Heavy Metal Britannia

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.

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

# Heavy metal thunder

# 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.

INDISTINCT LYRIC

# Love in the rain