Читать книгу Hell Bent for Leather: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Addict - Seb Hunter - Страница 20

Armageddon’s Ring still needed a drummer and a vocalist who could sing and whose voice had broken, and to get rid of Luke as soon as possible. My father’s response upon hearing our cassette had been to walk out of the room at the first drill of Luke’s solo broadside.

‘I spoke to Luke actually,’ said Paul, soon after that first rehearsal. ‘Just yesterday in fact.’

‘I don’t suppose he’s decided to leave the band?’

‘No, he was saying how excited he feels about our progress to date. He said he’s going to go and buy a Marshall amplifier next weekend so we can hear him a bit better.’

‘Oh, I see.’

I practised manically. I pledged to myself that I would play guitar for at least two hours every day, and stuck to this schedule religiously. The songs I was writing now were twice as complicated as before: they had quiet intros, sultry middle-eights, spastic codas, indeed anything and everything I could squeeze in. I even began to conceive an Armageddon’s Ring concept album based around a massive nuclear war, but I couldn’t think of any concepts to go with it except explosions. I played in my small bedroom, trying to headbang but unable to because it made me dizzy, while my family banged on the wall.

Then, one afternoon, my eye was caught by some brightly coloured, ‘electrocuted’ capital letters on the front of a magazine in WHSmith: Kerrang! It looked amazing, revolutionary, so I peered a little closer. The front page was claiming a world exclusive: my hero from Kiss, Ace Frehley, pictured for the first time ever without his make-up on. The picture was crap, though: Ace was wearing huge sunglasses and covering the bottom of his face with his hand; you couldn’t see anything except a few pockmarks. But I was still sufficiently excited to snatch up the magazine and buy it straight away. Sitting on my bed back home, I devoured every revelatory word. Here was my world on the page. I’d had no idea such a source existed. I read every article seven or eight times, picking up vital Metal information: links of different band personnel; all the different scenes; the coarse, sexist Metal vernacular; and, best of all, reviews of all the new Metal albums being released that fortnight. At £1.10 I considered this to be extraordinary value, especially since you also got a double-sided poster in the centre pages. Kerrang! empowered me instantly; it became my gospel, an instruction manual. I was no longer alone. It remained by my side for the next ten years. I worshipped it.

Paul phoned again.

‘I’ve got some even better news than before.’

‘Even better?’

‘I think I’ve found a singer with a microphone.’

‘Shit!’

‘I know. And a drummer.’

‘Shit! With real drums?’

‘A real drumkit plus cymbals and sticks.’

‘Shit!’

Another weekend session down in the Bavister conservatory beckoned, this time as a five piece. Cool as ice.