Rock of all ages

HEAVY Metal is back. In the last few months a fistful of well-known bands have returned, eager to push their latest album to the punters. If you like screaming guitars, lead vocalists who sound like they’ve had too many cigarettes and bottles of bourbon and drums that sound as though they are small bombs going off, then it’s a good time for new albums.

In the last few months, Metallica have released a new album, the subtley-titled Death Magnetic, and is the fifth in a row from the band to go straight to number one in America’s album charts.

Last month, AC/DC released Black Ice and sold out their tour in record time in September, shifting thousands of tickets in 40 minutes flat. To sell out their tour in a matter of minutes, Guns N Roses finally released their latest album and old veterans, Iron Maiden, are currently part of the way through a Somewhere Back In Time tour, which celebrates their back catalogue of 80s hits like Run To The Hills and Powerslave.

What’s impressive is that – without exception – all these acts have sold lot of copies of their latest release and sold thousands of concert tickets in recent months. It shows that heavy metal – or hard rock if you prefer the more palatable term – is enormously popular with audiences around the globe.

It appeals to adolescent boys, of course, but it also has a big adult following, with balding blokes who have kids and mortgages keen to spend disposable cash on Metallica’s guitar thrash or AC/DC’s innuendoladen lyrics.

Although it’s not easy to pinpoint metal’s starting point – Pete Townsend of The Who claims he invented it – it’s probably somewhere around 1968 when Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Led Zeppelin were all making a big impact. Zeppelin were always regarded as one of the great hard rock acts. Last year a reunion at London’s O2 arena caused a huge stir.

Despite persistent rumours of a comeback tour that would be worth millions of dollars, Robert Plant has resisted. Zeppelin, in many ways, laid the blueprint for what came later. In the early 70s, a quartet from Birmingham calling themselves Black Sabbath made heavy sounding rock with de-tuned guitars, occasionally borrowing ideas from Zeppelin.

Soon, Heavy Metal was evolving.

While AC/DC took the form through a hard-blues and boogie mode in the 1970s, Motorhead added inspiration from punk’s speed and energy (and no small amount of drugs) along the way releasing one of the great metal anthems, Ace Of Spades.

Fast, uncompromising and pretty relentless, the song helped to encapsulate metal’s appeal. Here was music you didn’t have to think about.

You just had to hang on, bang your head (or someone else’s) and enjoy the ride. But if Motorhead were fast, Metallica were even faster. Their delightfully named debut, Kill ’Em All, took the genre to new extremes, playing music faster and heavier (and spawning a thousand lesser known imitators in the two decades since). It was brutal, ferocious music, and adolescent western males loved it.

Bon Jovi and bands like Def Leppard, Cinderella and Europe enjoyed a hugely successful period with the genre in the late 1980s, but metal became very pop-oriented, with high production values and singalong choruses.

This was undermined by Guns N Roses, the LA band who brought fresh energy and street appeal to metal when their album, Appetite For Destruction, emerged in 1987. The recently-released Chinese Democracy says it all – 14 years in the making and costing $13m, the only surviving member of the original line-up is Axl Rose, an unpredictable character whose talent is matched only by his strange habits.

“It’s not an earth-shattering album,” says Daily Telegraph rock critic Neil McCormick of the new Guns N Roses release. “It’s just a rock album that has taken a very long time to make. Is anything worth a 14- year wait?”

Nevertheless, the genre endures and is arguably celebrating its 40th birthday. Metal’s appeal is difficult to identify. For all those who find it exciting and energising, there are others who find it overblown and ridiculous, a fact that didn’t escape the Spinal Tap team when they sent up the genre with their brilliant film parody in 1984. As one of the guitarists famously said, pointing to his specially modified (and ridiculous) amplifier “this one goes up to 11!”

Are you ready to rock?

G‘N’R SETS MYSPACE RECORD: Chinese Democracy scored a record 8.4 million streams when the album debuted on MySpace.

ROLLING STONE VERDICT WAS FOUR STARS: The magazine called Chinese Democracy “a great, audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record”.