This programme contains some strong language
Heavy metal is all about literally the awesome power of electricity through guitar.
What's that?
That's what you're playing, metal.
Is it?
Weighty.
Something that's thick, dense, intense.
Something with gravitas.
Heavy is slowing it down, making it deeper, darker, moodier.
Glowering.
Machine-like, buzzing. Snarling power.
I understand what it means. Well, I think I understand what it means.
Huge great power chords, wiping you off your feet.
Dark connotations with violence.
Metal lives in a world of its own creation.
It's its own World of Warcraft.
(IN A DEEP VOICE) Heavy.
A little bit too much voice, and that maybe is the definition, it's too much.
It's more that industrial sound, more...
I don't know, heavy, I suppose. Heavy metal.
Once upon a time, there was no heavy metal music. Anywhere.
There was just the factory landscape of the Midlands and the industrialised North,
where the sounds and smells of metal manufacture hung heavily in the air.
I've always felt it's really cool that metal is synonymous with the Midlands.
I've heard people say it's in the water, things like that.
And it's this steel industry thing that used to be,
with drop forges and all that.
I can remember as a kid at RC Thomas School in Bloxwich,
we'd be doing English, and we'd be next to a metal foundry,
and the steam hammers would be banging up and down.
The whole desk would be shaking.
You could always hear the steam hammers.
There was always a steel mill
within audible distance.
Walking home, you'd get all the,
they can't do it now, but in those
days the air was full of all these bits of metal grit,
you could taste it and you could breathe it in.
It's so simple, really. If you were born in Mecca, for example,
it's most unlikely you are going to grow up to be a Catholic.
Everything you do is shaped by your environment.
I think by the time you get to eight years old, when your mind starts becoming very fertile, and your
imagination is shaped by the house you live in, the street you live in.
If you had to get up at seven in the morning and walk into British Steel on a frosty morning,
the other thing that it does, it gives you determination to get out of there.
Maybe it was a kind of escape.
You can't nip down to the beach with your acoustic guitar, can you?
You are stuck in your bedroom
with a fuzzy guitar.
It comes out of the North, in swathes.
You look at those pictures of people with
a cigarette in the corner of their mouth, a dark look in their eye.
It's inner city music, isn't it?
Some of us say from the Midlands, we actually breathed in the metal before
it came to be a real thing and a real experience.
And I'm sure that's true, that the connection, because of
what metal represents to a lot of people, it's this very tough, hard, working class
honest people from the Midlands, particularly,
a part of the psychology, if you will,
the roots of the metal experience.
This now vanished industrial world incubated what would eventually become heavy metal music.
But when were the signs of its coming first heard among the pounding jack hammers?
Let's board a bus in the 1960s.
No-one actually can come up with a definitive answer as to when metal really began.
The earliest record they might well be able to identify with is the 1964
single from the Kinks called You Really Got Me.
# Girl, you really got me going
# You got me so I don't know what I'm doing. #
Dave Davies played, da na na na na.
It's like, OK, you know, raucous guitar. It's here.
# Yeah, you really got me now
# You got me so I don't know what I'm doing. #
I got a razor blade,
and I slashed the cone of the speaker up.
It came out really raunchy and buzzing.
# You really got me. #
That might well be the moment that metal was born.
The bass behind all great rock music is cool riffs, really.
When it starts, that's where it starts.
You haven't got anything at all.
A riff makes everything else happen, I think.
It was a great era for people inventing themselves
and their own music, because suddenly there were less rules.
Songs about my area, my street, my culture, my mates, my football club,
my beliefs. And this is teenage power.
There were bands in Birmingham, bands in Manchester, bands in Newcastle.
There was a tremendous richness, and there was a lot to feed off.
Then you had a period where growing musicians outgrew pop bands.
You've just got to look at the greatest pop group that turned
so many musicians into rock musicians. The Yardbirds.
Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck.
I mean, this is just one band.
One band, but part of a movement.
The British blues boom, youthful, aggressive and irreverent.
We found our own way of singing it and our own way of playing it.
And because we were young when we learnt it, we took the aggressive side of it and pushed it, I think.
I mean, when my first band did Hoochie Coochie Man,
we played it loud and hard.
Blues, you can only play 12 bars for so long, you know.
Yeah, well, even now it's boring really, certainly English blues is.
I suppose it was a post beatnik thing as well,
that was more applicable to us, than people who were a little,
half a generation before us, expressing yourself.
That's was what was coming, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah.
We were waiting for that first little box on the floor with a button on it, to go wargh!
Jimi Hendrix arrived in Britain from Seattle, possibly on the way to Planet Metal.
Jimi Hendrix is one of ours. It doesn't matter who tries to
claim him as being Hendrix the guitar god, blah de blah de blah.
He belongs to rock and metal.
That's where he is, that's where he belongs, he is one of us, if you want.
Everybody looked up to Hendrix, and Hendrix might have pioneered the distortion and feedback and wa-wa.
And several things people probably took from Hendrix.
But he was sort of more blues, and he didn't get into that hard rock,
like repetitive riffs, that maybe Deep Purple and Sabbath started doing.
It was at that point that I realised
I'd like to do that, you know,
as opposed to work for British Steel, which I did at the time.
A band that I think perhaps
had quite a bit to do with what became hard rock
which became heavy metal, and I'd like to put forward Cream.
By the time they split up in 1968, Cream had transformed American blues
into British psychedelic rock with heavy riffs, pounding drums, screaming vocals and wailing guitar.
Almost every essential component of a future metal performance.
Cream came along.
People like Fleetwood Mac and a whole bunch of offshoots from blues players that were progressing.
And, that word is so important, because they progressed in many ways,
and they had each got their own individual styles.
# Look out, helter-skelter!
# She's coming down fast
# Yes, she is! #
Some individual styles became dark and disturbing, as the hippie dream
was shattered by drug deaths, Altamont, and the Manson murders.
Things were getting heavy.
The sinister theatricality of Arthur Brown
inspired future metal performers, as did his extreme vocal range.
He came to our school and did a show, and it was incredible.
He'd got this Wagnerian tenor range
with things bolted on at each end that Wagner never really thought of.
The light show and everything else.
Although we came from that time of the hippies,
we were not actually like the blissed out ones.
I had a lot of violent energy.
# Take it to burn. #
It was quite nightmarish in some aspects.
I had to leave one concert on the floor of a taxi covered by a carpet because the Hell's Angels
were going to get me for saying I was the god of hellfire.
"You think you're tough? Hey."
Beat writer William Burroughs had introduced the phrase "heavy metal"
to the sub culture in his sci-fi Nova trilogy, published in the early '60s.
