Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Now online at Pitchfork, the essay I wrote for the first issue of the analogue-only Pitchfork Review about the analogue-era weekly music press of yore - "Worth Their Wait."

Loved the James McShane illustrations for the piece, which I suppose were meant to be me as teenage NME fiend, but in this case make Berkhamsted High Street look almost Parisian.



In the piece I refer to being such a NME-devotee that a caustic review of a bunch of NWOBHM records by Paul Du Noyer inspired me to compose an anti-heavy metal leaflet, which I distributed to bemused
passers-by on Berko High St.

Earlier this year I finally shipped the contents of  my 19-years-running storage unit in London to LA. Alongside boxes of records, cassettes, books, old music mags, and so forth, I found a trove of personal memorabilia - letters, scribblings, sketches, souvenirs, all sorts of shit I'd completely forgotten about. And in one folder I found the anti-HM tirade, which is scanned below.

Except it was different from how I'd remembered it. First, it's a work of co-authorship -- the handwritten bit isn't my handwriting, and the tone throughout is different, a composite of voices.  And it's not so much a straight diatribe as a spoof. Posing as an informative guide titled "The Bare Facts About Heavy Metal", the leaflet purports to clear up the misconceptions and negative stereotypes about this unjustly maligned subculture.



Just slightly too big to scan fully -- the cut-off last line, following the quote from Du Noyer's NME review, is:

 WHAT A WIMP!! WE KNOW HM IS SUPREME! HEAVY METAL CAN NEVER DIE.

Heavy metal gets the last laugh, though, as I now love even such lowly, irredeemably unsound examples of the genre as this: