Sinéad O'Connor

TRIGGER WARNING: I will be discussing the issue of child abuse in this blog.

It's been seven hours and fifteen days since I found that Sinéad O'Connor had been taken away. 

We've lost many talented musicians in recent years, but none have moved me as much as that of this amazing, talented, beautiful Irish artist.

Like most people, I became aware of Sinéad when the single Nothing Compares 2 U was released in 1990. Even as someone who prefers their music to arrive on albums, I could tell this was an amazing recording. The video was both artistic and touching, with Sinead shedding a real, unscripted tear, whilst looking fabulous and like no other artist.

I was saw her play the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury that year. As this was before the days of big screens, and I was a long way back in the crowd, 'saw' is perhaps not the best word. But I did hear her. (A recording of her set can be heard here.) The single was also being played by almost every stall that had a sound system, I remember. It was effectively the theme tune for the festival. People find it hard to believe now, but she really was talked about as being an Irish Madonna.  

Then came the infamous Saturday Night Live performance in 1992. This was the days before the internet, and I didn't even own a TV at the time, so I knew of this only as a news item. We're used to rock 'n' roll people shooting from the hip, but there was nothing impulsive about this act of rebellion. From the Ethiopian flags on the microphone to the Bob Marley song War she sang, everything was thought through. The picture of the Pope itself had belonged to her late mother and she been carrying it round waiting for the moment to destroy it. 

It nuked her career, but then she was never going to be the pop princess the record company wanted. I didn't see it at the time, but her appearance at the Bob Dylan tribute later that year is justifiably famous. When I watch the video now, and see her, so young and fragile, as she is booed by the crowd, it is still gut wrenchingly awful, right up until the moment Kris Kristofferson whispers in her ear "don't let the bastards get you down" and she launches into an acapella version of War. What's less appreciated is how significant the occasion was for Sinéad. Bob Dylan was her hero, whose music comforted and inspired her after she'd been floored by the death of Elvis. This was not a minor gig for Sinéad. 

I respected her for this, but I knew almost nothing about the issues she was trying to raise. I was hardly a fan of the Catholic Church, but the criticisms of the Church at that time were of the Father Ted variety, where priests were idiots, but not monsters. That changed a little over twelve months later when I found myself working for the Simon Community in Cork City. 

There I started to encounter the Ireland that Sinead was trying to tell people about. The other volunteers of the Simon Community either came from abroad, like me, or from the fringes of Irish society. The later were often themselves survivors, or at least witnesses, to abuse in Convent Schools or other Church establishments. Child abuse was, literally, never talked about in Ireland in the press, and the very few cases that came to light were usually referred to as 'incest', not abuse. From the Social Workers I encountered I also learnt how some abusers they had identified were effectively untouchable due to patronage from the Church. These people weren't priests, but just influential members of the congregation. What we didn't ask was why the Church didn't want any investigations. Nobody else asked either and Sinéad remained a loan, marginalised voice. But during the two years I lived in Ireland this all changed. 

First came the case of Brendan Smyth, a priest from Northern Ireland who'd been arrested for child abuse in Belfast, but who had then fled to the Republic, where the Catholic Church and the government protected him for three years. This was was not a minor scandal - it brought down the government - but at the time the issue was mainly one of cross-border extradition, always a difficult issue during the Troubles, rather than the abuse itself. 

Then in 1995 the bubble burst. There was a new case in the papers every month, it seemed, and this time they weren't being brushed under the carpet. Some people still refused to accept the truth. I remember one woman ringing in to a radio show to say that we should forgive priests as they were being deliberately tempted by Satan, and others simply chose to ignore the facts, but for most ordinary Irish it was now obvious that Sinéad had been right. 

How closely she was personally linked to abuse we would only later learn. She was named Sinéad after the mother of the doctor who delivered her. He was Eamon de Valera Junior, the son of a former Irish President. In a strange piece of synchronicity, it would later emerge that de Valera Junior had been involved in the covert kidnapping of children from the Magdalene Asylums to be adopted by childless couples. The Asylums, where single mothers, sometimes rape victims, were incarcerated for life were yet another Irish scandal.  Sinéad herself went to a reform school next to one Magdalene Asylum, and as a punishment she had to spend a night with the elderly ladies who's spent maybe sixty years in these prisons. This incredibly sad, and frightening experience was turned by Sinéad into one of her earliest songs, Take My Hand. 

But Sinéad didn't just witness abuse, she experienced it at home, from her mother, whilst that picture of Pope John Paul II looked on. This didn't just change her life, it changed her and she was eventually diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Thanks to my work experience in Ireland I have gone on to become a qualified Social Worker. I have done child protection work, but I have also worked with abuse survivors and have been privileged to have them tell me their stories, sometimes before they told anyone else. 

This takes courage, and Sinéad was over the course of her life to show great bravery in describing herown abuse. Unfortunately, there is rarely a happily ever after in these stories. She had to live with the scars of her early life. Her mental health problems, her family and relationship issues, even her changes of faith, are totally familiar to those of us who work with survivors. You can help people like Sinéad, but you can never take away the damage that has been done. I'd have loved there to be a fairy tale ending to her story, but there never was going to be one.

Just before I left Ireland I had the opportunity to appear as an extra in the film Michael Collins, a dramatic, and realistic, depiction of how Ireland became free, and stars Liam Neeson as the title character, and the late Alan Rickman as Eamon de Valera. Sinéad sang on three songs on the soundtrack, and her collaboration with The Chieftains on the project would also give us a version of The Foggy Dew, which is one of my favourite tracks by her. 

The final song of the film is She Moved Through The Fair. Mystical and haunting, there is no other Irish trad. song like it and nobody, not even Van Morrison, has ever sung it better than Sinéad. She would recorder an even better version a couple of years later, which I've always loved, although now it is almost too poignant to listen to. 

I'll admit I've shed a tear for the death of Sinéad; for the death of a remarkable talent, a fearless activist and a beautiful but damaged soul. But I also mourn for the many other lives lost or diminished by abuse in families and institutions, both in Ireland and elsewhere. May we all, just like Sinéad did, work to ensure there are fewer victims in future.  

 

Top Five Songs inspired by the Space Race

It's fifty years since the Space Race ended. America had won, and that was all that counted. Nobody was interested in what happened next. As if to prove the point, the original series of Star Trek was canned a full month before Apollo 11 touched down.

The Space Race was only ever really a proxy for the Cold War. Rockets that could carry people into space could also, obviously, carry atomic bombs back down to earth. The main reason the Russians held their early lead in the race was because their nuclear warheads were bigger and heavier and so their rockets needed to be more powerful.