# Get your motor runnin'
# Head out on the highway. # 'Heavy metal gimmick.'
# Lookin' for adventure. # 'Heavy metal gimmick.'
# In whatever comes our way
# Yeah, darling Gonna make it happen. #
It was first heard as a lyric in 1968, courtesy of the American
hard rock band Steppenwolf in their anthemic tribute to the motorbike.
# I like smoke and lightnin'
# Heavy metal thunder
# Racin' with the wind... #
Heaviness, of course, wasn't exclusively British.
Heaviest of all was Blue Cheer, then perhaps the loudest, grungiest band in the world.
# Sometimes I wonder what I'm just gonna do
# No, there ain't no cure for the summertime blues. #
Fuzzed out, really powerful guitars, they really didn't lay into a comfortable hippie area.
# Well if you want to use the car to go ridin' next Sunday... #
If you think about that era, 1967, psychedelia, flower power,
everything like that, and the Blue Cheer guys came out with something really heavy, it hit you so hard.
# Sometimes I wonder What I'm gonna do
# No, there ain't no cure For the summertime blues. #
There was heavy Stateside, yes.
But it was quite, it was a light heavy, if I can put it that way.
I mean, Vanilla Fudge, brilliant,
astonishing musicianship and inventiveness.
But it didn't hold the heaviness. It would float off.
# Set me free, why don't you, babe?
# Get out my life Why don't you, babe?
# You really don't want me
# You just keep me hanging on. #
I think Vanilla Fudge were hugely influential on rock music.
It was the first time we thought of hard rock perhaps as opposed to rock and roll.
In Britain, the Edgar Broughton Band chose not to fudge it.
This underground trio weren't heavy metal.
But they were heavy.
Up until then, you'd really either got to be a blues band or...
A pop band. Or a pop band or a beat band.
With the psychedelic progressive era happening, you could sort of do your
own thing, you didn't have to be exactly labelled quite the same.
Hi, kid.
Hello, sir.
# What you wanna do, boy? #
In some ways, we were almost like hell bent on not being progressive in some respects.
# Do you want to go to war, boy? #
Oh, yes, please, sir. Yes, please, sir.
But in terms of the metal, if you go to the first album, and songs like
Psychopath on the second album,
there was something sort of pre-industrial music about that.
Very riffy, very, very hard, basic three-piece stuff.
INDISTINCT LYRIC
# Love in the rain
# Love in the rain... #
There weren't many bands that could go on after us.
No, really. Because?
Well, because they didn't want to.
By the time we'd finished and our audience had finished with us...
Sometimes, people were a bit drained.
It might not have had the sort of sheet metal of metal,
but it definitely had the kind of balls of it, and the basic
stance, I suppose, dealing again with quite dark things.
Then Zeppelin popped up on the scene, and that was it.
MUSIC: Dazed And Confused by Led Zeppelin
They were the catalyst.
Because it's really guitar-based, really riffy, really heavy at times.
Without them having to resort to putting on leather jackets and things.
There was always a classiness about Zeppelin, where they'd come up with
these great riffs, and the four people would just nail that track.
# Run around, sweet baby.... #
It was just frenzied, tight. So tight.
Page's sound wasn't that big.
A scratchy sound, a lot of it, it wasn't really thick and huge.
But it was all punched out, you know.
And this drummer was featured.
And this frenetic vocal line on top.
# I've been dazed and confused so long it's not true. #
So that there was really the motivation, I think,
for the sound to develop.
It all comes in the basic form
from the exchange of American blues into blues rock, then into electric
psychedelic rock, progressive rock, and then the early strains of metal.
Those strains eventually came in 1969 from Earth,
a struggling blues rock-type band
comprising a bunch of blokes who lived around the corner to each other in Birmingham.
They were about to change their name and their music, and in doing so, let the beast out of the box.
You'd have never have thought this line-up would have got together.
I didn't even know... Geezer was a guitar player.
He'd never played bass in his life.
Ozzy was working in the slaughterhouse.
And thieving.
He did a few months in prison.
Everybody was middle class that made it in music, except for us.
We were ultra working class.
We were very rough and tough when we performed.
And Ozzy and Tony in particular, they didn't stand any bullshit.
And if they wanted people to get involved, they were very much encouraged to get involved.
And there were one or two fights with the audience.
Because we wanted everybody to be a part of this music.
Do you believe in ghosts?
The name came from the Boris Karloff movie, Black Sabbath.
Starring the incomparable Boris Karloff.
Terry had brought that to us.
And we all thought it was great because it sounded scary, you know.
Yeah, my brother went see it when he was about 16.
I was too young to go and see it, so he was always telling me about this film, Black Sabbath.
I always loved that name, Black Sabbath.
And it stuck with me. I always said, if I was in a band, that's what I would call the band, Black Sabbath.
Well, Geezer and myself used to go to the cinema a lot and go and see a lot of horror films.
We used to like that in them days.
Old Boris Karloff ones,
Christopher Lee and all that.
We used to like that, we used to go to the midnight viewing.
'An adventure into black magic that goes beyond the boundaries of the supernatural.'
Black Sabbath now began writing original material
that reflected their fascination with, and fear of, the dark side.
I am hungry.
I played this riff, and, oh, I really like this.
It gave you a sort of a vibe.
Oh, I really like what we're doing here.
So then it had to be lyrics that went with the image of that riff.
One night, I woke up and there was this black shape just staring at me at the bottom of the bed.
And I was frightened, it frightened the bloody life out of me.
I leapt out of bed and went and hid in the bathroom until I felt OK, then I came back to bed.
The next day I told Ozzy about it
and I think that inspired him, when he came out with the lyrics,
"What is this that stands before me, a big black shape,"
and all that kind of thing.
'This is Black Sabbath.'
# What is this that stands before me? #
When Oz sang, "What is this that stands before me?"
I was completely there.
# Figure in black which points at me. #
'I was completely there.'
And, if we'd have stopped and never written another song again,
that would have been enough.
# No, please, God, help me! #
We were very innocent, very innocent.
We weren't smart, we weren't contrived.
It just came out in a completely natural way at about 9.00am in the morning
at the Aston community centre, right in the centre of Aston, Birmingham.
Everybody was, in the world, was all on about all the good things that were happening.
It was all flower power, everything was all jolly.
And on the other side of it, nobody was talking about the things that had happened,
people getting blown up,
and just the other side.
We'd got the good and evil, and nobody was talking about the evil.
So it just seemed an ideal thing to talk about, really.
