we’d blush and push back the edges of our jackets to display the T-shirt design properly.

The winged flying steel robot beast on the front of my T-shirt was called the Hellion. He featured on a sequence of Priest records in a variety of guises. On my T-shirt the Hellion was Screaming for Vengeance, the image on the cover of the Priest’s best album, I think.