Blue Metal Jazz

Today we're thinking about the blues, metal and jazz. Mainly jazz though.

Blue Metal Jazz

These days whenever anyone asks me for my favourite genre of music I give this reply: Blues, because it is grandfather to my second and third favourites genres of music, heavy metal and jazz. Indeed, there can hardly be a style of music (outside of classical and opera) that has not been influenced by blues in the last century. I once saw on TV a Danish neo-Nazi heavy metal group singing white supremacist lyrics over 12 bar blues. Sometimes incredulity can only give way to hysterical laughter.

As previously written about in an article on Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’, heavy metal was the first music scene I got into. If I’d been born a decade earlier, I’d have undoubtedly been a punk, but I was a teenager in the late 80s and it was heavy metal at this time that was in the ascendancy. In many ways, I’m glad. Punk is fine and sometimes, as with the first few Clash albums or that one vitriolic offering from the Sex Pistols, even brilliant. Punk though was very much of its time, visceral and immediate, it made no apologies and it acknowledged few debts to its roots. It also had, ultimately, a limited range.

The reasons that I grew to love metal are the same reasons that I have grown to love jazz. On the musical spectrum, both occupy an enormous range of styles. They also blur the boundaries between neighbouring genres. Are AC/DC a rock band or a heavy metal band? Is Nina Simone a blues singer or a jazz singer? The answer in each case is both.

With both metal and jazz there is a bewildering breadth of styles, from blues rock to hard rock to glam rock (thankfully a dying breed), speed metal to black metal to progressive and power metal . There’s modal jazz, cool jazz, free jazz, and jazz-fusion; bebop, hard bop and fast bop. They can even encroach upon each other’s style, as in The Bad Plus’s kick ass jazz version of Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. Or listen to any Iron Maiden album featuring Nico McBrain on drums, especially ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’, to hear a jazz trained drummer at the top of his game.  Most of the best metal drummers list jazz legends like Chick Webb and Buddy Rich as major influences, in the same way that Tony Iommi credits gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt  as being instrumental to his playing style (see ‘Planet Caravan’ on ‘Paranoid’).

Of course, as similar as they may be in some respects, the two styles of music are vastly different in a great many more. Consequentially, I tend to listen to each under very different circumstances. Metal is my getting stuff done music. When I sit down at my desk to write of a morning (ok, afternoon), I usually need something rhythmic and plodding to shift me into writing mode, the bass drum propelling me forward, banishing any lethargy from my soul.

Jazz though is for reading. To settle down to the sofa with a volume of Alice Walker, Asimov or Melville, one needs a good jazz album. Most of the musicians I love are favourites because of their lyrical ability, but it’s difficult to listen to them when reading, because instead of concentrating on the words on the page, I’m lip synching to the words in the air. Jazz though wraps itself around the words, compliments them, soundtracks and illuminates them. Rock music kick-starts my day, jazz draws it to a close.

I came to jazz the way most people have come to jazz over the last fifty years, via Miles Davis and ‘Kind of Blue’. If you’re used to more regular or mainstream forms of music then listening to jazz is like learning to speak a new language. ‘Kind of Blue’ serves as Rosetta Stone to this arcane tongue. It’s also a fine indicator of how far your comprehension has progressed. There was a time when I hated jazz and even thirty seconds of any jazz album was enough to make me feel physically sick. First listening to ‘Kind of Blue’ was like hearing Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first time. Or struggling through that first, tortuous reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’. It was jarring, strange and didn’t always make a whole lot of sense.

These days I speak jazz fluently and ‘Kind of Blue’ sounds to me as mainstream as anything else I listen to. To be honest, I prefer ‘Sketches of Spain’, but that’s solely because of Miles’s heavenly interpretation of Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto de Aranjuez’, one of my favourite pieces of classical music. That said, ‘Kind of Blue’ is in many ways the perfect jazz album, the musical equivalent of ‘Frankenstein’ or Rimbaud’s ‘Ma Boheme Fantaisie’ in the original. It’s musica universalis, the music of the spheres in which ancient philosophers and eighteenth century astronomers and composers believed. Miles Davis is to jazz what J. S. Bach is to the classical tradition.

As mentioned earlier, Nina Simone blurs the lines between blues and jazz, as well as pop and rock, from covers of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles and half a dozen Dylan tracks, to her own compositions, like ‘Mississippi Goddam’, written in response to myriad racist murders committed in the 1960s (she called it a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written), to the instrumentals that showed off her sheer virtuosity on the piano. The latter, in particular, are showcased on her 1958 debut album, ‘Little Girl Blue’. To hear songs like ‘Central Park Blues’, ‘Good Bait’, the opening to ‘Mood Indigo’ is to experience serenity. These are complimented by the fragile tenderness of her voice in ‘He Needs Me’, ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and the title track, ‘Little Girl Blue’.

‘Little Girl Blue’ also contains perhaps Nine Simone’s most famous track, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, made famous when used in an advert in the 1980s, selling a product the name of which I care neither to name or even indeed recall.

Nina got screwed out of the royalties for her first few albums and was understandably belligerent in refusing to play any of their tracks live, making sure audiences comprehended her exact reasons. The albums still exist however and the world is a better place for their existence. She could be tough, demanding, insisting people refer to her as Dr Simone after she was awarded an honorary doctorate, but I guess she had to be. There isn’t an African-American musician in the last century who hasn’t experienced the kind of abuse that should fill any rational human being with revulsion. Slaves made America, north and south, what it is today and virtually every musical style to come out of the States in the last hundred years, good, bad and indifferent, is infused with the blues. A lot of the time I think the kinds of racism that is pointed towards the African American population is born out of jealousy and pure resentment.