Peace and love was not necessarily our reality.
You know, we came from Aston, which is a pretty rough and tough area in Birmingham.
And there wasn't a whole lot of flowers being handed out in Aston.
There were a few boots, and a kick in the head every once in a while.
And a few razor cuts.
It was a tough town.
We didn't actually embrace the possibility of
going to San Francisco with flowers in our hair for very long.
It was a couple of months in '67, really.
And then, by the time the British winter started to bite, which is normally somewhere in October,
I personally binned my bells and beads,
the kaftan wasn't keeping me too warm.
We were just reflecting on what our reality really did feel like.
It felt like... HEAVY ROCK CHORD
it felt like that.
It felt like, you know.
We suddenly went from, are you going to watchchamacallit, sticking flowers in your hair,
to this really, "I hate you, I've had enough of this, that and the other."
That was just a great catalyst, because suddenly people were like, "That's exactly how I feel.
"I ain't got flowers in my bloody hair, I've got weeds around my feet.
"That's not my life, that's not what I'm going through.
"I've got this life, this existence that is really pissing me off.
"And now I've got some music that's talking about that."
MUSIC: Gypsy by Uriah Heep
Down south, the heavy organ and guitar driven sound of Uriah Heep
may have been a late '60s mix of progressive rock, blues rock and folk,
but it was also, at its own admittance, very heavy.
The very heavy side of what we did was like Gypsy,
which you can probably say is nowadays,
with the journalistic pigeonholes there are, heavy metal.
But you can never call Uriah Heep totally heavy metal, because there
were other things that we do, like we do a beautiful acoustic
off that album, an acoustic number called Come Away Melinda, which is vocals and acoustic.
So, we always as a band wanted to do that,
we wanted to exploit all of that so we could never fall under one banner.
But, a part of us are heavy metal.
And we actually did, we used to rehearse in a place called Hanwell Community Centre in Acton.
And in one room was Uriah Heep, and in the next room was Deep Purple,
so that was a hell of a racket going on in there.
An infant British heavy metal took to the road to spread the gospel
in the alternative rock way, on A roads, B roads
and early stretches of precious motorway.
We were probably classed as a row, to be honest.
A loud row.
Everywhere you went, it was sort of soul clubs,
and I was absolutely sick of going to places and listening to soul music.
Because we all liked Hendrix and Cream and that kind of band,
when we start we started writing, we obviously went with that kind of thing.
I remember playing in pubs and we've struck the first chord up
and been so loud that the barman's been catching the glasses.
They jumped out of the bar and paid us and said, "But don't play any more."
You did all the clubs, all the circuit, all the universities.
Then you started building up a great following.
That was the essence of it, really, getting the following and the live work.
In the early days of metal, it was about getting in the van, driving up to Inverness, doing a show,
and then getting back in the van, coming down to Birmingham, then driving down to Dover, you know.
And you took the message of the music around the country to show it off.
In person, in performance, in concert.
Touring now is almost an industrial process.
It was on a much more naive and more charming scale back then.
And I never got to sample it as a kid because I never saw any rock bands.
It was a bit like the Marquis de Sade who had all his sexual experiences
locked in a jail cell writing his fantasies on bits of bog paper.
I was the same with music.
So I had all my musical fantasies...
..locked in its boarding school equivalent.
I could look at the gatefold album sleeves and only dream.
MUSIC: Hush by Deep Purple
Formed in 1967 by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and keyboard player Jon Lord,
Deep Purple had made three albums by 1969 and toured with Cream.
But they were on the road to heavy metal, in search of an original sound.
# Hush, hush, I thought I heard her calling my name... #
People who put the money up that enabled Ritchie Blackmore
and myself to start Deep Purple, I think they wanted a pop band.
And then they got this kind of two-faced thing that they got with Purple at first,
because the band didn't know what it was. We had a hit single with a cover of Hush.
And yet we were doing these weird psychedelic prog rock
introductions to other people's songs.
With the arrival of bassist Roger Glover and vocalist Ian Gillan,
the Hairy Scream, the band released a fourth album in 1970.
Deep Purple In Rock became a heavy milestone.
Hendrix was an obvious influence on Ritchie.
Vanilla Fudge were an obvious influence on the band as a whole.
But what made us go where we went with Deep Purple In Rock, which was our calling card,
our statement, this was us saying,
"This is where we have arrived at and this is what we want to be."
That came from inside. That came from within the band.
That's where we were headed,
from the moment that Ritchie and I sat down at 14 Gunter Grove in December 1967
and discussed what we were doing, that's where we were headed, was Deep Purple In Rock.
Blackmore had this vision about where he wanted his guitar to go,
so I just went, "Well, if his guitar is going to go there then my organ has to go there.
"The Hammond has to toughen up."
# Oh, I wanna hear you sing... #
We had Gillan, who had discovered this ability, as he now says, it was an aberration, he just
discovered it one day, he could scream on a top A in full voice.
SCREAMING
There's no word for it in music.
There's a word for other kinds of singing, you're a tenor,
you're a baritone, you're a bass,
you're a contralto, you're a soprano.
But what I do is called screaming.
By the end of the '60s, there was plenty to scream about.
The Vietnam war was proof that the world was not a safe or happy place.
When Black Sabbath first toured the States in 1971, they
played to a nation with its own very real experiences of the dark side.
When we came over here, the Vietnam war was like,
it was in chaos over here.
You'd play a gig and there would literally be a line of
police with tear gas and truncheons, like, as soon as anybody came towards the stage they'd be pummelling them.
It was really violent over here.
The first gig we did in Washington,
they'd overturned a police car and set it on fire, and this was while we
were loading the gear up, there's like a riot going on all around us.
I think kids were so angry over here and this was the perfect music for the release of their anger.
There were hundreds and hundreds of vets coming in to the shows, and they were in wheelchairs,
and they would have like a flag on their wheelchair.
So they got Children Of The Grave, they got Iron Man, you know,
they didn't need to translate it or anything else.
They felt it. They heard it. They enjoyed it.
When we played War Pigs, God bless them, nearly to a man they all stood
up and they were being held up in their wheelchairs,
and when you see that you don't forget that.
And um...
I didn't know I was going to cry this morning.
While American rock flirted with the darkness,
British proto-metal bands faced the harsh realities
of a '60s dream turned '70s nightmare head on.
There's something endemic in the British psyche,
if you like, or the British way of looking at music or being a musician that seems to
be a quite a gritty, no-nonsense way of looking... Lennon, you know.
It's the charge of the light brigade, isn't it? It's that British thing.
It's that thing that every 20-year-old feels - you know everything and you're immortal.
