Читать книгу Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter - Страница 12

People think the standard Metal uniform of band T-shirt and jeans is easy. And in a way they’re right. But passions run high – high enough for the choice of T-shirt not to be taken lightly. Not only must you worry about what band you’re going to choose, which is a perilous decision in the first place, but you also need to think about its rarity value, its kudos, the effect it would have on a fellow, say, Molly Hatchet fan, were you to bump into one on the high street. If that Molly Hatchet fan saw you in a bog-standard latest-album design with its colours still vivid on the print, you’d feel obliged to explain that you are a real fan, and haven’t just got into them recently despite the pristine appearance of the T-shirt. What you want to be wearing is that limited-edition tour T-shirt, the faded one and, most importantly, the one with the tour dates on the back. Having the tour dates on the back (preferably for a gigantic, world-straddling tour with tons of dates in Germany and places you’ve never heard of in America) makes you a proper fan. And if the tour you’re advertising on your back took place over five years ago, you’re pretty much sorted. Every Metal fan has at some point in his or her life walked down the street in the depths of winter with their denim or leather jacket slung over their arm, just to show off the tour dates on the back of their T-shirt.

The T-shirts have to be black. In the 70s they were occasionally red, but red fades to pink which is unacceptable. Black fades really nicely into ‘old’, ‘old’ becomes ‘favourite’, and ‘favourite’ often turns into ‘second skin’. When it comes to the design itself, the most important feature is the band’s logo. This is a straightforward branding exercise. The logo should be elaborate and embellished with one of a few standard lettering effects – gothic, or spiky, or three-dimensional, or even all three – but not so complicated as to be impossible to replicate in felt tip on the back of a denim jacket or in an exercise book. Uriah Heep really messed up – their labyrinthine design was much too difficult to draw without artistic training, so people tended not to bother trying and wrote UFO instead. Here are a few generic-looking logos of bands you may not have heard of, to demonstrate the general effect:

‘Destruction’ are German.

‘Overkill’ – I don’t know why they chose to separate the word in their logo like that.

‘Dio’.

This says ‘Venom’.

This says ‘Witchfinder General’.

The logo is particularly important when it comes to the Heavy Metal T-shirt, because the rest of the illustration will often be interchangeable with any other band’s. It might be a dragon, an apocalyptic urban scene featuring explosions, a crude image of five or so longhairs (the band themselves), a big motorbike, a large-breasted woman (often with the band’s name tattooed prominently on her upper arm), and if the band is American, a top-hatted, half-zombie Uncle Sam figure, cackling and pointing a spindly finger at you. Most of these images have been used at one time or another by everybody. The only Metal band whose art is particularly recognisable are the Maiden, with their lifelong mascot, the famous zombie ‘Eddie the Head’. Eddie features on all of the band’s album covers and most of their merchandise.

Eddie the Head

Jeans are easier. Any jeans are fine, so long as they’re not fashionable. If you take too much time over choosing the jeans you’ll be labelled a ponce. Bleached tight jeans will see you through without any problems. So too will filthy ones, and good old-fashioned grease never goes amiss either; it signifies a manual job, possibly with hot-rods or motorbikes, which is a good impression to give.

If you have spindly legs, you might want to go a step further down the jeans highway and invest in a pair of tight, clinging ones. These come in a variety of different types. The most Metal are the legendary stripy Spandex, as sported by behemoths all over the world since the early 80s. Spandex is the definitive Metal legwear; it’s skin-tight and comes in a huge variety of rainbow hues and faux animal prints. Tiger-striped, sequinned, leopardskin, black and white, leather effect, pinstriped, spangled, satin, polka-dotted – pretty much anything and everything goes, and amazingly no one (well, no Metaller) will raise an eyebrow to question your sexual orientation. For best effect the Spandex is finished off with a gleaming pair of bright white ankle-hugging trainers.

This chap knows he’s got it exactly right.

When it comes to coats, you can choose between two: denim or leather. The leather jacket – stolen wholesale from the Brando/Dean model of the 1950s – has, from the 70s onwards, been the purists’ staple. The only problem with the leather jacket is that you can’t really sew patches on to it, but it overcomes this design flaw by looking plain mean. What you could attach to your leather jacket were studs; in the late 80s they sometimes came with studs already on them, if you were a twat.

The denim model, though plainly cheaper and a little more versatile, was always considered the slightly younger brother of the leather. There were all sorts of things you could do to your denim jacket (things that would’ve ruined your leather one), such as add band patches, strategic rips, hem-scuffing and writing on them with felt-tip. The denim was an all-round friendlier type of beast – easier to celebrate your favourite bands with, but lacking the sweat and fusty creak of the bad-boy leather. Motorhead, arguably the only genuinely ‘cool’ Metal band ever, only wore leather jackets – crusty old biker numbers with wide lapels that flapped in the wind. They probably even wore them in bed (if they ever went to bed, that is).

Leather trousers are completely different. They’ve always been a big mistake, especially if you spend hundreds of pounds on a gleaming off-the-peg pair, which just give you tree-trunk thighs and a huge baggy arse. The only person ever to have looked cool in a pair of leather trousers (and even then only for about five minutes) was Jim Morrison. In the late 80s, though, during the new Glam Rock, leather trousers came back with a vengeance. In a way they replaced Spandex, which had slipped slowly out of fashion due to bands like Saxon never being out of the stuff. These new leather trousers began to develop accessories such as tassels, sequins and laces up the sides. This all looked quite nice for a while, but in the end they were just another easy target for Kurt Cobain and his subversive cardigans.

I’ve mentioned big white trainers, but after Guns n’ Roses came along, you had to wear cowboy boots, wherever you happened to belong on the Metal tundra. If you were sold on the whole Guns aesthetic like most people (their look would rule the Metal school right up until the end), you wore your jeans inside your cowboy boots, showing them off in all their fake chintz glory. But if you were still refusing to bow to the whole sleaze thing, or were on the whole Thrash Metal trip, you brought your blue jeans out and over like actual cowboys did.

Assuming you didn’t do that, assuming you had a shred of cool, you wore them with tight black jeans, much like a goth might. But – and think about this – have you ever seen a Metaller walking around with just a basic pair of cowboy boots? No! For God’s sake man, where are your spurs? In my era, between 1986 and 1992, all you could buy on Carnaby Street (the only place to go if ever you want to dress Metal) were accessories for your cowboy boots and skull-motif bandannas. But it wasn’t just spurs you could improve your naked boots with; all kinds of metallic understrapped appendages were permissible – studs, stars, flower shapes, bells, rivets, skulls, indeed anything and everything went, just so long as it flattered your ankles, jingled loudly or hurt.

Have I mentioned jumpers? Good. They’re not allowed. Granny’s knitted you a woolly pullover with ‘Warrant’ stencilled on it?

Fuck Granny.