I once knew a couple, she of Afro-Caribbean, he of eastern European Jewish decent. In Britain, few people looked at them twice, yet I was told that in the States, even in Manhattan, people on the street would regularly drop out of reality in seeing them together. My response upon hearing this was, what, has no one in New York ever heard of George Gershwin? The music of Gershwin embodies the artistic evolution that results in cultural cross fertilisation. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is often mislabelled a classical track, but it is as much jazz music as anything. For many, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is the theme song of New York, the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, one of the cultural crucibles of the world, an area of outstanding ethnic mixing. But then Gershwin’s all-black opera, ‘Porgy and Bess’, a work forged in the Manhattan melting pot by the son of east European Jewish immigrants was a flop at the time of its original production in the 30s, derided and sneered at by the usual subjects. It’s heartening to know that ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess’, with lyrics by DuBose Heyward, became, briefly, for a time, the most recorded song in history a couple of years ago, with everyone from Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong recording versions of the song. Nina Simone recorded her own version. Miles Davis too.

Jazz blurs not only into blues, but into classical music. Aside from Gershwin, some of the greatest American composers of the 20^th century came out of jazz. One has only to think of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the two greatest composers, pianists and band leaders to come out of the era of swing and big band. “One more time.” Many of the most recorded jazz standards in recording history are Duke Ellington compositions, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘ In A Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Mood Indigo’. “One more, once.” The high pitched horns of the Count Basie Orchestra almost define the sound of the 1940s. It somehow doesn’t sound right hearing them without the occasional doodlebug exploding outside.

Nina Simone I would characterise as my favourite female singer. Yet for all time jazz composer and performer, I can only pick one man and that is Charles Mingus. Much as I love ‘Little Girl Blue’ ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Sketches of Spain’, I adore ‘Mingus Ah Um’ above all others. If the ‘Count Basie Orchestra’ are the sound of the 40s, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ defines the 1950s, even if it wasn’t recorded until the decade’s final year (I can be forgiven, as I wasn’t born at the time). Released in the same year as ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s peerless ‘Time Out’, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ somehow encapsulates that time more than its contemporaries. ‘Kind of Blue’ is timeless and ‘Time Out’ mixed up with so many styles of world music as to almost escape the gravitational pull of jazz altogether.

‘Mingus Ah Um’, with its defining track, ‘Fables of Faubus’, written in mockery of Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas who deployed the National Guard in order to prevent two African-American students from attending high school in Little Rock, stands out as an album of its time. It’s an album of outstanding tracks, ‘Better Git it in Your Soul’, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, ‘Jelly Roll’ and ‘Self-Portrait in Three Colours’.

Like Ellington, Basie and Gershwin, Mingus is a genius composer. His meisterwerk, ‘Epitaph’, is so complicated that it was only successfully performed for the first time more than a decade after his death. Any fan of Radiohead will know Mingus’s work, if only by proxy, with both ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘We suck Young Blood’ both heavily influenced by the Mingus track, ‘Freedom’ (from the album, ‘Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus’, a title that inspired at least one ‘Jazz Club’ sketch on 90s programme, ‘The Fast Show’).

Indeed, it’s indicative of how far my comprehension of jazz music has come that there are so many jazz artists that I listen to these days that I have not yet even mentioned, including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Cassandra Wilson and The Bad Plus.

I still listen to heavy metal, but much of it being the music of my youth and, strangely for a genre firmly rooted in the mid-twentieth century, the list of jazz artists I listen to is marginally more contemporary than that of the metal. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what’s contemporary is what’s new to you in that instant. I read 102 books last year and only one of them was published within the year (Philip Hoare’s, ‘The Sea Inside’), so who needs contemporary? The past is another country. They may do things differently there, but it also means there’s a lot to discover for yourself, as if it had never been discovered before.

Get it done.

Playback

Since the Fall/Rupture/Event, Dave Keenan has been plummeting backwards through key moments in his life. It's not an uncommon phenomenon, given all the people that were living in the past when the rift opened.

For Dave, though, it's different. For Dave always loved music and always wanted to be a musician, but he lacked the dexterity or discipline required to learn an instrument. So instead he would listen alone and air guitar and picture himself performing for all the people who never took him seriously. How naive of him to think musicians would be held in any higher esteem than the rest of society.

Since the Rupture, though, this is exactly what Dave has done. Now a virtuoso guitarist, he jerks backwards through time, playing gigs to the people in his past, accompanied by a fleet of the finest musicians. The following are transcripts of his liner notes, including personnel and set lists.

Note on text: 'played spontaneously' indicates where a member of the audience stood up and played an instrument that appeared in their hands. The majority of those involved reported the experience as being a positive one and many went on to take up an instrument for real.

 ***

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Vocals, Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

Where I came in. Can't say when. Sam was there. Murray & Sarah too. Can only have been days before. Making peace.

Ever have that dream where you're caught jerking off in public? I felt like that, standing there, holding something in my hand, everyone looking at me. Instead of my dick, though, it was a guitar I was holding. Nylon strings. Rico asked if I was ok. He started to pound out the rhythm again and I somehow knew what to do. From there, we did a great gig and none of it seemed odd for an instant.

Dave and Ricardo

Diablo Rojo - Rodrigo y Gabriella

How Does it Feel? - Roy Harper

Tom Tiddler's Ground - Roy Harper - Lee Mai handing out recorders to some of the kids and showing them the melody to play along.

By the Riverside - Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee (Rico - vocals/guitar, Dave - harp)

Four Piece

Song for the Dead - Queens of the Stone Age (Sid - Vocals) - These first few songs are about us establishing our authority over the audience. Then we can start bringing people in with us.

No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age

Machine Men - Bruce Dickinson

Down Payment Blues - AC/DC

Gone Shootin' - AC/DC

Bad Boy Boogie - AC/DC (Rico - Vocals: Dave - Lead Guitar)

Full Band

Great King Rat - Queen - Lisa spontaneously played acoustic guitar in the middle. We hugged at the end and she kissed me and said she'd forgiven me.