However, whilst the technical legacy of space race is mixed - and before anyone says it Teflon was patented in 1945 and was not developed by NASA - it's musical legacy is much richer. Picking just five songs to represent it was difficult, but here I go.

Click on the heading to listen to the song.

5. Telestar by The Tornados 

Dylan aside, not many songs from the early sixties, the era of the Clean Cut Crooner, have stood the test of time, and it's arguable really if this one has. However, people remember it fondly and it turns up on various compilation albums.

The song is now more famous than the satellite, which is a bit of a pity as the original Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, was the world's first communication satellite. It wasn't in geostationary orbit, so it didn't exactly fulfil the roll that Arthur C Clarke had predicted back in 1945, but it was able to provide the first live trans-Atlantic link.

Communication satellites have changed the world far more than walking on the moon ever did, so it's only fair to remember the original.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss

This piece of music was not written for the space race.It was in fact written in 1896 by Strauss, a composer with unfortunate Nazi connections, inspired by a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher with unfortunate Nazi connections. However, the only part of the hour long piece that most people know is the opening section called Sunrise, and that's because of it's use in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Until pictures of the real thing came back a year later, this film was what people thought exploring the moon looked like. In fact, there's a strong argument for saying that Kubrick's film is better than the real thing; it's both more poetic, but also a lot more troubling. Utterly incomprehensible to most people who first see it, a re-watching shows 2001 to be a fascinating and complex critique of the culture that put man-on-the-moon. From the scene above which links the ape creatures to the near future (as 2001 was in 1968), when the leader's bone weapon thrown in the air turns into an orbiting nuclear missile, to the complete lack of emotion in the space station scenes, to the murderous-but-honest computer HAL, to the acid-trip ending; Stanley Kubrick took Arthur C Clarke's hard sci-fi tale of First Contact and subtlety turned it on its head.

Real astronauts watched the film too, and the crew of Apollo 13, who named their command module Odyssey, were listening to this piece of music just before the explosion that suddenly made the space race interesting again.

3. Whitey On The Moon by Gil Scott-Heron

Armstrong and Aldrin's successful trip to the moon and back inspired a number of pop songs, most fairly trivial offerings. Scott-Heron's spoken word piece though is not. A jazz poet from Chicago, he was very much aware that billions of dollars had been spent on putting two white guys on the moon, whilst millions of his fellow people of colour still lived in poverty.

One particular beef of his, as you can tell from the lyrics, was the lack of affordable healthcare. Still a live issue today, but in 1969, when most working class men would be in the type of job that still came with health insurance, one that was even more racially divisive than today.

Other songs on a similar vein were to be made in the years to come, with Hawkwind's Uncle Sam's On Mars, which compares the destruction of the environment here on earth with the delusions of space exploration, being one of my favourites. This song was the original though, and Hawkwind's knowing riff on the same theme. For it's power and relevance Scott-Heron is the perfect response to Apollo 11.

2. Go! by Public Service Broadcasting

The Apollo moon landings, of course, came with their own soundtrack, and musicians have been sampling the recordings of the astronauts speaking to mission control ever since they were made, but nobody has made such good use of them as Public Sector Broadcasting.

Part of their album The Race For Space, which is made up entirely of sample audio set to music, Go! tells the story of Apollo 11 from the point of view of the folks at Mission Control. As the tension builds we are intruded to the people who will ultimately decide is the eagle lands or not, the Mission Controllers. Under the super-cool direction of Flight Director Gene Kranz, we are introduced to the laconic FIDO (which stands for Flight Dynamics Officer), the excitable Guidance and the rest of the chorus.

The original recordings are out there to be listened to if you want to, although it's not terribly exciting. "The eagle has landed", for example, was said for the press and the actual moment of reaching the moon was marked by Aldrin simply saying "Contact light". Even the very real drama of that did occur during the landing is underplayed.

In the song you can Armstrong call "1202 alarm" as the Eagle descends. This indicated that the spaceships navigation computer, which probably had less processing power than your washing machine, was overloaded with data and was rebooting itself. Kranz turned to 25 year old NASA engineer Jack Garman to make the decision. Abort the mission and America may not achieve Kennedy's dream of landing on the moon before the decade was out. Fail to abort and Armstrong and Aldrin's trip could be one way. In the end Garman called "Go", trusting his programming to keep the computer prioritising the landing. It was the right call.

The young people at Mission Control may not have taken the same risks as the astronauts, but it was their cool that got the fly-boys to the moon.

1. Space Oddity by David Bowie

Well, obviously Bowie was going to be Number One.

Coming out nine days before that 'giant leap for mankind', Bowie has been the soundtrack for the moon landings for almost fifty years. I say 'almost' because the track only reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1969, and most people didn't hear of Bowie again until he reappeared as Ziggy Stardust three years later. Space Oddity was re-released in 1975 and finally became the number one it should have been in '69.

There's nothing I can say about this song that's not already been said. What's interesting to me though, firstly, is how the lyrics owe more to Dan Dare than Neil Armstrong. We have 'countdown' rather than 'launch sequence', 'ground control' rather than 'mission control', 'capsule' rather than 'command module' and so on.

It's also a very maudlin song, a eulogy to the Space Race. The space fantasies of the comic book of the fifties had finally come to pass, and they were frankly a bit disappointing. All this comes across in the character of Major Tom. A remarkably English type of astronaut, he seems to take a jaundiced view of the fame that comes with space travel. And this, don't forget, was a song that came out a week before Apollo 11 took off. Genius.

Top Five Misunderstood Songs

What do songs mean?

That's a more difficult question than it sounds. The process of creation is complex, and the writer doesn't always know himself. Lou reed wrote Perfect Day after a walk in Central Park, and that's what he thought it was about. When other people heard it they thought he was writing about drug addiction, and he seemed to believe them. Mike Oldfield wrote Moonlight Shadow shortly after the death of John Lennon, but claimed that wasn't what the song was about. Was he right? Who knows.

However sometimes it is quite clear what the song is not about, and sometimes it's also quite clear the people requesting it really don't get it. So here are my top five misunderstood songs.

Imagine by John Lennon

Is Imagine misunderstood? Surely everyone gets that it's John Lennon's atheist hymn to a more humane world?

Well, yes, but you wonder if he actually got that when he made the video. That really is the ex-Beatle playing a $40,000 piano in his $2 million dollar mansion whilst singing "Imagine no possessions". I wonder if he could?

