Still 666 words but this time the guys battle it out! What is Sleep Token? Who’s side are you on?
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t’s been a long looong year hasn’t it? When Covid shut everything down in March of 2020, did we really think we would still be here, lives restricted beyond recognition, 15 months later? I don’t know about you but I’ve found it really hard to be parted from my family, my friends, my work colleagues and my live music for so long. But here we are, restrictions are finally lifting and there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon and a hint of anticipation in the air. Will we ever get back what we have lost? Possibly not, but in the meantime we can, I think, begin to plan things again.
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The music festival has become a quintessential part of the Great British summer. They used to be counterculture enclaves, full of smelly hippies wishing to storm the barricades of the bourgeoisie elite, after of course they had finished spliffs. However, over the last fifteen years they have evolved into an essential component of our way of life (and our economy). Comparable to high profile sports or cultural event such as Wimbledon or the Chelsea Flower Show.
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Like many of you, I am approaching the most bizarre and unwanted anniversary. On Monday, March 15th it will be exactly one year since I last clapped eyes on an in the flesh live band. 365 days before that date I witnessed the majestic Employed to Serve (you can find my review here) at the Academy 3 in Manchester. They were tight, taut and utterly excellent. A youthful cocktail of confidence and rage filled righteousness. Then suddenly the world grounded to a halt. Tours shuddered to a standstill, the cancelled or postponed signs came on one by one and the wheels fell inexplicably off my world.
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Like any good student of American politics, I watched last week’s attack on the Capitol building unfurl with a mixture of shock and disbelief. This was not simply a protest, this was an attempted coup. The pictures from inside the under siege building were worth a thousand words, as what looked like a load of Sons of Anarchy extras (including a dude in a sweatshirt extoling the virtues of Auschwitz and another dressed like the guy from Jamiroquai) trashed the joint. If, like me, you have Metal running through your veins then there was a certain familiar face that made collective jaws drop.
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It’s been a long 6 months but here we are, emerging from lockdown and looking for a new normal. How can live music possibly survive under current social distancing rules? Many venues can’t, and have sadly remained closed or even folded under the financial pressure of not being able to trade.
One of my favourite venues, however, has recently reopened. Eleven (Stoke-On-Trent) ...
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When I'm not working for the NHS, I'm a gig photographer. As nice as it sounds (and as amazing an opportunity as it would be), I don't go to stadiums or arenas every week to shoot Metallica/Foo Fighters/Pink Floyd etc. I shoot up-and-coming Rock and Metal acts that gig across the North West of England for this very website (run by people not only very passionate about live Rock and Metal music …
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The last few weeks has made me think about what we actually mean by inclusion and equality. In our music genre we view ourselves as open, inclusive and non-judgemental. The whole mantra of everyone being welcome is central to all that is Metal and Hard Rock. So why then, are there so few BAME faces in our world? Why (at least in Europe and America) are we a predominantly white genre with BAME artists and fans being the exception …
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For my final 666 of Mental Health Awareness Week I’ve tried to pull together some of the strands that I have dealt with over the last five days. It is fantastic having a high profile Mental Health Awareness Week, but like a dog being for life and not just for Christmas, we should actually be aware of our and other’s mental health all the time and not just a few days in May. Mental health is still seen largely as someone else’s problem and that is because we subconsciously still stick the word illness after those two words. In the same way that we all have physical health (whether we are physically ill or not), we all have mental health as we all have a mind. Just like our physical health, our mental health will go up and down. There will be good days and bad days, but that does not necessarily mean that you are ill.
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It is a cliché but there is still a bizarre oxymoron that Metal is a corrosive and confrontational style of music, yet the people it attracts are amongst the kindest, most generous souls that you will find. It is like the music, channels our aggression and abrasion, leaving us inside with a good nature and caring mentality. This year Mental Health Awareness week is all about kindness and being kind. But what does that actually mean? As Forky would ask (go watch Disney +) “What is kindness?”. The formal definition is “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate”. In terms of mental health, the most important element here is consideration. You see, 40% of what happens to us we can control and 60% we can’t. But that 60% still has the same effect on us. All the actions and reactions happening around us affect us in how we feel. This includes the deeds of other people and what they say.