My Fairy King - Queen (Dee - Vocals) - Rico's out in the audience. Couple of guitars with people out in the crowd, hooked to up a short delay to play the middle section. Each sequence of notes are played forwards a couple of seconds before the reverse comes into effect through the speakers. He used to the same with the Beatles, 'I'm only Sleeping', though we don't play that one so much these days.

You Don't Understand Me - Raconteurs (Dee - Piano/Vocals) - Just the band here. Gives them a break and you find at this stage that they admire just watching you play.

Top Yourself - Raconteurs (Dee - Banjo) Sid's brother's mate spontaneously bashing away on piano at the end there. Not much of a trick to it, any chord in key will do.

You Know You're A Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals) - All kinds of brass action and other spontaneous shit going on all over these Beefheart songs. We love playing Beefheart, the possibilities in his music are endless. With just about everything else we play, the instrument is played by the same person for the duration of their part. The Captain won't be restricted to such narrow roles though, and his music flies all over the place, three notes played by this person here, next four played at the end of the room. Not even the band play every note. The rest of the evening is almost in our complete control, but we throw these songs in to mix things up for ourselves, as much as anything. It's terrifying. Also exhilarating.

Bat Chain Puller - Captain Beefheart

Grow Fins - Captain Beefheart

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

Big in Japan - Tom Waits - Waits songs are all about the journey into self. We don't have to do anything special here, just play, sing the words and watch everyone spacing out on the trip of their lives. Occasional spontaneous players emerge from their trance to play.

Clap Hands - Tom Waits

Tango Till They're Sore - Tom Waits

God's Away on Business - Tom Waits - This one goes all Beefheart. The brass is all over the audience. Have the 'Ha!' in the middle down pat, so that I can make it ripple through the crowd, like a wave.

Talking At the Same Time - Tom Waits

Bad As Me - Tom Waits

Satisfied - Tom Waits

Brown Sugar - Rolling Stones

One More Weekend - Bob Dylan

The Man in Me - Bob Dylan - Everyone singing, La-la-la etc. Piece of piss.

Sabotage - Beastie Boys (Sid - Vocals) - Everyone shouting, Listen all of y'all there's a sabotage etc. At this point, we're very much phoning it in.

2 + 2 = 5 - Radiohead - Rock out. No other reason.

Down is the New Up - Radiohead - We do this one with a double orchestra of audience members. Dee conducts, me on piano, Rico making other electronic noises. Brought the house down tonight.

Jigsaw Falling into Place - Radiohead - More rocking out for the hell of it.

Why Don't You Write Me - Simon & Garfunkel - Member of the audience spontaneously plays one half of the intertwining sax solos with Lee Mai. One of John's mates this time, I think.

Superman's Big Sister - Ian Dury & the Blockheads- Double orchestra again. Same setup.

Cleaning Windows - Van Morrison - Lee Mai and three specially picked brass players. Girls she was at college with.

Encore

Give Us Bubblewrap - HMHB

Depressed Beyond Tablets - HMHB

When the Evening Sun Goes Down - HMHB (Lee & Dee on penny whistles with the kids)

 ***

2013

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

I was in a bad place right about now. Drinking too much. Not working. So lazy, I didn't even bother the stand up to go through my one man mime act. I spent most of the time slumped down in a bean bag on the Xbox, same playlist ringing in my ears hour after hour, half singing, half growling, breaking off from Gears of War now and then to take a solo, giving two fingers to the fuckers who got me sacked. Depressing, when you think back. To be honest, if the world hadn't ended, I'd probably have ended myself.

In the rerun, things played out much better.

Four Piece

Grind - Alice in Chains

Hollow - Alice in Chains

My God is the Sun - Queens of the Stone Age

Beanman (Camera Part One) - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - For me it's always been about the lyrics. All about singing the words I love best and communicating them to new ears. These A, P & S songs are all off their second albums, Snapshot. It's virtually unknown, which is bullshit, 'cause it's one of the best collections of sustained lyrical brilliance that I know.

Monster - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Blood Simple - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - 'I've always known ya stubborn and malicious and pathetic, but I didn't realise until know exactly how stupid'. Take that bitch!

Full Band

Hollow - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - Violins spontaneously played by Lisa's mates

Trouble - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - 'An innocent observer, rather like poor Joesph K, I find I'm implicated from a thousand miles away'. Come on! Got the audience doing all kinds during this one. My mate Mike did all the mournful moaning, spotlit, while Dee played the glockenspiel parts on the back of a T-Rex skeleton.

Sixteen Saltines - Jack White - This turned into a bit of Jack White mini-set. Blunderbuss hadn't been out that long.

Hypocritical Kiss - Jack White

Weep Themselves to Sleep - Jack White - Loved playing the duelling solos here, me and Rico fading reappearing in other parts of the hall with each distorted back and forth.

Old Enough - The Raconteurs (Dee - Violin)

Top Yourself - The Raconteurs (Dee - Banjo)

Carolina Dream - The Raconteurs - Another la-la-la singing crowd moment. Hard to get these wrong. Remembering all the lyrics is tricky. Just got through it.

Nadine - Chuck Berry (Rico - Vocals)

All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix (Rico - Vocals) - Weird shit

Twice As Hard - Black Crowes

Thick n Thin - Black Crowes

Duquesne Whistle - Bob Dylan- Song was a year of so old at the time, but no one in the band had actually played it before. Could we get it right first time? With a little help from the audience, yes.

You Know You're A Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals) - Time for things to go all Beefheart. Love it.

Bat Chain Puller - Captain Beefheart

When I See Mommy, I Feel Like A Mummy - Captain Beefheart

Nowadays a Women's Gotta Hit A Man Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)

Too Much Time - Captain Beefheart

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

Sympathy For the Devil - Rolling Stones

Paint it Black - Rolling Stones

In the Dark Places - PJ Harvey (Dee - Vocals) - This gave me Goosebumps, I will confess.