However Imagine gets on the list because it is our most requested song at funerals.

Now if you actually are a humanist that's all very well and good, although personally I'd go for Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. However as they're about 2% of the population, it isn't humanists who are making Imagine popular. Instead it's people who are nominally Christian sending dear old Aunty Nora's coffin through the curtain to Lennon singing "Imagine there's no heaven."

Perhaps not a bad little thought experiment to carry out, but there's a time and a place for this, surely?

Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen

A patriotic American song, often sung by patriotic Americans, who only know the chorus. This is a pity because it's actually a pretty good song, if only you listen to the lyrics.

"Got in a little hometown jam, So they put a rifle in my hand, Sent me off to a foreign land, To go and kill the yellow man" goes the second verse, which should give you an indication this was no simple Redneck hymn.

However that doesn't stop it being your number one singalong classic for 'Make America Great Again' voters. Which, of course, leads to the age old discussion of whether this makes The Boss a hero or a zero. I mean, it's one thing to write an anti-war song that gets banned from the TV, becomes a smash hit and gets sung by half a million hippies at Woodstock (take a bow Country Joe). But to write to an anti-war song that gets sung by Trump voters??!?

As Spinal Tap said, there's a fine line between genius and stupid.

Puff the Magic Dragon by Pete, Paul and Mary

1963 and the sixties were just starting to light up. Everyone was either smoking pot or writing songs about it.

Everyone except Peter Yarrow. Instead Yarrow decided to use a poem, written by a friend of an old housemate, to tell the story of an ageless dragon, left behind when the boy he plays with grows up. It's sad, it's poignant, everyone knows the words, and it's not about drugs.

The problem was nobody believed it wasn't about weed. Within twelve months of the song appearing Newsweek were reporting as fact that the boy's name, 'Jackie Paper', was a reference to rizlas, 'puff' meant smoking, dragon really meant "draggin'", 'autumn mist' meant clouds of smoke, 'Hanah Lea' meant a place in Hawaii marijuana apparently grows really well etc

Yarrow has now spent more than half a century denying this, and not from any puritanical motives. If he wanted to write a song about drugs, he says, I bloomin' well would. Meanwhile, stop corrupting a perfectly innocent song that children love.

Indeed, he appears to be so unrelaxed about the issue that it pretty much proves he isn't on pot.


The One I Love by REM

Romantic songs probably deserve their own category, although usually the problem is lyrics being misheard rather than misinterpreted. Jimi Hendrix not singing "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" has inspired a website.

However this song does achieve a special status, owing to the number of people who request it for their girlfriends in clubs, without actually realising what it's really about.

You should always try to listen to REM lyrics, although that can be quite a challenge. Having spent a lifetime around cars, guns and heavy metal bands, I expect that by the time I retire I won't be able to understand even Brian Blessed without subtitles. And if I want to imagine what this will be like, I just try to make out the lyrics of Radio Free Europe.

The One I Love though, can just about be understood by anyone with normal ears, so there isn't really an excuse for dedicating a song to your True Love that refers to "A simple prop to occupy my time", and where the woman in the last verse is clearly not the same one as in the first.

However, unlike the other entries in this blog, I very much suspect that the lyrics of this song were written to be misinterpreted, and that's it's REM having the last laugh here.

Summer of 69 by Bryan Adams

There are lots of songs that are believed to be really dirty, but in fact aren't. Madonna's Like a Virgin being an example, which has been misunderstood ever since Pulp Fiction came out. However here we have a song that is in fact really dirty, but nobody realises.

Adams came up with a bit of catchy soft rock nostalgia here. Pretty much every thinks the '69' refers to 1969, the year of the moon landings, Woodstock and the end of the hippy dream. Who wouldn't want to remember 1969? The fact that Adams was ten when Country Joe was raggin' at Max Yasgur's farm is, presumably, considered a bit of artistic license.

However Adams has made clear that this is not so. It is about the band he put together at High School, and 'Jimmy' who 'quit' and 'Jody' who 'got married' were real people. The '69' was, and he has stated this on the record, a reference to the quantity and quality of sex they were all having at the time. For some reason though this interpretation hasn't really taken off. Maybe it's the lumberjack shirt?

So some people write clean songs that people think are dirty, some people write dirty songs that sound as if they're clean. Bryan Adams writes a dirty song that sounds dirty, and everyone thinks it's about the Beatles splitting up.

Once again, it's that fine line.

Who inspired Suzanne by Leonard Cohen?

'Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river'

 

So it's RIP Leonard Cohen. Poet, song writer and performer even in his final years. He will be missed. But what about his most famous song, Suzanne?

A much covered tune, including by the early Fairport Convention, Suzanne has a melody that can properly be described as haunting.

The inspiration was one Suzanne Verdal, then the partner of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, whose most famous work is a giant fountain in San Francisco dedicated to Quebecan independence. Cohen says that 'everyone was in love with Suzanne', including him, although, as the song says, he could only 'touch her perfect body' with his mind.

She was the one that pout the breaks on the relationship. She said in 2006 “Somehow, I didn’t want to spoil that preciousness, that infinite respect that I had for him… I felt that a sexual encounter might demean it somehow.”

Cohen met her in Montreal, and they would walk by the St Lawrence River before popping back to her place for 'tea and oranges'.

An early eco-activist, she was big into recycling, which is why  "she's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters" and "she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers". This wasn't terribly fashionable at the time and so probably explains the line ‘you know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there.’

Suzanne travelled the world as a dancer and by the late nineties she was living in a home made shack with her seven cats and working as a dance instructor and massage therapist. However a serious accident ended her dancing career and she ended up broke and homeless.

The song appears in the soundtrack of last year's Reeth Witherspoon film Wild, based on the book by Cheryl Strayed, as Verdal was a friend of the author's mother. It seems everyone really did love Suzanne.

So as Cohen humself shuffles off this mortal coil, his works remain, including this wonderful, bittersweet, hymn to a unrequitted, but still beautiful, deep and emotionally charged love affair.

Cohen missed Suzanne, and we now miss him.

Twenty Years On: The Help Album

There have been a lot of anniversaries this year: two hundred years since Waterloo, seventy years since the end of World War Two, and thirty years since the Battle of the Beanfield, the end of the miners strike and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. (Busy year 1985).

But here's an anniversary nobody else has bothered with - twenty years since the release of my favourite charity album. On 4 September 1995 twenty groups went into Abbey Road studios to each record a track. The result is a day-in-the-life of a musical genre at its peak. 

1995 was also the year I returned to England after a two year sabbatical in Ireland. Politically the country was just as moribund as when I'd left, with an unpopular right wing government that by then nobody would actually admit they voted for, but culturally the place was finally coming alive.

I was after the underground protest movement that was springing up, especially the Road Protest Movement, which by then had parted company with the ground completely and was occupying Stanworth Valley, in my home county of Lancashire, to stop the extension of the M65 motorway.

However mainstream culture was also finding its vibe. Madchester had died a little while earlier, but
Britpop was very much alive and well. Guitars had been creeping back into the charts for a while thanks to Grunge, but US misery and fake poverty wasn't everyone's up tea. Instead but now guitar based pop was as much in vogue as it had been twenty or thirty years earlier.

And October 1995 was to be a huge month for British music. First Blur released The Great Escape, then Oasis retaliated with (What's the Story) Morning Glory before finally the relatively unknown Pulp blew them both out of the water with Different Class. All  three albums are pop rock at their very best.

In due course the whole Cool Britannia thing would become just a small Metropolitan elite and Britpop would be just another unreconstructed aspect of male lad culture, but in the mid-nineties it was about Working Class bands from across the country writing music that meant something to them. It was a reaction against both US imported Grunge and locally produced plastic pop. And it rocked.

The government  may have been hated, but the country as a whole was doing better. Since dropping out of the European Exchange Rate mechanism (the precursor to the Euro) the British economy had been recovering steadily. But there were clouds on the horizon. War in the east had led to failed military intervention and a refugee crisis. This time though it was Bosnia and not Syria.

The War Child charity intended to do something about this though and so it persuaded some of the
best and brightest stars of Britpop to enter the most famous studio in England to record an album that would be released five days later. So quick was the process that there wasn't even time to put a track listing together. The result is varied, but very interesting.

Ticking off the stand-out tracks could take a while.

The best track for me is Sinead O'Connor's version of Ode to Billy Joe is a brilliant version of a great song. Having started out as a pop star then turned into a media personality, Sinead O'Connor the performer had almost been forgotten along the way, but she really can sing.

Then we had the founder of Britpop, Suede, with their version of Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding, the Manic Street Preachers with their cover of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, and a nod to the alternative scene with The Leveller's still very relevant song about fortress Europe Searchlights. Searchlights. Paul McCartney and friends, who included Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher, recorded another version of Come Together whilst Gallagher and his brother and their friends, which included Kate Moss and her boyfriend Jonny Depp, re-recorded Fade Away.

There was also Radiohead, Orbital, the Boo Radley's (who I always thought a better live act than Oasis), Portishead, Massive Attack (I usually skip this one), and plenty more including the other half the Battle of Britpop, Blur.

Finally we had the return of the enigmatic KLF foundation, this time under the name of One World Orchestra. Their track The Magnificent was a drum and bass version of the Magnificent Seven theme,  with the haunting sampled vocals of Serbian DJ Fleka "Humans against killing: that sounds like a junkie against dope".

KLF, who had just burnt a million quid to show their contempt for money, realised the irony of their
contribution to a charity album. They said they regretted getting involved and that the track was "shit". However the next year protests erupted in Belgrade against the dictatorship of Slobodan Milošević, the chief architect of the Bosnian disaster, the track became the anthem of the resistance, making the track the most relevant on the album.

Britpop carried on for two more wonderful years, before Oasis peaked, Blur reinvented themselves, Pulp became disillusioned, New Labour got elected and The Verve told us The Drugs Don't Work any more. The world moved on, but the Help album remains a slice of life an the heart of a musical movement at its best, and is still worth a listen.

Top Five Songs About Vikings

The BBC adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom is currently causing me a bit of a crisis of loyalty: should I cheer for the pagans or the English?

Well both, obviously.

Meanwhile, how about a list of Viking themed music. 

(Click on the title to listen to the song).

5. Horrible Histories Literally

Who better to start us off than the best thing to ever come from CBBC: Horrible Histories?

There is of course some real history here, but far more fun is counting the rock and pop references in the Queen-meets-Lordi video.

4. Leave's Eyes Sign of the Dragonhead

Of course you couldn't do a list like this without including some real Vikings. Viking Rock is a major genre in Scandinavia. Some of it is so heavy you need special ears to listen to it, and some has so many folk elements you think you're listening to a Spinal Tap parody.

That still leaves plenty of decent stuff though, and Norwegian-German group Leave's Eyes has been knocking out decent songs more than a decade, as well as keeping Viking reenactors busy in their videos. Founder member and front woman Liv Kristine recently left, casuing a crisis amongst their friends. However her replacement by Finnish born, but British based, soprano Elina Siirala was certainly all right by me. Siirala had been fronting her own band Enkelination since 2011, and they were pretty good. However with Leave's Eyes behind her she done even better.

3. Iron Maiden Invaders 

Power Metal may be alive and well and living in Scandinavia, but it has it's roots in this country.

When punk started to falter in the late seventies, a deluge of bands collectively known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal arrived. Working Class and utterly introverted, Iron Maiden were one of the few bands who escaped this sub-culture and made it megabig.

They were fond of songs about history, and this one is from 1982's breakthrough The Number of the Beast album.

2. The Darkness Barbarian

If there is any band today that channels that spirit of eighties rock excess it is Norfolk's The Darkness.

Hailing from a part of England well and truly trashed by the Vikings, lead singer Justin Hawkins has now stopped getting trashed himself and the band have survived the curse of the Christmas single to become the sort of really together rock outfit they should have been ten years ago. 

1. Led Zeppelin Immigrant Song

But before all of the above got into the act Robert Plant was singing about Vikings on 1970's Led Zeppelin III.

The title is ironic, given the racial problems of 70s Britain, and even more ironically the word 'immigrant' is itself an immigrant, having popped across The Channel from France to steal the job of an Old English word. The real Anglo-Saxons would have referred to the Norsemen - when they were being polite - as ingangers. 

Anyway, Last Kingdom is on again on Thursday, so we can find out how Alfred deals with the ingangers, but it has a rubbish soundtrack compared to these songs. BBC please take note.

Five Cases of Unrequited Love That Inspired Songs

Rock songs inspired by women? Well I could easily done a top one hundred here, or it might have been easier to do a list of songs not inspired by women. To limit the list a little I'm only going to include women who the songwriter, at the time of writing the song at least, had failed to actually get off with.

5. Lillie Langtry inspired Pictures of Lily by The Who

 'Pictures of Lily made my life so wonderful'

A "ditty about masturbation and the importance of it to a young man".