When I was 21, I DID know everything and I was immortal.
I keep coming back to this word "dark".
Dark Satanic mills, you know, it's there in Blake's poetry.
I think it's part of the British character.
There's a cynicism, there's a darkness about us.
You can go to any village or town in, you know, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland,
and pluck out a history book of that area and it's seeped in it.
You know, so...
for me, being a lyricist,
writing that type of song, it's a fantastic place to be, actually!
Already the feeling of a lot of people was,
"Hang on a minute, we're making our own kind of new sound here."
Metal, heavy metal music, comes from the UK.
The first strains of British heavy metal,
under the leadership of Black Sabbath, were drenched in doom and gloom.
The fairies and wizards of progressive rock became demons and devils
in a contemporary world characterised by paranoia and dysfunction, loneliness and fear.
Sabbath were a conundrum because nobody sounded like Ozzy.
He was a great interpreter of...something,
some kind of strange, scary soul that came through the music,
and it was just the right kind of voice to complement the riffs.
And the riffs just seemed
to have their origin in the dark night of the soul of every adolescent.
That element of darkness,
that kind of sombre, melancholy, you know,
not exactly doom and gloom,
but talking about things that in popular music you never went there.
You know, the Beatles, "She loves you, yeah, yeah".
And metal bands were singing about the angst
and the pain and the difficult things in life.
That was quite an important statement.
Despite being ridiculed by the rock press,
the early rumblings of British heavy metal began to surface around the country.
They were heard in the Welsh Valleys courtesy of Budgie,
a band that adhered more to the blues-based power of Led Zeppelin and Free
than the paranoia of Black Sabbath.
British heavy metal was still in a molten state
as it edged its way through communities that were also on the brink of change.
A lot of places around the Valleys,
the South Wales Valleys,
every village would have ten clubs in it.
You had the Labour Club, the Conservative Club,
the Liberal Club, the non-political club,
the Miners' Welfare, the rugby club.
And they'd all have a shindig on a Saturday night.
# I ain't messin'
# Call your name
# Don't you ever
# Turn your back on a friend
# Slowly come, girl, to my bed
# Underrated
# Underfed... #
You're chopping licks. There are gaps.
Bam, gap. Ba-dum-dum, gap.
In-between that gap, there's this drum.
Bam ba-um-pum da, you know.
It fills the gap.
Pound it out with a big fat chord, and I'd just get a big kick.
We all did. That's what we liked doing.
# Slowly come, girl, to my bed
# Underrated
# Underfed... #
Never bought a Black Sabbath album or Uriah Heep or Deep Purple, never did. Not my type of music.
I wasn't interested.
Black Sabbath, who were signed at the same time as us,
they were doing their demos,
we had to wait till they finished theirs so we could do ours.
What did they come out with? Paranoid.
Think of Communication Breakdown.
It's the same thing. They did it slightly differently,
put their chop chording in a different place.
But they'd wised up.
MUSIC: Paranoid by Black Sabbath
# Finished with my woman cos she couldn't help me with my mind
# People think I'm insane
# Because I am frowning all the time... #
Throughout the early '70s, as hard rock became heavy rock,
the essential component that would drive heavy metal began to assert itself -
the primary power source that was the guitar riff.
# All day long I think of things But nothing seems to satisfy
# Think I'll lose my mind if I don't find something to pacify... #
HE PLAYS "PARANOID" RIFF
Tony Iommi's riffs were always heavy.
They were big and they were never up the fretboard,
they were always down there.
The essential thing for a metal song
is the guitar riff has to be killer.
Symptom Of The Universe.
HE PLAYS RIFF
HE LAUGHS
What came first, the riff or the chicken? I don't know.
Or the singer or the egg? I don't know.
But it's interesting that with blues...
there were always some kind of riffs that were very simple,
and this is how it started.
PLAYS RIFF
That one.
Brook Benton had a hit record
with a song called Kiddio, which had a riff which went...
HE HUMS RIFF # Told you, baby, how I feel... #
And it's that "duh-doodle-de-dum".
And you hear that on a lot of riffs, and then suddenly,
some years later, you hear the, "duh-doodle-de-dum, tsh"
You hear, "ba-ding-guh-ding-ding chukka-tsh, chukka-tsh".
Same notes, just a different slant on the whole thing, and it's blues-based.
Smoke On The Water is one, isn't it?
PLAYS POWER CHORDS
The riff of Black Night was actually nicked from a little bass riff
under Ricky Nelson's version of Summertime.
That just... You know, that just went like that...
PLAYS "BLACK NIGHT" ON PIANO
MUSIC: Black Night by Deep Purple
We just put that turnaround in it.
So riffs had always been part of it,
but then they got louder and then they became a part of the song.
# Black night, black night
# I don't need black night
# I can't see dark light
# Maybe I'll find on the way down the line
# That I'm free
# Free to be me
# Black night is a long way from home... #
And I think each band tries to "out-heavy" the next.
You need a heavy-o-meter! Maybe, yeah!
Heavy-osity.
By the mid-70s, proto-metal had developed a pact with its growing audience
to provide ear-splitting, bone-crunching walls of sound.
The music was becoming louder as well as prouder.
We were playing something that was responsive, you would have to respond to it.
We very much wanted to say,
"Hey, we're playing here. Listen to us."
MUSIC: Hand Of Doom by Black Sabbath
# From life you escape
# Reality will wait ... #
So that's one of the core reasons why we got louder,
got much, much louder.
We got very loud.
We used volume to enhance certain parts.
You'd play a quiet part
and then the volume coming in to a loud bit would be more power.
We tried to use it in not just because it's loud,
we tried to use it as a part of the song.
Those people that don't understand metal, firstly it's, "It's too loud, it does my head in."
For us, that's the joy of it, that's the luxury of it.
Give us more volume, turn everything past ten.
You've got to crank it up.
You need steam coming out of it.
You need your foot to the floor, pedal to the metal.
You need it at maximum revs.
You'll never get off the ground otherwise.
When Blackmore was grinding it out on the other side of the stage,
there was tremendous excitement, you know, I wanted to hear that Hammond growling away madly.
I rapidly became quite pleased that we were on the stage and not in the audience.
Lucky for us,
we've got these ears here to protect us
because we've got the flaps here and the music is behind us.
But these, they're right in the front of it, you know!
# Well nobody gonna take my wife I'm gonna keep her everywhere
# Nobody gonna take my wife I'm gonna keep her to the end. #
You'd see suddenly wall-to-wall Marshall stacks that had you
cowering in the corner before they even turned on the standby switch.