Weird Fishes - Radiohead - Like Waits's songs, Radiohead is all about taking people into themselves, rewiring them and sending them on their way anew. No one leaves a worse person than when they arrived, and that's our guarantee.

Bodysnatchers - Radiohead

Jigsaw Falling Into Place - Radiohead

Down is the New Up - Radiohead - Same way we always play it, but with a new twist. We take them in to themselves with Radiohead and we bring them out, to find themselves sat in a horseshoe in tuxes and ball gowns, each tuning up an instrument. Dee steps forward, lifts her baton, and we're off.

New Shoes - Crazy Gods of Endless Noise - Sudden desire to play a couple of Crazy Gods songs. Wondered what would happen. Not as much as I'd hoped, though we did get very literal for a second there, every line triggering a vision in air that dissolved and reformed as the song moved on.

Trapped Water - Crazy Gods of Endless Noise - Ditto

Just A Man - Faith No More - Entire crowd coming in as chorus at the end here. Great way to end.

Encore

Enjoy Yourself - The Specials- Specials songs jump all over the crowd like a Beefheart song, but with a lot more predictability. Good fun just to watch it running through people.

A Message to You Rudy - The Specials

Gangsters - The Specials

Ghost Town - The Specials  

 ***

2011

Dave - Vocals & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Ah yes. This was the week '90 Bisodol (Crimond)' came out, I discovered Half Man, Half Biscuit (HMHB), and played little else for months. Little happened here of note, except for the simple joy of singing some great lyrics ('at the end of the day, just like I say, we'll take each Armageddon as it comes'). Everyone should know of the Biscuit.

4AD3DCD - HMHB

This Leaden Pall - HMHB

Numanoid Hang-glide - HMHB

Even Men With Steel Hearts - HMHB (a rare appearance tonight by Lee Mai on trombone)

For What is Chatteris... - HMHB

Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo - HMHB

Surging Out Of Convalescence - HMHB

Upon Westminster Bridge - HMHB

Joy Division Oven-Gloves - HMHB

Depressed Beyond Tablets - HMHB

Bogus Official - HMHB

We Built This Village On A Trad. Arr. Tune. - HMHB

Give Us Bubblewrap - HMHB

Evening of Swing (Has Been Cancelled) - HMHB

Bad Losers On Yahoo! Chess - HMHB

Took Problem Chimp To Ideal Home Show - HMHB

Totnes Bickering Fair - HMHB

On The 'Roids - HMHB

Tonight Matthew I'm Going To Be With Jesus - HMHB

Them's the Vagaries - HMHB

Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not - HMHB

When the Evening Sun Goes Down - HMHB (Lee Mai playing two penny whistles at once)

Left Lyrics in the Practice Room - HMHB

Rsvp - HMHB

Tommy Walsh's Eco House - HMHB

Joy in Leeuwarden (We Are Ready) - HMHB

Rock and Roll is Full of Bad Wools - HMHB

Paintball's Coming Home - HMHB

 ***

2007

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid - Bass Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

She was still on my mind, but there was a new love in my life, Lisa. Beautiful, beautiful Lisa. It all frittered away to nothing in the end, but I did end up using her as substitute for Sam, carrying on the same arguments that were still raging in my head.

By now I've come to see this experience as a journey into redemption, a chance to make amends and no excuses for leaving loose ends. Previously I arrived back a day or a few hours before each gig. Here it was a week. Just enough time to set things right and move on. If I had to pick, of all the gigs we've done down the years, this is the one I had the most fun performing. Big sloppy grin on my face all night.

Dave and Ricardo

Diablo Rojo - Rodrigo y Gabriella

Four Piece

Wynona's Big Brown Beaver - Primus (Sid - Vocals)

Song For the Dead - Queens of the Stone Age (Sid - Vocals)

No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age

Careful With That Mic. - Clutch (Rico - Vocals)

Red Horse Rainbow - Clutch

Cypress Grove - Clutch

Promoter - Clutch

Snakecharmer - Rage Against the Machine (Rico - Vocals) - Lisa loved Rage and Dub War and Rico spent longer on the mike than usual tonight as a favour to me. In total command, he was, though. Made every womb within a half a mile radius flutter (as usual).

Tire Me - Rage Against the Machine (Rico - Vocals)

Down Rodeo - Rage Against the Machine (Rico - Vocals)

Enemy Maker - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Silencer - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Can't Stop - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Spiritual Warfare - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Fool's Gold - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix (Rico - Vocals, Dave - Toilet)

Full Band

This Must Be the Place [Naive Melody] - Talking Heads - After a slow start with the spontaneous events, they now take a hold with a vengeance. All kinds of electronic action going on here, keyboards flying around all over the shop.

Psycho Killer - Talking Heads

Beanman (Camera Part One) - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - I see this song as anticipating Simon Cowell by a good decade: 'He rubs his hands together on what's rightfully theirs, and tells the stars it's he who makes them shine'.

Blood Simple - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Hollow - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Trouble - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Three Changes - The Good, the Bad & the Queen - From Three Changes to I Want to Be Straight, the music wouldn't stay in the same place for ten seconds. Hard to keep a hold of the reigns with all that's going on. Thank heavens for Andy! Steady as a rock.

Gangsters - The Specials

Dance Little Ruddy - Ian Dury & the Blockheads (Rico - Vocals)

Mash It Up Harry - Ian Dury & the Blockheads (Rico - Vocals)

I Want to Be Straight - Ian Dury & the Blockheads

Superman's Big Sister - Ian Dury & the Blockheads - Double orchestra. Kick ass.

2 + 2 = 5 - Radiohead - Introspection time. Mind blowing.

