Читать книгу Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter - Страница 13

Once Marc and I had the basic gear down pat, it was time to customise the rest of our clothes. The most Metal way of doing this was by pleading with my mother to sew on band patches. I got a small AC/DC one on my black corduroy jacket in the area between the shoulders, and I wrote the Iron Maiden logo along the bottom with a toxic silver marker pen. You couldn’t really buy patches around Winchester or Southampton – often you had to rely on getting one as a free gift in a special 12-inch single – so building up a backful was something that took time, years even. The problem with this was that you ended up with patches on your jacket of bands you’d liked at the time of sewing, but had gone right off a few months later. Heavily patched denim jackets had the constant potential to become walking walls of shame – lucky for me I never got into the Quo.

My school uniform started to get in the way of this new self-expression. I didn’t dare sew a Judas Priest patch on to the back of my blazer, though I was desperate to. The only way to rebel from within the uniform was by stealthily growing my hair down beyond my collar. This sounds vaguely rebellious until you glance at any school photograph from that era, where, apart from the hip kids with their sides-shaved mullets, we all have exactly the same shaggy, bigfoot haircut.

By the end of my second year at this increasingly unpleasant and bewildering secondary school, I was known among my peers as a sad and boring Heavy Metal obsessive. I’d acquired this reputation on the back of just three bands – the DC, the Maiden and the Priest. But as I endlessly thumbed the Priest section in Venus Records, I could see a band poking through the racks to the right that made me feel uneasy; they were covered in blood, fire, and terrifying black and white make-up. Despite being frightened, my eyes couldn’t help but occasionally stray over in horrified fascination, though I didn’t dare pick out one of their records. Little did I know of the clandestine excitement just around the corner – little did I know I was about to embark upon an affair.

I’d heard of Kiss before – who hadn’t? But they had such a stupid and uncool name (why not just call yourselves Hug, or Cuddle, or Namby Pamby?), I’d always been loathe to investigate. I was also intimidated by the way they looked – I didn’t really understand why they wanted to scare everyone quite so much. But then one day, under pressure from Marc, I bought their first double live album, Kiss Alive! – and suddenly they were my new favourite band.

Kiss weren’t a regular band as such. Instead they were a Demon, a Spaceman, a Starchild and a Cat, who just happened to play instruments and hang out together in their own rocking fantasy world. The establishment couldn’t see this and so therefore considered them dangerous. They claimed that Kiss was an evil acronym that probably stood for Knights In Satan’s Service, but this was all wrong because they were really just four young guys from Queens, New York, who became so swept up in their theatre that nobody saw them without their face paint on for ten whole years.

Kiss’s music wasn’t as technically great as Judas Priest’s or Iron Maiden’s – they played nice easy chords with big choruses in a kindergarten blues style – but their overwhelming visual impact more than made up for the pleasingly rudimentary chops. You couldn’t just buy, play and listen to Kiss records like you did with other groups – you had to buy into the whole rock ’n’ roll pantomime. They became the biggest band in the world, a living, breathing pop cartoon franchise. You either swallowed it down or thought the whole thing completely ridiculous, which of course, it totally wasn’t.

Unfortunately for me, I got into them just after their album sales hit rock bottom and the band consequently decided that the face paint had outlived its magic. They decided to shake their dwindling audience back into action with an earth-shattering gesture – their true faces revealed for the very first time on the front of 1983’s Lick it Up.

The album was pretty good, all things considered (it even featured some rapping), but my timing couldn’t have been worse – they exploded their myth just as I excitedly approached, and the two coolest members had left the band, too. I was stuck with their anonymous new clump-metal direction and nobody left in the group that I liked.

They eventually came to their senses in 1996 and put the make-up back on – something that ego catastrophe Gene Simmons said they’d never do – having forced their slighted muse through the shame of going Grunge in the early 90s. Kiss fans all over the world forgave them everything as the original line-up gathered again, donned their capes, stack heels and shoulder pads, and set out to conquer the world, via marketing, once more. They’d unwittingly become the world’s ultimate tribute band.

Back at school I heard on the grapevine that there was someone else in my year who liked Kiss. I knew him by sight because he had ginger hair and caught the train from Winchester every morning. His name was Dominic and I didn’t like him, or rather he didn’t like me, but I was desperate to talk about Kiss with someone, so I regularly tried to approach him in school.

One day he was standing outside a classroom with a group of kids I didn’t know.

‘Dominic!’

Kiss Koffin.

He was ignoring me, trying to edge out of my way.

‘Dominic!’

‘What?’

‘You like Kiss!’

‘So fucking what?’

‘Do you like Creatures of the Night?’

‘Just fuck off, Hunter. For once, just fuck off.’

‘Have you got Alive 2?’

He attempted to walk away.

‘Love Gun?’

He turned and spat – yes, there on the vinyl tiles!

Why didn’t he want to talk about Kiss? I couldn’t find anyone in this godforsaken place who liked them!

Then I had a lucky break. There was a swarthy kid in my form who told me in passing that he had an older brother who went to another school in another town but who liked Kiss.

‘How much does he like them?’ I felt nervous.

‘He really likes them.’

‘How much is that?’

‘A lot.’

‘Has he got Creatures of the Night?’

‘How am I supposed to know?’

‘Has he got Alive 2?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

So I wrote him a letter.