In fact, often the cry came up from the crowds, "Turn it up!"
MUSIC: Mars, The Bringer Of War from The Planets by Holst
The dark heavy metal sound and its powerful dynamic range owed
a debt to the shock and awe of symphonic music.
I definitely think classical music plays its part in heavy metal.
Why are orchestras so big? Why do they have such huge
brass sections and string sections in symphony orchestras?
You could quite easily play the same music with a couple of each.
The reason they have 80 or 90 or a hundred if they can, with these huge, massive percussion sections and
eight double basses,
it's amazing.
It's natural to want to create power.
# Breaking the law! Breaking the law! #
Some bands, inspired by the heaviness of Sabbath, Deep Purple and Uriah Heap,
pushed the music further away from its blues roots and into a faster form of metal-sounding rock.
Birmingham based Judas Priest began forging a new kind of high tensile British Steel,
less gloomy but pumped up with the volume of not one but two guitars.
While one of the guitarists plays lead break
the other can play rhythm.
Or you've got the great big stereo chord sound, which is again very metal.
# I got no place, no name I'm just a killing machine. #
A lot of our music is about, "get out there and do it with your life,"
it's actually a very positive outlook, lyrically, on everything, you know and "survive".
# Got expensive tastes But I hasten to add
# That I'm the best that there is.
# They pay me the money And I'll do the job
# I got a contract on you. #
There's a need for something new.
There's a need for a new sound.
There's a need to see a new band, to hear a new way of playing guitar, a new way of singing.
Rob Halford's six-octave vocal range confirmed that the scream was now
a front-line weapon in the metal armoury.
Men in heat would sound like girls in pain.
The high and hairy legacy of Robert Plant and Ian Gillan was here to stay.
The Americans absolutely loved Robert Plant.
He was the big, you know,
blonde hair and everything else,
and that slightly ambivalent sexuality.
# Way down inside! #
The Americans thought, "Great, you've just got to be tall and skinny and sing real high."
That was the definition of a heavy metal singer.
How does Ozzy do it?
How does Lemmy do it?
How do I do it? How does Bruce do it?
Bruce is a bit younger than me.
But I mean, it's mad, isn't it, when you think about it?
I get up in the morning and have a cup of tea and some cornflakes,
and that night I'm going to be on stage screaming my tits off.
# Honey didn't I give you nearly everything I ever had to give... #
The style of that singing, the root of that singing, you listen to some
of the early blues singers and people like Janis Joplin...
# When you hold me in your arms, and I say it once again... #
When she's going absolutely crazy...
# Oh, oh, oh gonna take it. #
You know, what it's like she's mad, she's possessed, but that was
unusual for a girl to put on that kind of very, almost masculine, display.
# Arghhh-oh-oh
# Well, you know you got it, if it makes you feel good. #
And that's what part of metal is about for a lot of singers, it's the intensity of the performance.
# I'm in love So in love
# And I can't stop talking # 'Bout my love forever. #
It's like, when I've done a show and I go back to hotel room and I'm
lying in bed, I'm like, "Was that me? Did I just do that?"
# My fever... #
You've got to be able to balance it out. I'm not on stage 24 hours a day.
I need to be able to go down to Morrisons and do my shopping.
# Yes, I'm talking 'bout... #
The beast was developing a uniquely tribal, highly physical relationship
with its dedicated audience - a union that was blessed most spectacularly in concert, live.
You feel uplifted, you feel excited,
you feel like aggression is pouring out of you.
You feel like you absolutely want to go, "Yeah!"
And you know you're witnessing something very special, and everybody else around you feels the same way.
If you don't do something
that involves the audience, then
you know, it's not good.
You have to use that
power in a great way to make people feel good and have a good time.
A good time was being had by all.
Well, not all, exactly.
Audiences tended to be dominated by boys and men, absorbed in displays of private
dancing, tribal head-banging, and air-guitar playing to a music that didn't seem to appeal much to women.
You're in some hall somewhere, some smelly club, with a bunch of
hairy biker types and a lot of dandruff flying around.
I don't know, it's just not so cute, you know.
There weren't that many women involved.
Metal is, it's fair to say, primarily, it's primarily male.
It is. Again, in the early days, it made sense, because it was a very brutal, intense type of experience.
Somehow, metal became a male domain and male province,
because of the lifestyle, the denim and leather,
the patches and so forth, the collectability -
it all spoke to the male psyche, rather than the female one.
Because it's primarily male, people assume it's therefore sexist,
and actually it's not, it's very inclusive.
When you do get included in it,
um...it's great.
It's just that girlies do Hannah Montana more, which is a shame.
Because I wish they would do a bit more metal.
Audiences also dressed exactly like their favourite bands.
Long hair, denim and leather, patches and insignia, seemed to be
the obligatory proto-metal dress code of those offstage and on.
You know, the bell-bottoms, the long hair, the whole thing, it was the total package, wasn't it?
Down on your knees, giving it some.
Happy days!
The Americans really had scarves and things wrapped around.
They did, Aerosmith and Van Halen, it was all a bit, you know, a bit west coasty, Beach Boy thing.
But we were more studs and metal, and swords, and medieval.
I think it's the history thing.
Among the British bands, it was Judas Priest who would take the heavy metal look further, firstly
with brightly-coloured spandex, and then on to what became the classic,
faintly homoerotic, metal uniform of tight black leather and studs - the biker look, including the bike.
The big thing was, it became international.
It went out of the borders of the UK and Europe, and started
to go all over the place, particularly in the States.
Come on, let's have a party!
British heavy metal proved to be a hugely successful export, particularly in the States.
Its toughness, directness, monster sound, and sheer sense of scale,
seemed to strike a power chord with blue-collar America, from Pittsburgh to Detroit, New York to LA.
While bands like Sabbath and Uriah Heap were still unsung prophets in
their own land, the vast touring network of the States rewarded them with adulation, money and success.
We had the Learjets, and we had the whole
floor of the hotel, bodyguards outside...
It was all silly stuff, but it was just fantastic.
They just took it on board and they couldn't get enough of it. Yeah.
That's when we really did
come into a load of "different"
people, let's put it that way.
They came out of the woodwork, some real strange people, witches and all sorts of things.
We attracted so many strange people.
We used to have wizards turning up at the dressing room, and outside
and we would bring them in and have a laugh with them, you know.
It got really, really silly, you know, wizards turning up everywhere!
# You've got to be our baby
# You've got to be our baby, to go to heaven. #
If some Americans worshipped at the altar of British heaviness, others adopted the role of
Witchfinder Generals, self-appointed saviours fighting
to protect the vulnerable souls of America's impressionable youth.