You and Whose Army? - Radiohead

Knives Out - Radiohead

Stop Whispering - Radiohead

Mississippi - Bob Dylan

Summer Days - Bob Dylan - Here, we play the rhythm sections and let all the little guitar licks dart about the crowd.

Bye and Bye - Bob Dylan

Ain't Talking - Bob Dylan

Grow Fins - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)  - Beefheart time. Madness and we're gone.

When I See Mommy, I Feel Like a Mummy - Captain Beefheart

Nowadays a Woman's Got to Hit a Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)

Too Much Time - Captain Beefheart

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

***

2002

This one happened a few days before I found out what she'd been up to. This time, of course, I already knew. I arrived forty eight hours before the gig and had it out with her, and I wasn't even a dick about it. It was still bitter, some things you can't change, but more amicable. Less hateful. They came to the gig, and I still wasn't a dick. They even joined in on a couple of numbers. I heard both learned to play after. Formed a band. Good luck to them. I'm not bitter. Not much.

Longest set we yet played, over three hours. Good night. Good to see the look on their  faces. I took some pleasure in that. But then, I still had them to deal with. Always there's another angry couple that I have to set things right with.

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

Dave only

Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake

Working Class Hero - John Lennon

Dave & Ricardo

Going to California - Led Zeppelin

That's the Way - Led Zeppelin

Four Piece

Travelling Riverside Blues - Led Zeppelin (Rico - Vocals)

All Your Love - John Mayall & His Bluesbreakers (Rico - Vocals, Dave - Lead Guitar)

Safe As Milk - Captain Beefheart - Here comes the Captain Beefheart , Crazy Bonanza ][

You Know You're A Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)

Down Payment Blues - AC/DC - Full on rock out

Gone Shootin' - AC/DC

Riff Raff - AC/DC (Rico - Vocals, Dave - Lead Guitar)

Full Band

Fearless - Pink Floyd - Just for the mischievous pleasure of making the entire crowd, even the Mancs, sing 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

San Tropez - Pink Floyd

Great King Rat - Queen - Got him playing the acoustic part. Got a nod of approval from her.

Stone Cold Crazy - Queen

New Feeling - Talking Heads

Harry Rag - The Kinks

Big Black Smoke - The Kinks

Sunny Afternoon - The Kinks - Entire front row taking the accordion part. Quite a sound.

Autumn Almanac - The Kinks

Big Sky - The Kinks - Roof opened to the heavens, hall bathed in blue, clouds drifting in, until we feel like we're performing on top of the world.

All of My Friends Were There - The Kinks

Five Years - David Bowie - For all of these Bowie songs, we got other people playing the acoustic part, while I ran about like a dick, singing with my arm draped over each new guitarist, clothes and make-up cycling through Bowie personas. The guitarist here is Len, a guy I used to share a pedestal with at work.

Queen Bitch - David Bowie - Guitarist, Sam.

Rock n' Roll Suicide - David Bowie - Guitarist, my brother, Tony.

Fixing a Hole - The Beatles - Ghost of Mozart on the harpsichord

Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite - The Beatles - Like what we do with 'Down is the New Up', only 60s, la. Psychedelic baby. Groovy.

I'm Looking Through You - The Beatles - I took a little pleasure directing this one straight at them, knowing their turn would be next. I know where this is all going now.

Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles - Imagine how crazy the next two songs could possibly get, multiply it by a hundred and you still won't get close to what happened here.

I Am the Walrus - The Beatles - Beyond words.

Paint it, Black - The Rolling Stones - Ditto

Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones - Mind blowing        

Brown Sugar - The Rolling Stones - Ditto

Captain Beefheart - The Floppy Boot Stomp - **??*?

Street Fighting Man - The Rolling Stones (RATM version)

Into the Mystic - Van Morrison - Lee Mai has got incredibly inventive with her brass arrangements by now and these Van Morrison songs get complicated, one section of the audience playing off against another, point and counter-point.

Cleaning Windows - Van Morrison

Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan - We get so many people involved on this one, so many people playing bits of percussive kit, that it ends up sounding more Tom Waits than Dylan.

Outlaw Blues - Bob Dylan - Introspection time. Everyone experiences this differently.

Tombstone Blues - Bob Dylan

Just Like Tom Thumb Blues - Bob Dylan

Visions of Johanna - Bob Dylan

Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat - Bob Dylan

Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine - Bob Dylan

Obviously 5 Believers - Bob Dylan

I'm So Bored With the USA - The Clash (Rico - Vocals)

The Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards - Ian Dury and the Blockheads

Encore

Kick Out the Jams - MC5 (Rico - Vocals) - We hadn't planned on a encore, but everyone was so deep in trance this night, that we had to play MC5 to wake them all that. If that hadn't worked, it'd have been Slayer next.

 ***

1996

The Year of Her. I was there a couple of days before & glad to get out almost as soon as the gig finished. That was the night things came to a head. It had been coming a long time. I guess it was mostly my fault. My jealousy and maybe if I'd ended up with her instead of Murray, it would of been him and Colin walking and me and Sid forming a new band with her. As it was, me and Sid walked, bruises inflicted on both sides.

Half of which must be wrong. I mean, I wasn't in a band, was I? It was all in my head. Gets so hard to remember what used to be fantasy and what was real. All the same thing by now, I guess.

Nothing strange happened. Not that rerun. I made my peace with all three of them and we played a killer set and I moved on.