Usually the women who inspire rock songs are people the songwriter has actually met. However in this case Pete Towshend is writing about a woman who died sixteen years before he was born.

The inspiration in this case appears to be a music hall actress whose picture one of Townshend's girlfriends had. Langtry is probably better described as an 'adventuress', as she appears to have done most of her 'acting' between the sheets of various royal beds. Amongst her conquests were apparently the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII of England), the Earl of Shrewbury (then the owner of Alton Towers) and Prince Louis of Battenberg (Prince Philip's granddad). Not a bad little list.

Apart from Townshend, she also appears to have inspired George MacDonald Fraser, who names her as one of the conquests of Sir Harry Flashman VC and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who made her into Irene Adler, "The Woman" who Sherlock Holmes had a bit of a crush on.

As Ms Adler and the great detective never got it together you wonder whether the celibate Sherlock, like the boy in this song, also 'enjoys' her pictures?

4. Suzanne Verdal inspired Suzanne by Leonard Cohen

'Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river'

A much covered song, including by the early Fairport Convention, Suzanne has a melody that is one of the few that can properly be described as haunting.

The inspiration was one Suzanne Verdal, then the partner of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, whose most famous work is a giant fountain in San Francisco dedicated to Quebecan independence. Cohen says that 'everyone was in love with Suzanne', including him, although, as the song says, he could only 'touch her perfect body' with his mind.

Cohen met her in Montreal, and they would walk by the St Lawrence River before popping back to her place for 'tea and oranges'. An early eco-activist, she was big into recycling, which wasn't terribly fashionable at the time and so probably explains the line ‘you know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there.’

She travelled the world as a dancer and by the late nineties she was living in a home made shack with her seven cats and working as a dance instructor and massage therapist. However a serious accident ended her dancing career and she ended up broke and homeless.

The song appears in the soundtrack of last year's Reeth Witherspoon film Wild, based on the book by Cheryl Strayed. Verdal was a childhood friend of the author's mother, so it seems everyone really did love Suzanne.

3. Pattie Boyd inspired Layla by Derek And The Dominoes

 'Layla, I'm begging, darling please.'

The bible warns us against coveting our neighbour's ass, but far worse is coveting the ass of your neighbour's wife. In this case the bottom in question belonged to Pattie Boyd, then the George Harrison, then still a Beatle and good friend of Eric Clapton, who was the one doing the coveting.  

Pattie was a model in the sixties who had one line in the film of A Hard Day's Night. Harrison asked her to either marry him or have dinner with him, and she ended up doing both.

It was Pattie who persuaded the Fab Four to meet the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Eastern mysticism worked for Harrison, but the marriage was a bit of a car crash, literally. Pattie was seriously injured when Harrison decided to drive his Mercedes at 90mph during a blackout along a road still under construction. She survived,  but was soon relying on alcohol and cocaine to get through life with her womanising husband.

Clapton meanwhile had the serious hots for Pattie, and after she turned him down he embarked on three years of heroin addiction, which is a bit of an overreaction in my opinion. What was worse is that he then did the 'sleeping with her sister' thing by moving in with Pattie's younger sibling Paula. Once Paula heard Layla she realised what was going on and moved herself out.

Pattie and Paula had another sister by the way, called Jenny, who inspired Donovan's, Juniper and married Mick Fleetwood. They appear to have been that kind of family.

Clapton eventually quit the drugs, and the pro-Enoch Powell rants, and Pattie quit Harrison. They married in 1979, but it was a very similar story and soon Clapton was sleeping with other women whilst Pattie hit the bottle. They divorced in 1989.

Sometimes unrequited love is best left unrequited.

You'd think this would have put her off men for life, but instead she married again just last month to a property developer. However you can't accuse her of rushing into things the third time, as she has been with Rod Weston for twenty five years.  

2. Debbie Bone inspired Disco 2000 by Pulp

'Your name is Deborah. Deborah. It never suited ya.'

Someone who certainly knows a thing or two about getting nowhere with women is Pulp front man, and coolest dude of the 1990s, Jarvis Cocker.

The Deborah in question here was family friend Debbie Bone. The song apparently pretty much tells it as it was and "the only bit that isn't true is the woodchip wallpaper." 

Bone went on to a career as a mental health nurse and innovator in the field of children's mental health. She was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours list just this year. Tragically she died of bone cancer in January, just hours before she was due to receive news of the award. She was only 51.

She and Cocker may never have been more than friends, but they stayed in touch and he sang Disco 2000 for her at her 50th birthday party last year. The song is a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.

1.  Danae Stratou inspired Common People by Pulp

'She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge'

Another failure to the 'lanky northern git' that turned into a Britpop anthem.

(Lets forget about the William Shatner spoken word version).

There must be a little bit of doubt about the identity of the identify of the Greek student who told him 'that her Dad was loaded', as BBC3 tried and failed to get Cocker to pick out her picture a few years ago, and a Greek-Cypriot artist called Katerina Kana believes it was her. As she does say she remembers Cocker, unlike Stratou, she has a good claim.

However as the only Greek student who 'studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College' at the time Cocker was there, Ms Startou is currently the most popular choice. In reality Cocker didn't take her to a supermarket, or anywhere else. In fact she appears to have turned him down flat and forgotten about the entire incident. A certain amount of artistic license has therefore gone into the song, especially as the middle class Cocker can't really claim to be one of the 'common people' either then or now.

Stratou herself has gone on to be an internationally renowned installation artist specialising in very big outdoor, errr, things. She eventually married a Marxist Professor of Economics by the name of Yanis Varoufakis.

When the left wing Syriza party swept into power in post-austerity Greece, Varoufakis was invited to become finance minister and champion of the common people of Europe's most unfortunate nation.

Stratou and Varoufakis recently had an encounter with some of those common people whilst out for a meal in Athens' Exarchia district. Exarchia is the home of Athen's arty-intellectual-lefty types and is regularly engulfed by anti-government riots that resemble small wars. During the stand-off Ms Stratou stood her ground and protected her husband, showing she is no more phased by balaclava wearing anarchists than she is by amorous 'lanky northern gits'.

Coda

So there we are, the moral of the story? Self abuse can be inspirational, there's nothing wrong with tea and oranges, nice girls should never marry racist guitarists, sometimes it's good to just stay friends and don't worry too much if you are an ultra-cool rock star and the girl you fancy dumps you for an economics teacher.