# ..to go to heaven. #
You'd switch the local news on and you'd hear,
"Black Sabbath are in town, and they're all Satanists.
"If you're going to the concert, don't look them in the eyes
"or forever you'll be possessed."
Hail Satan. Hail Satan.
A lot of the people that believed in Jesus Christ were really, really
convinced that we were a Satanic band, an evil band, and deserved to die.
And I believe they actually tried that a couple of times.
We were due to play in America at this town,
and the church banned us from playing.
For some reason the church got burnt down, and guess who got the blame?
So they really did think that we were a band that had a manager called Lucifer.
Actually, we did have a manager called Lucifer, but that's a different story.
Satan went mainstream in 1973 with the American movie, The Exorcist.
But America's fundamentalist fear of unwittingly importing British
paganism through music wasn't totally unfounded.
Strange goings-on were often the order of the day in Camp Heavy.
We used to do all sorts. We used to drag people off in the night
and go and sit in the middle of the Rollright Stones or some site, and get into all of that stuff.
That, that was in... I mean so many things were in our music.
There was a lot of stuff going on. There was with you, you were into a bit of dark,
dark stuff. Me? Was I?
Briefly, a brief flirtation with the old darker side.
But, I suppose it was something everybody was getting into.
It was taboo to talk about things like Aleister Crowley..
Spiritual things and occult things...
No, no, we're not all devil worshippers.
I think most bands will deny that they're,
that they're in league with Satan.
I got this flat on my own, and I painted it all black and had all
these crosses upside down everywhere, and pictures of Satan and everything.
The aim is always at Christ, you know, Christianity.
That's where it's always at.
Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and all the rest of them,
the names are all fiddling around and want to sound menacing.
The lords of the watch towers of the South...
I'm a Christian, so I don't mess with anything like that.
Cos I read in the Bible it's a bad thing to mess around with anything.
In my particular case,
I stopped doing certain things
very early on in our career, because things got
out of control, that's the best way I can put it.
I'll leave that as something that was private to me.
Because there is macabre inside us, inside everyone.
Lust is such a large source of energy that can drain us,
in good ways and bad ways.
There was a lot of weird things happened within Sabbath
that we couldn't explain.
It might have been the drugs, but...
I don't think so.
As the night wears on, the witches, by tradition, become more frenzied in their enjoyment of this religion.
In their eagerness to prove their magical powers, they show their ability to ignore pain.
This is just beyond... these people...
those kids that are doing it, they don't believe they are doing anything particularly wrong,
they don't believe there's a devil, they don't believe there's a God,
they just think it's a lark.
There's a few Satan references in some of our songs and lyrics.
I don't know why, it just seems
right to be singing about that kind of subject matter over this kind of music.
"Love grows Where My Rosemary Goes..."
It just doesn't fit.
It's heavy so if it's what you call "heavy metal",
then you've got to put a pretty heavy lyric to it.
I suppose, writing about the darker forces and the darker sides or whatever fits the music.
You would hardly write about a love song to that kind of heaviness.
Somehow, "Satan is the...",
is more appropriate, somehow,
over this titanic riffage.
# Oh Lord, oh Lord now help me
# This entrance falling down
# The madness of our father's law
# The pain of retribution
# The house brought down to ground
# Sins of my ancestors
# The judgment day's at hand. #
They want to look demonic, though, they want to look like demons now.
Shaved head, covered in
tattoos, you know,
little beardy, goatee beardy things.
Some people say, "you set yourselves up,
"if you're a Marilyn Manson you set yourselves up for trouble.
"If you're Ozzy, biting the head of a bat, you set yourselves up." You don't.
We're entertainers. That might sound a very flimsy way to describe us.
We're entertaining you, we're giving you a great night out.
You know. Come and see the band with your mates, have
a great night out, and that's basically what it's about, surely.
It did used to cross my mind that the devil could
be included in some way, or could have his hands on it in some way.
But, in the lust for glory of it all, you take no notice anyway and you just keep going. Say nothing.
1975.
In a desolate location near London's North Circular,
DJ Neal Kay established the first real home for hard rock, heavy rock,
and heavy metal enthusiasts - The Soundhouse, bivouacked at the local pub called the Bandwagon.
There was nowhere like this anywhere in this country at the time.
Because it was a street-driven thing, there was no national link.
There was no, you know.
They were at everywhere, but they needed somewhere
to believe in, somewhere to go, a place to call their own.
It took five years, really, of very, very hard work
and a lot of persistence to change the whole situation around.
These days, as you're well aware, we run five nights a week, hard rock,
and soul's gone straight out the door, that way, sideways.
Neal Kay and the Soundhouse punters took the initiative and began building a scene of their own,
one that would unite the heavy metal fraternity.
We had regulars fly over from Northern Ireland.
We had people come in from Jersey.
And then, in the latter years of the Wagon, we started getting them from Europe.
And when they arrived, they found was this huge great sound system,
that absolutely crushed anything that stood in its path.
So people that came to the club could hear rock as if it were a concert.
It seemed as if the gods of rock and roll, natch, were parting the Red Sea to let us through.
The Soundhouse quickly became the Mecca for head-banging and air guitar,
and then the birthplace of a new form of spectator sport, courtesy of club regular, Rob Loonhouse.
Rob walked in the door one day somewhere about 1976, I guess.
And under his arm he had this
hardboard flying V.
Has it got frets on it?
No, I don't bother with frets, you know.
I think it's taking the piss a bit, really,
when you put frets on it.
You're making it look too much like a real guitar.
Everyone said, "Rob, what are you going to do with that, there's no strings on it?"
"Well, I don't need strings".
Later that night, Loonhouse birthed a new sub-species of the beast.
Suddenly, Rob appears in front of everyone, and he starts playing it
along with the solo, and he's absolutely perfect.
When you go to a classical concert,
you get the music on music paper to follow it through.
You're not a lunatic for doing this, you're
passionately wrapped up and involved in the intensity of the performance.
You wish to follow the moves the musicians are making.
The people coming to the Soundhouse were the same kind of people with the same ethics.
They wanted to be inside the music, they wanted to be as close to it as they possibly could get.
The lifeblood of the metal scene coagulated and scabbed
into something that could now be identified.
But the musicians who made the music were often uneasy with their new "heavy metal" tag.
I've never liked the phrase.
I've never applied it to Deep Purple.
Ah, you see, the big debate of who's metal,
who's rock, who's hard rock, and who's heavy metal.