Dave Keenan - Vocals & Guitars

Murray Anderson - Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards

Sarah Dodd - Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards

Sid Taylor - Bass

Colin Anderson - Drums

Misery - Soul Asylum

Shut Down - Soul Asylum

Promise Broken - Soul Asylum

String of Pearls - Soul Asylum

Nothing to Write Home About - Soul Asylum

Runaway Train - Soul Asylum

New World - Soul Asylum

April Fool - Soul Asylum

Without A Trace - Soul Asylum

Richard III - Supergrass

Sorted For Es & Whizz - Pulp

Zero - Smashing Pumpkins

Bullet With Butterfly Wings - Smashing Pumpkins

Galopogos - Smashing Pumpkins

X.Y.Z. - Smashing Pumpkins

Sting Me - The Black Crowes

Remedy - The Black Crowes

Jailbird - Primal Scream

Rocks - Primal Scream

Would - Alice in Chains

The Bends - Radiohead

High & Dry - Radiohead

Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead

Bones - Radiohead

Just - Radiohead

Sulk - Radiohead

Street Spirit (Fade Out) - Radiohead

Hold Me Now - Elastica (Sarah - Vocals)

Waking Up - Elastica (Sarah - Vocals)

Connection - Elastica (Sarah - Vocals)

Give the Anarchist a Cigarette - Chumbawamba (Sarah - Vocals)

Timebomb - Chumbawamba (Sarah - Vocals)

Mouthful of Shit - Chumbawamba

Bad Dog - Chumbawamba (Sarah - Vocals)

Enough is Enough - Chumbawamba

Stitch That - Chumbawamba (Murray - Vocals)

Alice What's the Matter? - Terrorvision

Oblivion - Terrorvision

Pretend Best Friend - Terrorvision

Encore

Take Our Sorrows Swimming - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Open Season - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Come Around the World With Me - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

P.V.S. - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

 ***

1991

The Cultural Fascists' first gig. We were all 17. Just the lads. One tight four piece, the way we liked it. No one else chipping in either. Arrived back a few days before the gig, in time for last rehearsals in Murray and Colin's dad's garage. Good times.

Again, nothing weird happened. We just played.

Gig was at our old Bell-end School. We were not what they were expecting. But we made them listen anyway. Mwohaha etc.

Dave Keenan - Vocals & Guitars

Murray Anderson - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Sid Taylor - Bass

Colin Anderson - Drums

Prowler - Iron Maiden

Waking the Dead - Suicidal Tendencies

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - Black Sabbath

Epic - Faith No More (Murray - keyboards)

No-One Came - Deep Purple (Murray - keyboards)

Stone Cold Crazy - Queen

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Metallica

Fade to Black - Metallica

One - Metallica

Sad But True - Metallica

South of Heaven - Slayer

Reign in Blood - Slayer

Souls of Black - Testament

In My Darkest Hour - Megadeth

Dawn Patrol - Megadeth

Got the Time - Anthrax

Anti-Social - Anthrax

Broken Doll - Wolfsbane

Twice As Mean - Wolfsbane

Crucify - The Almighty

Overkill - Motorhead

All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix

Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix

Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones

Mr Brownstone - Guns n Roses

Back in the Village - Iron Maiden

Still Life - Iron Maiden

The Phantom of the Opera - Iron Maiden

The Call of Ktulu - Metallica

Am I Evil? - Diamond Head

 ***

1984

Oh, right, this. If I tell you I was ten. It was our class's turn to put on a turn for assembly. Halloween was nearly upon us. Michael Jackson ruled the Earth. Thriller. Oh the horror.

I still sometimes have nightmare about that performance. Not because of the make-up (though I remember some of the kids had nightmares in the weeks after, the gimps). No, just the sheer, tacky, poorly co-ordinated horror of it. If anything, going through it a second time was worse than the first time, but at least I didn't really know what I was doing, which if anything, improved matters.

On the plus side, it was good to just be lads with Colin and Murray and Sid for a couple more days. Simpler times. Enough to make you remember all the mistakes you make. The mistakes you rectify.

The day of assembly and the whole school joined in, even the teachers. Even the parents. Think of that prison that did it in Indonesia, years from here, and then think bigger. Think, actually everyone becoming undead for nearly six minutes. Feeling what it's like to actually be a zombie. Not pleasant.

Then we heard the sound of Vincent Price's manic laughter echoing across the playgrounds and fields and, for me at least, the whole scene faded to black, and the next thing I knew, I was grown up again.

***

∞

Dave Keenan - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Murray Anderson - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Sarah Dodd-Anderson - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Sid Taylor (½ of SidLee) - Bass & Vocals

Colin Anderson - Drums

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind, Brass & Vocals

Murray and Dave - The Musical Slammer

Okay, so this mini set stemmed from when I met up with Dee and Rico. We got to talking about whether you could recreate the olfactory experience through music. Like, songs that represented different ingredients in a meal or on a plate. That led, inevitably, to the same conversation, only with alcohol instead of food, and we finally settled on the motif of the Tequila slammer. Three songs, performed or played in quick succession, each representing one ingredient. This is what me and Murray came up with:

Salt: Tonight Matthew I'm Going To Be With Jesus - HMHB

Shot of Tequila: Blue Valentines - Tom Waits

Slice of Latin Lime: Diablo Rojo - Rodrigo y Gabriella

Full Band

Really tight on these new songs now. Played them often enough.

Talking Post Apocalyptic, Time Travelling Blues (Keenan)

Hypatia (Dodd-Anderson: Sarah, Vocals)

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - Black Sabbath

Epic - Faith No More (Sarah - Keyboards)

Operation Moorcroft (C Anderson/M Anderson/Dodd-Anderson/Keenan)

Centre: Level: Roar - Youngblood Brass Band - This is Lee Mai's baby, but we all join in, playing what instruments we please (Andy tonight guesting on drums), farming out the rest of the parts to members of the audience.

Neophyte (Sid/Lee: Sid -Vocals)

Interject (M Anderson/Dodd-Anderson)

Evolve - Ani DiFranco (Sarah solo)

My Fairy King - Queen (Sarah - Vocals) - An old favourite, done exactly the same way as always.