Six Songs About Cold War Eastern Europe

It is now 25 years since the Berlin Wall came down. A great victory for freedom, capitalism ... and rock music.

Rock music? Well, sort of.

In the run up to that historic day rock concerts in the West Berlin had helped to stoke resentment against the Communist authorities in East Germany.

In 1987 police had to use truncheons and electric stun guns to stop east Berliners listening to gigs across the wall by David Bowie, The Eurythmics and Genesis. Despite this the Ossies still appeared to enjoy the music, but then they'd not heard the real Genesis with Peter Gabriel. In 1988 thousands of Stasi secret police were deployed to stop them enjoying Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson.

In an attempt to defuse the situation the authorities organised gigs in the east by Bob Dylan, Depeche Mode, Bryan Adams, Joe Cocker and Bruce Springsteen. The latter led to thousands of previously good communists singing "Born in the USA".

Then in August 1989 the Russians organised the Moscow Peace Festival. The Soviets clearly decided soft rock wasn't enough and instead booked a line up of the best Glam Metal acts in the world including Jon Bon Jovi, The Scorpions, Motley Crue and Ozzy Osborne.

All this meant that it seemed to people stuck in Eastern Europe that everyone in the West, and even the Russians, were having more fun than them. This set the scene for the events that shook the world. (Hmm, so maybe Greece wasn't the only place where rock music changed things) When the wall eventually fell many present described the atmosphere as "a rock-concert" buzz.

Eight months later another rock concert, by Pink Floyd, with ex-member Roger Waters as well, celebrated these events by playing an extended version of their Prog Rock album The Wall. But The Wall was never really about the Berlin Wall, at least not in a literal sense. In fact I'm not entirely sure what it is about, and I don't think Roger Waters is either.

So here is my list of the top five rock songs that really were inspired by the Iron Curtain that divided Europe for 44 years.

(Click the title to listen to the song)

Heroes by David Bowie (1977)

In 1976 David Bowie quit Los Angeles for Berlin, looking for inspiration and an end to his drug addiction. He turned his back on the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and moved into a simple flat with Iggy Pop. Bowie observed, consisted of bars for sad people to get drunk in. 

The three albums he made in the city, Low, Heroes and Lodger, are amongst the best he ever produced, and for good measure he also co-wrote Iggy Pop's The Idiot. Not for nothing this is usually regarded as the most productive part of his amazing career. Remarkably, this is the only song on the trilogy that is well known. Even that is largely down to its performance at Live Aid eight years after its original release was largely ignored.

The song is about tow lovers separated by the Belrin Wall, which Bowie could see from the window of the Hansa recording studio. The song was the highlight of his famous 1987 gig in front of the Reichstag. 

Vienna by Ultravox (1981)

 

But Vienna wasn't in Eastern Europe, I hear you say.

Well, you're sort of right. However for five centuries, as the base of the Hapsburg Emperors and as the capital of first the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, it effectively ruled Eastern Europe.

Then in 1945 it was occupied jointly by the British, Americans, French and Russians whilst the Allies tried to figure out if the country of Hitler's birth was an occupied nation or Axis power. This the time in which Carol Reed's classic film of Graham Green's book The Third Man is set.

Ultravox pretty much remade the film to produce their seminal video for this song. Half of it was actually filmed in London, with the rest of it done on the cheap on a quick trip to the real Vienna.

The city continued to be occupied until 1955. Then the Russians left on condition that Austria didn't join NATO and all British, French and American forces left the country. This they all did, apart from my dad's unit of the Intelligence Corps which got left behind in Gratz, or that's what he tells me.

The Austrians then sat out the rest of the Cold War enjoying their grand palaces and entertaining the world with an annual New Year's Day concert played by a Nazi orchestra.

Child in Time by Deep Purple (1970)

Not many Deep Purple songs can claim to be about anything much. Indeed lyrics such as "Black night is not right, I don't feel too bright" are usually as meaningful as they get. There's Smoke on the Water, admittedly, which is about something that did actually happen, but apart from that there is ...errr.....Child in Time.

The song is probably more interesting for its layered composition which allows each member of the band to show off what they can do. Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord try to out do each other with extended guitar and keyboard solos, whilst Ian Gillan turns it up to eleven with banshee like screams. He can't hit those high notes now, so Steve Morse's guitar does the job in live concerts.

The lyrics though hint at a range of Cold War themes, including the Vietnam War that was then still on at the time. The song just sneaks into this list though thanks to "You'll see the line, The line that's drawn between good and bad".  Whether or not you believed this literally, this is how it always came across at the time.

The term Iron Curtain was first used for the barrier that came down across Europe by Winston Churchill in his Sinews of Peace speech in Fulton, Missouri. The symbolic barrier very rapidly became a physical one with mines, barbed wire and armed patrols. In the north the soldiers were on the eastern side, but in Greece it was the West that militarised the border.

Toxica by The Plastic People of the Universe (1974)

The story of rock music in Eastern Europe though isn't just about western bands.

Under totalitarian regimes where even listening to music was difficult, forming your own band was never going to be easy, but some people managed it. Perhaps the most influential group on the far side of the Iron Curtain was Czechoslovakia's Plastic People of the Universe.

The band was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Prague spring, when Soviet tanks crushed a reforming government. The name of the band came from a track by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention but their main influences was the New York psychedelic scene of the late sixties, in particular The Velvet Underground.

They lasted about a year before their musician's license was revoked, after which concerts were clandestine. In 1976 they were arrested and charged with "organized disturbance of the peace". Band members received between eight to eighteen months in prison. however this didn't stop them and despite regular interrogations and beatings from the police the band continued.

Like the rest of Eastern Europe they were stuck in a bit of a time warp and still sounded like a Woodstock support act when the Iron Curtain came down. Their influence though has been huge and the peaceful revolution that toppled communism in Czechoslovakia became know as the Velvet Revolution after the band that had inspired them.

Budapest by Jethro Tull (1987)

By the 1980s though the Cold War was starting to thaw and rock music became a bit more acceptable in the east. With local talent having been suppressed it was up to western bands too old or unfashionable to play the big venues in the West to cross the Iron Curtain. Jethro Tull were one such group.

Whilst touring Hungary the band, by then all comfortably in The Middle Age, were startled by an attractive young woman serving drinks back stage without her trousers, inspiring this song which appeared on their next album, Crest of a Knave.

Hungary has a special place in the story of Eastern Europe. Twelve years before they crushed the Prague Spring, Russian tanks put down another revolt in Hungary. In Budapest, the majestic second capital of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, they met fierce opposition and the parliament building still showed the damage when I visited in 1993.