I liked "hard rock", because
it said exactly what,
what it was. It was rock-and-roll, but it was played with aggression.
And then some people started calling it "heavy rock",
and I'm not sure where the words "heavy" came from.
Possibly after Black Sabbath.
This came up many years ago with me,
because I always classed ourselves as heavy rock.
It kind of changed over when, um,
Motorhead and people come out like that. It was full on. You know.
Then they were actually "heavy metal". You know.
# I...
# I just took a ride
# In a silver machine
# And I'm still feeling mean. #
In 1975, the man known simply as Lemmy stepped off
Hawkwind's Silver Machine to form the band that was Motorhead.
Out went space rock, in came the punter driven, user-friendly garage approach.
Out went acid, in came speed.
But, was it heavy metal thunder, or just rock-and-roll?
He wasn't saying. He still doesn't.
Don't analyse it, I told you, man, before we started.
I'm not analysing it, I'm just asking!
You're trying to understand.
Why?
Just enjoy it at face value, that's what I do.
It's fairly simple, and it's very loud, and it's very fast.
And it's great driving music if you like driving into the side of bridges.
It's great music for hurling yourself off trees by.
# We're moving like a parallelogram
# Don't move I'll shut the door and kill the lights
# If I can't be wrong, I must be right, I should be tired,
# And all I am is wired
# Ain't felt this good for an hour
# Motorhead, remember me now, Motorhead all night
# Yeah, yeah, yeah, Motorhead! #
It gets a lot of emotion out of you that would otherwise be channelled into bad things, maybe.
I do it cos I like it.
I don't know why, I just like it.
I like it. Is that so wrong?
People who work in a factory, right, or some awful fucking mind-numbing job like that...
Because I've worked in a factory, I know what it's like, it's fucking awful.
Most people have to do that kind of job, that they hate, every day of their lives.
Can you imagine what that must be like?
You have to submerge your intellect completely and just...
You know, all that.
At the weekend, they want to hear something that tears their heart out
and gives it them back better, you know?
This one's for the people that are into modern fashion.
By 1976, it didn't matter what you called it.
Punk was trampling everything under foot on its DIY three-chord advance.
Everything, that is, except metal, which seemed to have a built-in resistance.
Its champions didn't even get their hair cut.
I don't think punk musicians or fans really thought much about
metal, because it didn't have that definition.
If you said to a punk fan in 1977, "Do you like Budgie?", they would probably go, "Who?"
If you said, "Do you like Caravan?", "Rubbish, hate them, nonsense, dire."
I don't know if it damaged the line at all.
I think it just kind of gave it a bit more of a kick, you know, and made it
a bit faster and a bit more powerful.
Maybe brought it back down to the street a bit,
so that the kids could get back up on stage, you know?
You can think, if these guys can put this energy out without being able
to play very well,
we can put a lot more energy out because we can play better.
I used to think, I'm going to have to practise for 15 years to be as good as Ritchie Blackmore, at least.
When punk rock came along, I thought,
I can play like that, so maybe I should simplify my ideas a little bit.
Ahhhhh, we're gonna start now.
This aggression that the punk music had,
we quite liked, you know?
We liked it.
I think it really affected us. I don't think we copied it in any way but I think it went into our psyche.
Motorhead and The Damned toured together, quite a lot, so there was
that crossover at some point between punk and metal, an energy exchange, and both happily co-existed.
We sounded like punks so they liked us already, and then they saw we had long hair and it was too late.
They had already committed themselves.
I always wanted to be obnoxious because all the bands I liked were obnoxious, you know?
MC5.
We came out at the same time as the punks and I thought they were splendid.
And The Damned were great fun, you know?
Not all hard and heavy rockers survived the punk moment.
Deep Purple, by now an international success story, gracefully retired on the battlefield.
I think Deep Purple was becoming irrelevant,
not just musically...
..but to the people in the band.
Rock made its big mistake by becoming fat
and loathsome and bloated and pompous.
So, less contact with the streets.
# Sweet child in time
# You'll see the line. #
What had been our baby, our, er,
shining creation, had become tarnished and a little,
it had become overblown.
It was playing its own cliches, rather than inventing new cliches.
Black Sabbath were spending more time in America,
cut off from their dark British roots, suffering from
a creative stasis of their own, aided by old-fashioned drug and booze abuse.
I was the one going to the record company, giving all the lines, you know?
I'd go there and they'd say, "How's the album coming?"
"Oh, great." "How's the songwriting?"
"Yeah. It's really coming on."
"When are we going to be able to hear some stuff?"
"Soon." We hadn't got anything.
We were totally knackered, some gigs,
so you take a bit of the old coke to get you through the gig.
And eventually, you start relying on it.
We started getting heavily into drugs...
..and doing silly things on...
..out of our brains.
First of all, it was very creative, we found.
We could stay up and we were coming up with ideas and we would talk a lot more.
Certainly with coke, we'd be up all night, talking away.
It was fantastic, we had some great discussions.
We'd never remember them the next day, but we had some great discussions.
It did help a lot, to open each other up and to talk.
When we did Vol 4, and we'd done so much... We'd done more coke...
The cocaine bill was more than the recording bill.
And the recording bill was 80,000.
But later on, it got, with that and the drink,
it sort of took an ugly turn, really.
And the first casualty, of course, was Ozzy, you know, and Bill.
I came off tour, not because I didn't like Tony or I didn't like Geezer or something like that.
It's because I placed more priority on drinking than I did the band.
And that might be a shameful thing to say, but it's the truth. That's the truth.
And we were coming up with ideas and we'd walk in the lounge
and Ozzy would be asleep on the couch,
and you just couldn't...
We couldn't communicate any more.
Ozzy Osbourne was sacked from Black Sabbath by band-mate Bill Ward in 1979.
Ward left the band himself soon afterwards.
You know, anything to do with the original band, I can't...
It's like being...
It's like being outside of the phenomenon.
You know, I'm very much set in that Sabbath
is Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward.
So... I just couldn't do it, and I missed Ozzy so much.
Black Sabbath has no time.
It doesn't abide by any time.
And Ozzy knows how to sing to no time.
It's a tremendous skill.
It's really, really difficult,
and he's so far left or far right that he has those capabilities.
And singers that sing in time can't sing Black Sabbath...
..because Black Sabbath is not in time.
If the old guard now displayed signs of metal fatigue, or terminal rust,
a new generation of post-punk metal bands was ready to take up the crusade.
The press called them the "new wave of British heavy metal",
mercifully shortened to NWOBHM.
Bands like Diamond Head, Iron Maiden and Saxon had grown up in a different kind of world,
one of strikes, three-day working weeks and winters of discontent.