Promises Broken - Soul Asylum - Crowd broken down into sections for this one, me, Murray, Sarah & Sid each leading a section. Results are amazing.

Whither Be My Wonder? (C Anderson/M Anderson)

[think up title] (M Anderson/Keenan)

NO MAYO (Dodd-Anderson/Keenan)

28 minute, freeform jazz improv, utilising half the audience, playing everything from sax to vibraphone.

Bat Chain Puller - Captain Beefheart - Usual Beefheart craziness

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

Time - Tom Waits - It's why we're all here.

The Changing of the Guard - Bob Dylan - A three song finale, packed with more brass than a meeting of three star generals.

Where are You Tonight? - Bob Dylan

N.F.Y. (Normal For You) (C Anderson/M Anderson/Dodd-Anderson/Keenan)

Spent. Couldn't play an encore if I tried.

Peace, I'm outta here.

***

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Best Things Ever #14 Bruce Dickinson: The Chemical Wedding

”’Have you read Harry Potter, Stew, and the— and the Tree of Nothing?’ No, I haven’t. I haven’t read it, but I have read the complete works of the romantic poet and visionary William Blake. So fuck off.”

         Stewart Lee

Nebs. That’s what the Indie kids called us. After Knebworth Park and the Knebworth Festival. Yes, even though heavy metal wasn’t really associated with Knebworth. I guess logic rarely penetrates the mind of a fifteen year old.

Metal was the first scene I got into. It was the early 90s and British Heavy Metal was going through a resurgence. Kerrang Magazine were calling it the Second New Wave of British Heavy Metal, with bands like The Almighty, The Wildhearts and Thunder coming to prominence. Iron Maiden went to number one with ‘Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter’, and their future singer, Blaze Bailey, first inspired me to want to be a writer through his rants in the fanzine of my then favourite band, Wolfsbane.

I had the leather jacket. I had the drainpipe jeans and studded belt. I made the pilgrimage to the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donnington that all good Nebs were required to make (the Indie kids should have called us Dons!). Friendships were formed based on the bands that we listened to and many of those friendships have endured to this day. And even after I’d discarded the long hair and denim waistcoat cluttered with band patches, metal still held the power to energise me. By 1996, my tastes had widened and I was listening to Supergrass and Chumbawamba. Yet when my dad died a month before exams, it was the music of Metallica, Dub War and Rage Against That Machine that drowned out the world and lent me the strength to focus on revision.

Fast forward a decade. Up in Sunderland to visit my brother (a dedicated metalhead). He gives me a copy of Bruce Dickinson’s 1998 album, ‘The Chemical Wedding’. Bruce had spent most of his career as lead singer for Iron Maiden, before quitting the band in 1993 (and rejoining in 1999). He had released a series of solo albums, all different styles, from trad. rock to grunge, but all with something to recommend them. I hadn’t heard his last couple of offerings, but Rich sent me home with a copy and a wink that said, ‘trust me’. I arrived back and loaded the disc into the five CD changer that I used to use when reading. Nina Simone, Jeff Buckley, 'The Basement Tapes', Miles Davis and the like came and went from the mix, but ‘The Chemical Wedding’ remained. Over the days and weeks, I came to see it as the epitome of everything that had attracted me to metal in the first place.

I like music that is about something. We all have trash hiding away in our collections, and I am no exception. Yet while my tastes have diversified over the years to take in most anything from Shostakovich to Slayer, I’ve never been able to tolerate mainstream, manufactured pop. That’s because it’s about nothing. Words plucked out of the air, arranged into some semblance of order and wailed over a tinny drum machine. Add a full orchestra if you like, it’s still of no value. And yes, I know pop music is for dancing to. Sorry, I don’t dance (not in front of other people at least). Good music is be listened to and appreciated on a constant loop, until every lyric, note and cadence is memorised. And then you write a two thousand word article about what you’ve heard (sarcasm).

‘The Chemical Wedding’ is about something. It’s about a lot of things. Dickinson initially set out to make an album about alchemy and transformation, but found that after the first few songs he had blown himself out. And then he turned to the poetry of William Blake. The album takes its title from ‘The Chymical Wedding’, a seventeenth century alchemical text, but it is Blake that lies at its core. I used the planned writing of this article as an excuse to go and read Blake’s works in their entirety.

I had read a lot of Blake in my youth, most of it from earlier works like ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ and ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. Yet it his longer, prophetic works that inform much of The Chemical Wedding: Songs with titles like ‘The Book of Thel’ and ‘The Gates of Urizen’, as well as spoken passages from ‘Milton’ as voiced by Arthur Brown (of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown fame).

I must say that when I first set out to read ‘The Book of Thel’ and ‘The First Book of Urizen’, I was confused. They seemed to bear no relation to the songs that bore their names. Blake’s Book of Thel is about a young girl drifting around a garden (possibly the Garden of Eden) and conversing with anthropomorphised forms of nature; the lily, the worm, the cloud. Dickinson’s Book of Thel is about human sacrifice. Was I missing something?

Then I found an old interview with Bruce on YouTube, broadcast on ITV around the time the album had been released. He talks about, ‘trying to borrow Blake’s spectacles’; that ‘the album had a mentor’, with three or four new songs immediately pouring out of him upon reading Blake’s works. The album had entered existence as a meditation on alchemy and transformation, but through Blake the lyrics had taken on the additional themes of renewal and rebirth. Listening to the interview,

the scales fell from my eyes.

Blake’s prophetic works are reimaginings of contemporary events and biblical tropes. ‘America: A Prophecy’ and ‘Europe: A Prophecy’ retell the recent American and French Revolutions, with their generals and kings transposed by Blake’s own mythical forms, Orc, Albion, Enitharmon: Giants of antiquity that sleep for millennia and do battle from across oceans. In ‘The First Book of Urizen’, ‘The Book of Ahania’, ‘The Song of Los’, through to Blake’s last epic poems, Creation itself is replayed, bearing little relation to the original biblical texts. Blake was constantly defining and redefining his own mythology, drifting further and further from the sense of his initial prophecies. Urizen as found in ‘Milton’ bears little relation to the ‘self-closed, all repelling’ shadowy figure of The First Book.

