Metal skins

We told Larry Schwartz to go to Hell. So he did. And he came back with his ears hurting after a night of death metal music.

HELL is between a boutique and a bakery on Swanston Walk.

It is a darkness punctured by the glow of cigarettes and strobe lights. Dancers hurl their torsos about and whip long hair at the floor. Hands are placed at the edge of the stage, heads bang up and down in unison.

On a screen to one side are ghastly images of pain, disfigurement and the fright of a late-night television horror flick in which a monster injects fluid into the brain of its victims.

Someone has `NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD’ on his singlet; someone else `BLOOD, MURDER AND SATAN’. A hapless air-guitarist on the dance floor they call the mosh pit boasts the incongruous “SEXY SPANISH COMEDY”.

It is way past midnight at The Hell Club, a cavernous hangout for Melbourne’s heavy metal music crowd. The organisers estimate there are more than 100 people here tonight. There can’t be more than a dozen at a time in the pit.

From a safe distance, I pound a foot to the perceived beat and grimace at the thud of drums, discordant guitar screech and indistinguishable vocal blur.

“Who loves ya all the most,” yells the lead singer. “Who wants half a (drum) stick?” The crowd roars.
SINCE the youthful Presley, rock has embodied a brazen swagger that has set elders on edge. Today’s metallists share a passion for a music that can make forebears who once seemed heavy from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath seem like lite pop.

To its followers, sub-genres such as death metal (characterised by a preoccupation with death, low guitar tunings and vocal roar) and black metal (in which Satanic imagery abounds) have a potency not encountered elsewhere.

Some attribute the heavy metal tag to American critic Lester Bangs, who appropriated the phrase from the novel `The Naked Lunch’, by Beat novelist William Burroughs. But metal is poles apart from the whimsical singer-songwriter genre that also emerged in the ’60s. Metal has always been rock’s larrikin kid brother.

It has become a focal point for parental fears. Enthusiasts are still incensed at the condemnation that persists, despite a 1990 ruling by an American judge that the British band, Judas Priest, was not responsible for the deaths of two youths who shot themselves in a churchyard after a day spent smoking marijuana, drinking beer and listening to heavy metal music.

The judge found that the families of the men, aged 18 and 20, had failed to prove that they were influenced by a subliminal message.

“I think it was just a load of rubbish,” says sound engineer, Warren Eales, 29, promoter at the Hell Club. “I think it was somebody looking for a scapegoat to lay some blame on for parents not being able to control their children.” He argues that they would have had to be unstable to commit such an act and with drug and alcohol might as easily have been listening to the national anthem. “. . . If I played you that (Judas Priest) song, you wouldn’t grab a gun and shoot yourself, would you?” With a genre that is wilfully ugly, it is all too easy to be unnerved by album covers that seem intent on outdoing each other in bad taste. A snapped neck at the end of a noose; a corpse being devoured; an old woman in nightie pegging babies by the heel to a washline; a skeleton in monk’s cowl cradling an infant.

Instead of sexual taboos, it achieves the desired shock by suggesting death triumphant over life.

Why the fascination with this kind of fare? “I reckon 90 per cent of us like horror,” says Glenn Stock, 36, proprietor of Metal Labyrinth, in Banana Alley, Flinders Street.

“Heavy metal music has got that sort of gothic horror about it. Everybody likes to be scared, don’t they?” THE lead vocalist of one of the most popular Melbourne bands goes under the name of Damon Bloodstorm. His band, Bestial Warlust, was the big drawcard at the Hell Club last Friday night. Bloodstorm has a silver ring in his left nostril. “Sadistik Exekution” says the black T-shirt that shows a corpse impaled through the ribcage with a spear.

On stage, he wears bullet belts and chains across his chest and “huge spikes that rise out of my arms”. The players in Bestial Warlust are “covered in blood”. Stage blood, I am relieved to hear.

Bestial Warlust was formed in early 1990. Bloodstorm says its debut album, `Vengeance War ‘Til Death’, on a local label called Modern Invasion Music, has sold 5500 so far. “Our music is aggressive, violent, destructive,” he says.

Bloodstorm characterises it as “war metal” and his vocal style as “a mixture between very deep and very screamy”.

He has a day job at Extreme Aggression, the store in Flinders Lane that fans say stocks music for those with a taste for the “heaviest” of metal music. (Heavy is a term of endearment that alludes partly to vocal and instrumental style).

Bloodstorm produces handwritten lyrics for the new album, `Blood and Valour’. One called `Barbaric Horde’ (“We come at night barbaric horde, evil vicious fright . . .”) was penned by a band member he will refer to only as Joe because “his last name’s got a swear word in it”.

He has written the other, `Wrath’: “Blood for blood, kill for kill/ wrath is the way to force a path/ the destiny fearless quest/ the powers shall reign for evermore . . .” The music, he says, stirs anger and aggression. Does he aim to incite violence in the audience? “We don’t make a judgment,” says Bloodstorm. “Whatever one feels when listening to our music, we have no responsibility for . . . whether someone becomes violent or anything, when we play live it is up to them.” The Hell Club meets Friday nights through to the early hours of Saturdays at Wall Street Bar and Grill in Swanston Walk.
Its promoter, Warren Eales, a sound engineer, sees a disparity in the aggressive image and behavior in the metal crowd.

“Basically, once you get to know the people, you’ll find that they are nowhere near the image that the big bands portray.
They’re really a friendly bunch.

“. . . You’d probably find that the metal population per head drink a lot more. But you’d also find that they’re probably the lowest per population of getting into fights.” Between bands, deejay Brett Trottman, 23, takes me to a small room where we can talk with slightly less noise. Still, it throbs to the sound of an American group, Pantera. He talks of the melodic appeal. I concede that I can’t hear it.
To me, it is the most excruciating musical experience I have endured since `Hello Dolly’.

“Our music is ours,” says Trottman. “It’s for us. And if you don’t like it, it’s not our problem.” A video store salesman, his dad once played drums with Normie Rowe and the Playboys. His tastes run the gamut from metal bands like Deicide, Faith No More and Fractured to the gentler Doobie Brothers.

Though Trottman says some of the more extreme of the metal music “drives me bananas”, he shares an outrage at some of the comment that followed the Judas Priest case.

Fans are drawn by music, he insists, not violence. The death imagery reflects the images of war on the news and far from encouraging it, bands are often speaking out against aggression.

On stage, a band called Fracture finish their set. The curtain closes. Sound mixer Robert Mulligan, 24, takes me backstage for a chat. He plays guitar for a band called Abramelin and drums for another, Earth. He has silver batwings and a crucifix about his neck.

Mulligan’s T-shirt features the name of a Scandinavian band Bloodstorm told me is controversial “because of all the killings and church burnings across the Norwegian country”.

We are joined by Fracture’s balding drummer, Euan Heriot, who also plays in Abramelin, singer Cameron Henry and guitarist Mark Matthews. Talk veers from the practice required to utter the rough vocals to subtle differences in style.

Henry, who had moments earlier strutted about, mouthing the kind of between-song obscenities fans say break down barriers with the audience, now seems subdued. He recognises it might be hard for “virgin ears” such as the megadeaf pair I’m now nursing to detect the differences in lyric and sound that distinguish bands including his from the opening act, Concrete.
Conversation is polite. When I take my leave some time after 2am, it is not before one after the other has reached out to shake hands, insisting on a courteous farewell.

THE SUNDAY AGE, 30-Jul-1995