They emerged just as the country elected its own metal mistress, the Iron Lady herself.
They had to invent the Friday Rock Show thing, to play it,
because it couldn't be on mainstream radio.
I think in some respects
it backfired on them because it made us bigger, you know?
It did really make us, you know, rebels, really.
And it was all in this mishmash of no jobs, strikes.
I think it gave us a bit of will,
to get out of all that and succeed at something we loved doing.
Saxon were, if you like...
They were our granddaddies.
They'd been doing working men's clubs in Barnsley for years, and all round the North.
They came on, the well-oiled machine, and we were like,
"Wow, they have people who tune their guitars!"
First of two heavy metal bands on Top Of The Pops.
It's Saxon.
You know, we did Top Of The Pops
and Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran, they'd all be there with the red carpet.
We'd wander in from out of a taxi at the back.
We were treated more like the bad boys, it wasn't real music.
Because we wrote about things like motorbikes
and steam trains and jet planes
and fighter pilots being on drugs up in the sky,
I just think the music had to match.
# I leave the motor ticking over when she's back on the track... #
So, it had to be aggressive and fast for us.
# I got a 68-7 with pops on the side
# You know she's my new beauty And that's what I ride
# She's got whe-e-e-els, wheels of steel... #
You know, we're using the same format as the older bands.
Great guitar riff, melodic vocal, but we were just condensing it much faster, you know.
The difference between seeing Led Zeppelin at Knebworth,
200,000 people, you know...
You've got to think, when you're in your bedroom practising,
hoping to play a pub up the road,
how on earth are we ever going to get to Knebworth, you know?
What's that...? What have we got to write to achieve that?
# Am I evil?
# Yes, I am
# Am I evil?
# I am... #
It almost felt like we missed the boat, really.
And we kept scratching our heads thinking, "Why don't they sign Diamond Head?"
And we'd even get pieces written about us in Sounds, "Why has no-one signed this band?"
CROWD: Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!
Maiden!
Where Diamond Head failed, Iron Maiden succeeded.
With punk-like aggression, dressed in a full-metal jacket,
the power and the glory was theirs for the taking.
Vocalist Bruce Dickinson was already a devoted student of metallurgy,
a classicist, when he first saw Iron Maiden perform.
It was a force of nature.
I mean, I was just...
It was like, wow! This is not...
This is real. This is full-on. This is like being hit by a truck.
You know, every single song,
the musicianship was fantastic, guitar-playing was astounding.
MUSIC: Iron Maiden by Iron Maiden
# Won't you come into my room... #
And I've got to say, the only thing I looked at was the singer, and I thought, I should be there.
# Iron Maiden can't be fought
# Iron Maiden can't be sought
# Oh will, wherever Whenever you are... #
I thought, God!
It reminded me of an album, the first album I ever listened to from Deep Purple, Deep Purple In Rock,
which is a really heavy record, you know, really exciting, raw and fresh.
And I could hear so many little echoes of that kind of excitement.
It was like being plugged into the mains.
And I just thought, God, I could...
If I was singing with that band, wow!
Oh, well, never mind!
As if by black magic, Dickinson was asked to front Iron Maiden in 1981,
the year the band went stratospheric.
Finally, British heavy metal had a face, a name and a number.
It was branded 666.
The beast was back in business.
'Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast.'
The Number Of The Beast, the first album I was on,
was number one in God knows how many countries round the world.
It broke us in America. 'Its number is 666.'
We actually had quite a run of hit singles.
# Just what I saw
# In my own dreams
# Were they reflections of my warped mind staring back at me?
# Cos in my dreams
# It's always there
# The evil face that twists my mind
# And brings me to despair
# Ye-e-e-eah
# Ohhhh... #
It was really aggressive, in-your-face music
but it had great musicianship
and it had interesting words and stories and, you know...
So, it was a fantastical world that you could enter in.
Hey, thank you.
And the whole rest of the year went like that.
And we went round to America twice, we went to Japan, we went all round Europe.
It's a song called Run To The Hills.
'We toured our socks off.'
All those adolescent dreams, sat up in bed, you know,
drawing pictures on the back of my exercise books of big PAs
and drum kits on the backs of things,
saying, "Our back line should look like that.
"That would be really nasty-looking, yeah," you know,
had all happened.
My absolute wildest dreams had all happened in a year.
And, you know, I was a bit depressed, to be honest with you.
Because I thought, "What do I do now?"
Um... What do I do now?
I suppose the same again next year, but bigger.
Metal, under the supreme leadership of Iron Maiden, did just that.
It got bigger and bigger,
far beyond even the wildest dreams of its naive originators.
Even Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan
was belatedly inducted into the cult
when he joined Black Sabbath in 1983
for one album entitled Born Again.
I don't know how I got in Black Sabbath, because we ended up drunk under a table.
I went for a meeting with Tony and Geezer at The Bear in Woodstock.
And I don't remember any more, and I got a call from my manager, Phil Banfield, the next morning,
saying, "Ian, if you're going to make career decisions, then I think you should call me first."
"What are you talking about?"
"Apparently, last night you agreed to join Black Sabbath."
"Well, anything else in the diary?" "No, not at the moment," so...
I went on tour with them. The whole thing lasted a year, I think,
and it was the longest party I've ever been to. It was fantastic.
On its rampage from the '60s to the '80s,
the British heavy metal beast had consumed all manner of musics,
seeking a life and identity of its own.
Despite being targeted by the press on its unfashionable journey, it had emerged triumphant,
a glorious band of brothers with a huge fanbase that worshipped its codes, sounds and symbols.
It surrendered its Britishness, went global
and gave birth to 1,000 subspecies, constantly renewing itself.
Unrepentant, unforgiving, unstoppable.
Heavy.
A lot of people that don't understand metal.
They stick the boot in and say, "Oh, it's rubbish, it's crap,
"it's meaningless, it's Neanderthal, it's got no value."
I kind of like that. I really do.
We'll always be the underdog in rock and roll, to a certain extent.
The big thing about heavy metal is, you know what,
you lot over there who don't like us and don't want to like us, fine.
You go on slaughtering us, because we have tens,
hundreds of thousands, millions of fans
who want us, love our music, will always be there for us.
And weighing it up, do we want them, do we want you?
We know where we going to go, we're going to go that way.
It's not nostalgia like most music is.
It stays with them.
It just feels like it's something that hasn't sold out.
More of a religion, I suppose.
Like soccer, football.
It's like, you know, you grow up supporting your team and you never...
It becomes part of you, till you die.