Taking all this into consideration, it is of course appropriate for Dickinson to have borrowed Blake’s spectacles, appropriating the names of Thel and Urizen and remoulding them in his own image in exactly the same way as Blake had done. Bruce’s own Book of Thel even contains lines borrowed from ‘Macbeth’ (‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.’). But then, if any artist plundered the past for ore with which to shape his plays, it was Shakespeare.

Yet even as Bruce borrows from Blake, so he returns the favour in kind in that eternal cycle of renewal and rebirth. On ‘Jerusalem’, Dickinson takes the words of Blake’s most famous work and expands upon them. Blake provides the verses: Bruce adds chorus and refrain.

I’ve always had a problem with ‘Jerusalem’. It’s its jingoistic associations, its dreary appropriation by the Church of England, its arrogant assumption that Jesus had somehow made a pilgrimage to our ‘green and pleasant land’. Whenever I hear spoken or sung its series of rhetorical questions, I feel compelled to offer my own commentary:

Blake: And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon England's mountains green?

Me: No.
Blake: And was the holy Lamb of God, On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

Me: No. No he wasn’t.

And so on.

Los, aka Blake

And yet once you start reading Blake (and around Blake), a number of things become readily apparent. For a start, the poem isn’t called ‘Jerusalem’. The words commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’ actually form part of a short preface to the longer poem, ‘Milton’. This preface is written in part prose, part verse, a classical form to be found in the works of Seneca, Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’, and even ‘The Chymical Wedding’.

Secondly, Blake had a habit of writing and printing prefaces to his illuminated works, that he would then discard at a later date. ‘Milton’ is no exception. Only two extant copies exist of this preface and it is therefore ironic that perhaps Blake’s most famous lines were regarded so cheaply by the artist himself. It is also ironic that ‘Jerusalem’ is such a popular hymn in the Anglican church, given that Blake was a member of dissenting religious sect which despised the priesthood and its substitution of virtue for pomp and privilege. Moreover, Blake was a republican (as were many of his contemporary poets), with ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ depicting the rebel angels as heroic in the face of the tyrant Albion. Think about that the next time you see a member of the aristocracy singing about not ceasing from Mental Fight, and allow yourself a smile.

Also, once you start reading the actual ‘Jerusalem’ (‘Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion’, Blake’s longest completed work), you realise that Blake isn’t talking about Jerusalem as an actual place existing in time and space. Blake experienced visions (suffered, some might say) throughout his entire life and claimed to regularly converse with angels. His poetry and artwork are the manifestations of these visions. Jerusalem is not England, it is not even London. It is wherever Blake walked, hence why the centre of the universe in his final epic is South Molton Street, the address where he spent many of his remaining years.

The issues that I had with the poem commonly known as ‘Jerusalem’ meant that for years it was the one track on ‘The Chemical Wedding’ that I used to skip. Knowledge brings tolerance and with a greater understanding of it lyrics, ‘Jerusalem’ regains its visionary charm (it is certainly less offensive than some of the passages in the actual ‘Jerusalem’, like where Blake addresses the Jews: ‘Take up the cross, O Israel, and follow Jesus’). Dickinson’s version reinvigorates the sterility of the hymn and gives it back its energy. Not only do I leave ‘Jerusalem’ playing these days, I’ll even find myself singing along. There’s progress.

I suspect that Blake would have been appalled by some of the other themes on ‘The Chemical Wedding’. In ‘Trumpets of Jericho’ for instance, the trumpets sound, but ‘still the walls remain’. Although in true Blakean style, the lyrics have little else to do with the Joshua of the Old Testament (and archaeology informs us that Jericho had no walls). The song also references the opening lines of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’: ‘Man is born forever free, but is everywhere in chains’. I wonder if Bruce realises that despite being the father of the French Revolution, Blake came to condemn Rousseau along with Voltaire and Newton for their trust in reason above belief (“Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau: Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again”).

Newton, scheming, face turned from God

However, it takes more than a decent set of lyrics to make a great album. What makes ‘The Chemical Wedding’ the epitome of heavy metal isn’t just its morality plays or its references to Satan; it’s the apocalyptic openings of its songs, the duelling guitar solos, the contrasts in Dickinson’s voice between the melodic and the air-raid siren. It has the same grinding rhythms of any metal album. The same bass runs and drum fills. It can also be accused of being as clichéd as any metal album. And yes, there are clichés here too, but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with a good cliché. I’m not claiming ‘The Chemical Wedding’ as the greatest album ever made. If I want to listen to musical perfection, I also have Johan Sebastian Bach in my collection and he pisses all over every other composer in recorded time. Yet if you want to know what heavy metal music is about, with all of its energy, exuberance and excess, you could do much worse than to start with ‘The Chemical Wedding’.

‘The Chemical Wedding’ may not be the greatest album ever recorded, but in the same way that Alice in Chains’ album, ‘Dirt’, defines everything that the word ‘grunge’ conjures up for me, so ‘The Chemical Wedding’ represents everything that I hear when I think of heavy metal (right down to the Spinal Tap-esque mandolins on ‘Jerusalem’). It is metal’s epitome and its apotheosis. What elevates mere entertainment to the level of art is its ability to open the doors of perception to new experiences. If you haven’t read Blake before, Bruce offers you a way inside the troubled mind of genius. Blake wasn’t perfect, but he was brilliant. As with Blake, so ‘The Chemical Wedding’.

Bruce Dickinson interview on 'Faith and Music'
Harry Potter and that there Stewart Lee