By the late 1980s though Hungary was ahead of the rest of the Eastern Bloc in adopting mild progressive reforms. However not all the anti-communists in Hungary were nice social democrats. Hungary's right wing government had allied with the Axis powers in the Second World War and following the Credit Crunch the country has taken an increasingly conservative direction, with Jews, Roma and homosexuals getting the blame.

Rather like the Ukrainian fascists helping the democratically elected government fight the current Russian invasion this a reminder that your enemy's enemy is not necessarily your friend.

Born to Die in Berlin by The Ramones (1995)

I could easily have done a Top Twenty just about Berlin, or even a Top Five of Marlene Dietrich songs about Berlin.

The divided city came to symbolise the entire Cold War, but Berlin has always been a bit of an anomaly.

Hitler couldn't stand the place and spent as much time as he could elsewhere.

The Communist didn't seem to like the place much more. Their arrival in 1945 was heralded by the slaughter and mass rape of civilians, a crime made all the worse for the victims because the world thought they deserved it.

To many outside of Germany Berlin was a defiant two fingers (or whatever the German equivalent is) to Communism. However to Germans Berlin was a strange demi-monde (or whatever the German expression is) that was neither in the German Democratic Republic, nor properly part of the Federal Republic. It was where a young person could get out of National Service and divide his time equally between radical politics and wild partying.

The most influential Berlin band was Ton Steine Scherben. They played in squats to crowds of New Left students in the sixties, and to anarchists and Red Army terrorists in the seventies. To radicals like Ton Steine Scherben the problem with the GDR was that it wasn't socialist enough.

It's no surprise then that the Ramones felt at home in the city. In the end they survived several visits to the place, although all the original members have now expired in different parts of the world. However they are remembered in the city by the only Ramones museum in the world.

The legacy of Berlin's radical culture is rather harder to find. Although Ton Steine Scherben wound up in 1985, their radical fans were in the vanguard in pulling the wall down. Their dream was a united Germany combining Western freedoms with Eastern socialism.

It never happened.

Freedom they got, but also a form of Capitalism not only more ruthless than the Social Democracy which had won the Cold War, but also less sustainable. Germany, it's true, isn't doing too badly, but across the rest of Europe Capitalism now seems as broken as the Berlin Wall.

Since the credit crunch the number of billionaires in the world has doubled whilst unemployment in some parts of the EU is running at 40% and millions are surviving on food banks. The Cold War may have ended, but many people are still wondering when we will really be free.

Anti-Capitalism demonstration, Berlin, October 2011

Guns 'n' Roses versus Metallica

It was 1987 when I more-or-less simultaneously discovered beer, girls and rock music.

The first band I ever saw was Motorhead, at Southport Arts Centre in 1987. This was the tail end of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) and the era of Hair Metal, but mostly I listened to the dinosaur rock bands of the previous decade; Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and its spin-offs and Hawkwind.

However there were two contemporary bands I was aware who were neither spandex wearing Glam Rockers nor older than I was; Guns 'n' Roses and Metallica. They are both still with us, and both have been candidates for Biggest Rock Band in the World at different times, but their career paths have been a little different.

Round One: 1987

 

Metallica formed in Los Angeles in 1981, one of several bands to emerge from the city's Hardcore Punk scene. However as I was eleven and living in Merseyside at the time I wasn't listening to too much Hardcore Punk at the time.

Guns 'n' Roses came along four years later, formed from the merger of two other bands.

Then in 1986 Metallica released Master of Puppets, probably the best Thrash Metal album of all time. All the songs are great, but it's the title track that sticks in the memory. It is seven minutes of head-banging that is scored like a symphony, and made Metallica a band that even people like me, who looked down on Thrash, admired. Few people usually read the lyrics of Thrash songs, but in Metallica's case it was worth making the effort, and the album includes songs inspired by H P Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and, in the case of the title track, cocaine addiction.

Guns 'n' Roses in 1987

The next year though was when Guns 'n' Roses came out with one of the most amazing debut albums of all time, up there with The Doors and Never Mind The Bollocks. Appetite for Destruction doesn't have a bad track on it and three of the songs; Welcome to the Jungle, Paradise City and Sweet Child O'Mine are amongst the best Hard Rock numbers of all time.

They were initially considered too toxic for MTV. The station eventually agreed to play the Appetite for Destruction once, at four o'clock in the morning, but after fans jammed the TV station's switchboard afterwards to demand more they gave in and the band were on their way to fame. It was hard rock, but so popular they even got played in the trendy discos that girls went to, which was a bonus for me.

There was also controversy in the form of a robotic rapist in the front cover, which perhaps should have raised a few concerns amongst liberal listeners like me, but which we largely passed up at the time.

Metallica in 1986

Metallica always came across as bunch of ordinary blokes who, apart from now wearing better trainers, appeared to be completely unchanged from their days of playing dodgy clubs in LA. G'n'R by contrast were something else. Front man Axel Rose and lead guitarist Slash came from dysfunctional families and had difficult childhoods. Rose was forced to attend Pentecostal church eight times a week whilst Slash had to live in Stoke-on-Trent. A decade earlier they would have made prototypical punks.

At the time I dressed rather more like Metallica - at least until I discovered paisley shirts. However if I'd had a top hat and the guts to wear a man-skirt that's what I would have been doing, because without a doubt their look made them the coolest thing in the world in the eyes of seventeen year old me.

So it's a strong start for both bands, but on balance you'd have to say G'n'R take this, but only by a small margin. So lets put the scores at this point as:

Metallica 2 Guns 'n' Roses 3

 

Round Two: 1988

 

Liberals took a bit more notice the year after Appetite for Destruction though when G'n'R released their EP Guns 'n' Roses Lies. As well as the track Patience, which showed they were also the master of the Power ballad, it contained - against the advice of the rest of the band - Roses' song One In A Million in which he lets loose at a variety of things he hates, includes black people, immigrants and homosexuals. He also had a go at the police for good measure, but G'n'R were now sounding less like rebels and more like my parents.

Metallica meanwhile released And Justice For All. Not quite as good as Master of Puppets, it did contain One, a song about the First World War that manages to be both heavy and meaningful and is one of the best things they ever did. Lyrically the album dealt with themes on ecological destruction (Blackened), corruption (...And Justice For All) and discrimination (The Shortest Straw).