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Our response to physical health tends to be proactive. We eat well to ensure that we stay well. We undertake exercise because we know that this makes us healthy (and yes moshing does count, according to my Fitbit I “ran” over 10km whilst in a Slipknot pit). In fact, our current reality is a massive pro-active attempt to beat disease by taking measures to avoid contraction in the first place. Our approach to mental health tends to be a little different. We view it in a much more reactive manner. We seek help only once we actually feel “ill”. The services that are available are based around mitigating conditions and syndromes once they manifest themselves and are not designed to be preventative. There is even scepticism about whether you can actually “prevent” mental ill-heath (believe me you can) or whether it is just something that happens.
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There is a poetic poignancy that the first day of this year’s mental health awareness week fell on the third anniversary of Chris Cornell’s death. Around 1988 Kerrang started talking about interesting releases coming from an independent label out of Seattle called “Sub Pop”. They reviewed the first singles from Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana, describing a raw primordial sound that took Metal’s heaviness and combined it with punk’s guttural energy. I was intrigued, but as this was the days before Spotify (and I had limited disposable income) I became a Grunge fan because I liked the way that it was described as opposed to actually having heard any of it.
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You know what? When this is all over and I get to stand in front of a real-life, in the flesh live band I will cry like a friggin baby. I’m emotional just thinking about it. Gigging is my hobby and my passion. In fact, it is more than that, it is my crutch and my salvation. It is my rock (n’roll), the antidote to rough days. It is something that I look forward and hungrily countdown to. Life’s ups and downs and frequent disappointments are made easier by the thought of forthcoming shows. Work crap is made more bearable by the thought that I have got some obscure Norwegian Black Metal act that evening.
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I’ll let you into a secret, I just don’t get filmed concerts. In lockdown, I have tried the plentiful streams coming from some of my favourite artists (Insomnium, Enslaved, Swallow the Sun, Hevy Devy) and I also tried revisiting films of classic shows. Both have sadly left me cold. I adore Frank Turner’s “England Keep My Bones”, but heretically I left his full album performance on Thursday midway through coz I was bored. You can see me surging in the crowd in the footage from both AC/DC and Iron Maiden triumphant early nineties Donington headline sets, yet I barely get through the opening numbers with both shows before I decide I have something else tp do.
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If you read the comments on Facebook regarding the few festivals that are left, you will see that opinions divide neatly into two camps: those desperate for the events to go ahead and those weary of ever again being within two meters of another human being. This split is also evident in national research on how the general public view the potential return to some form of normality. On Radio Five this morning, they hypothesised that if Coronavirus stuck around for years to come, there could develop a real suspicion of social mixing that would intrinsically change the way that we operate as human beings. This has led me to mulling over how this will affect live music.
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Our universe is vast. It is full of melodic mountains made up of euphoric life-affirming anthems. Music that makes you feel invigorated. There are also dark recesses where the pain and anguish run as torrents of harrowing human misery. Music that speaks to the broken and down-trodden. Yet, both exist side by side. Both are Metal. Metal started as Sabbath. Sabbath was Metal, Metal was Sabbath. Simple. But then like any virus it started mutating. And that's the point. There is no blueprint or grand plan for this music. It is not built to some preordained structure, it creeps, it develops and it evolves. Which begs the question “What actually is Metal?”.
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Earth change their name to Black Sabbath, come up with that riff and metal is born. In this country, they appeal to kids bored by their elder brothers Beatles records. In the states, they appeal to kids bored of smoking spliffs to the Grateful Dead. Some stay awake long enough to form Aerosmith, Kiss and the Alice Cooper Band.
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