By this time I was running a rock disco at the university in Leicester which, thanks to a low admission price and cheap beer, attracted every rock fan in the city. It was still Paradise City and Sweet Child O'Mine that filled the dance floor, but Metallica had escaped from the Thrash Hour and were getting regular plays later in the evening. So this round is both a musical and moral victory for the Thrashers, a clear two-nil win. The aggregate score is now:

Metallica 4 Guns 'n' Roses 3

 

Round Three: 1991

 

Metallica were on a high. Along with Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeath they were one of the 'big four' of Thrash, but they were getting ready to transcend the genre that had spawned them.

Their fifth album, released in 1990, cost a million dollars and three marriages, but is one the greatest rock albums of all time. It was marketed in a jet black cover a la Spinal Tap and lacked an actual name, a la Led Zep IV.

Like Appetite, there wasn't a bad track on it. Of Wolf and Man is a classic Thrash track, Wherever I May Roam is a well constructed song by band that tours more than most and The Unforgiven is an angry song about the struggle to remain an individual in a repressive society. However the two songs that stand out are Enter Sandman and Nothing Else Matters. The first is a Thrash track with a rif so catchy and commercial it sounds made for MTV whilst the latter is their entry into the Power Ballad category and another candidate for The Best Thing They've Ever Done.

Guns 'n' Roses meanwhile came out with two albums released simultaneously; Use Your Illusion I and II. The albums certainly contained some of their best material. There were excellent cover versions of Live and Let Die and Knockin' On Heaven's Door, the surprisingly poignant anti-war song Civil War and You Could Be Mine ,which was used to great effect in the film Terminator II. Best of all there were two fantastic Power Ballads in Don't Cry and November Rain. The video to the latter was almost a major motion picture in itself, but it deserved the Hollywood treatment being, in my opinion, there best ever song.

However in between there was an awful lot of crap. An awful lot. G'n'R were seemingly incapable of telling the difference between a classic and something they should have left on the studio floor. At this time I was still listening to them on vinyl, so not only was I pissed off that I'd had to pay twice, but also because lifting the needle up when pissed was always a but dangerous so I had to listen to the shit songs to get to the good stuff.

Meanwhile drugs were starting to cause problems. Heroine had rendered Steven Adler almost unable to play the drums and so he was fired. Rhyme guitarist Izzy Stradin menawhile decided to clean himself up but then found he couldn't stand life in the band if he wasn't on drugs, and so he left too. Slash continued to take pretty much every substanced known to man whilst Axel continued to sneer and demand he actually listent to the lyrics of Mr Brownstone.

Mucially though in this Battle of the Bands less is definitely more, and so I award a two-one win to Metallica, making the scores:

Metallica 6 Guns 'n' Roses 4

 

Round Four: 1999

 

The paths of the two bands were now to cross literally. In August 1992 they collaborated on joint stadium tour. Nirvana had refused to be the warm up so Faith No More got the gig. Things went well until Montreal, when Metallica front man James Hetfield accidentally walked into a twelve foot pyrotechnic flame, suffering Third Degree burns, which cut the set short. Guns 'n' Roses came on earlier than planned, but the sound was off and Rose had a sore throat. Disgruntled fans took out their frustrations by rioting.

Both bands decided to follow up there last albums with sequels made up of cover versions. G'n'R managed to take songs such as Since I Don't Have You by The Skyliners and Ain't It Fun by the Dead Boys and rehash them so well they felt like original compositions. However they also decided to add as an unlisted 'Easter Egg' a cover of a Charles Manson song. Not only is the song pointless and tasteless, not to mention rubbish, the whole thing seemed like such a manufactured controversy that I suspected some music industry exec was behind it.

In fact it was all Axel Rose's doing and, like with One In A Million, he pissed of the rest of the band in the process. He also pissed off a lot of the fans with some pretty offensive language and behaviour on the stage, and relationships within the G'n'R fell apart.

The band did make another awesome cover version, this time of the Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil for the film Interview With Vampire. A brilliant song brilliantly used in the film, as it meant they didn't need to ruin Interview by making The Vampire Lestatt. (Or maybe not...)

However things had now gone too far between Rose and Slash, and the latter quit. He was followed by a series of replacement axemen, including one who would only play with a KFC bucket on his head. 

Metallica meanwhile toured and toured. Their album Garage Inc was interesting rather than spectacular. But as it was in effect a tribute to the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands that had inspired them, they are to be thanked for remembering a genre that by this time was on its last legs. So for doing this, keeping going and not behaving like complete idiots, I award Metallica a one-nil win.

The scores now are:

Metallica 7 Guns 'n' Roses 4

 

Round Five: 2008

 

By 2008 Metallica had played virtually everywhere you can play, including our own Monsters of Rock festival four times, and have continued to release albums that, although not up to the best of their back catalogue, are still interesting.

Guns 'n' Roses meanwhile have been in the studio apparently since the last century with all sorts of rumours flying around about what the guitarist was up to. In fact a lot of the time we weren't even sure who actually was their guitarist. The resulting album, Chinese Democracy, must rank as one of the most over-produced and over-promoted in rock history. It's not rubbish, but it is totally forgettable.

One-nil to Metallica then.

Metallica 8 Guns 'n' Roses 4 

 

Round Six: 2014

 

2014 and Metallica play the Glastonbury Festival for the first time, inflicting Thrash classics on the various rich kids and slumming accountants that make up the Glasto audience these days. A whiff of controversy preceded them thanks to Hetfield narrating a documentary about bear shooting in Alaska. However as far as I'm concerned he could shoot unicorns, Metallica were deservedly the Biggest Rock Band in the World.

Guns 'n' Roses meanwhile, having lost every original member apart from Rose, started a residency at The Joint in Las Vegas. With Rose having let himself go a bit since the days he was married to supermodel Stephanie Seymour it seemed they were headed down the Elvis route to Living Legend status.

Rumours of a G'n'R reunion have continued for years, but apparently the main stumbling block is that Axel believes that after his last OD Slash's soul leftb his body and another soul replaced it. This other sould certainly appears to still be able to play th eguitar, but Axel only wants to play the first one.

I think I'd have to award this a two-one win to Metallica giving the final scores as:

Metallica 10 Guns 'n' Roses 5

 

A clear win but...

....if I wanted a Hard Rock/Metal song that could be played to a mainstream audience I'd go for Sweet Child O' Mine over Enter Sandman, if I wanted a Power Ballad I'd opt for November Rain over Nothing Else Matters and if I wanted to air guitar I'd go for Paradise City rather than Master of Puppets.

They may have gone from the Baddest Band in the World to one of the Saddest, but G'n'R will always have a special place in rock history, and my history.