Remove all the wheelblocks, there's no time to waste!

Those of you with memory spans that weren't wiped out in your late teens and early twenties by vast amounts of military grade amphetamines and industrially synthesised LSD will recall that in the last post I was wittering on about my early manoeuvres through the heady world of Heavy Metal. I got thinking about some of the other ridiculous things I did when I was finding my feet musically. I mentioned that my introduction to the world of Metal was through Kiss, I only ever owned one record by them and that was Dressed To Kill. It had been bequeathed to me by my uncle, he'd long since realised that they were just a bunch of 60 year old Jewish Grandmothers and off loaded the album onto me when I mentioned seeing them on Top of the Pops. This was the first LP I truly owned myself and I played it until the grooves ran out. I apparently loaned it to Al Sithee for a time, telling him that Anything for my Baby was the best track on the album. But besides this small interruption it was rarely off my turntable.

What the fuck was I thinking?

As previously mentioned, I was a rather fickle child and seemed to be only able to like one band at a time. When Ninjasaurus Rex learned of my interest in long hair and guitars, he loaned me Iron Maiden's debut album on cassette. Now, Ninjasaurus was already way ahead of me in the music stakes. He'd been listening to Hawkwind since he was in nappies, for fuck's sake. I had a lot of catching up to do. I'm sure he felt like he was doing me a great deal of good by opening my mind to new bands. Little did he know how fickle I was. The moment I heard Maiden, I rejected Kiss out of hand for the disco sounding stuttin' cocks that they are. Maiden was a band that was so metal they were creating new types as of yet undiscovered metal and adding them to the periodic table. They probably had a laboratory somewhere on the Rhine where they were synthesising alloys day and night. I made a copy of Ninjasaurus' album and with the lack of a proper album cover, I conceived my own, based on the original but drawn up in Biro and felt tip pens. Unfortunately this didn't survive the later Slayer cull and I don't have a copy of it anymore for you to laugh at. You just have to imagine the front cover of Iron Maiden's debut album as drawn by a retard armed with a spatula and a plastic bag full of tramp's sick and you might get the idea. Mind you, this is how Derek Riggs seems to paint all the Maiden covers anyway....

Needs more sick...

Anyway, The reason I'm telling you this is to emphasise just what was going on in my mind when I was a child. I have always been interested in making models, when I was a wee lad it was model aeroplanes. My bedroom was full of Spitfires, Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs and Black Widows. I was a child obsessed. I loved aeroplanes and when I first heard Aces High by Maiden, it blew my tiny fucking mind. Here was a band that were more metal than anything I could ever imagine and they were performing songs about aeroplanes! They even referred to Messerschmitts as 'Me-109s'. They knew what they were talking about! They weren't just making this shit up! I fucking loved that track and I got so obsessed with the song that I looped it over and over again on one side of a C90 cassette so I wouldn't have to keep rewinding the tape at the end of the song. Forty five fucking minutes of Aces High. This was back in the days before CD players and programmable repeat patterns. This was old school. The analogue way of doing things. I would sit for hours at my modelling table, listening to an endless (for forty five minutes) loop of Aces High, whilst inhaling a heady mixture of Humbrol enamel paint, polystyrene cement and white spirits. There's no wonder I turned out like I did.

I FUCKING LOVE THIS, ME!!

As I said, I was a fickle child, even stripping down my musical obsessions to the bare bones by repeating one song over and over. This theme actually continued when I discovered Slayer. I borrowed the album Reign in Blood from the Rovrum Library and this shit literally melted my fucking face. As soon as I heard those opening bars of Angel of Death nothing was the same again. It was like I had been held down on the living room floor by intruders intent on causing me serious aural damage. This was no longer playtime. The big boys had arrived and they had knives. (Now I can just sense I will get a load of abusive comments about South of Heaven being a better album than Reign in Blood. This is simply not true. South of Heaven, although fantastic, is the lesser album. The band were hardly speaking to one an other during the recording of South of Heaven and this disjointed approach comes through on the album. Reign in Blood is perfection. The fact that the themes of the final track (Raining Blood) can be heard building in crescendo through the two previous tracks is just one example of the brilliance of the album. The whole album holds together far better than South of Heaven, which has great tracks amongst its numbers, but feels like there is a lot more filler on South of Heaven than on Reign In Blood. I play it now and it is still as fresh as it was in 1988 when I first heard it. There, that's why it's a better album, if you disagree you are in error.)

It just is. Deal with it.

So I recorded the album, but my dislike of rewinding tapes reared it's ugly head once more and I recorded the first two tracks of the album at the end of the tape and to this day (I still have my original cassette recording of Reign in Blood) Angel of Death still bursts forth when Raining Blood has finished. This is not the only relic of my past that is encased on this particular tape. The tape I used to record Slayer on was the Aces High loop cassette. It was probably my way of wiping out the past. A stepping stone, if you will. A closing of a chapter, some might say. The problem is that Reign in Blood is only about thirty minutes long, even with two extra songs tacked on at the end, this only adds up to about thirty five minutes of recorded material. To this day, as I play the tape in my car, the end bars of Piece by Piece are replaced by about four looped recordings of Aces fucking High.

I ain't drunk, I'm just drinking...

Apparently according to Alejandro from Facefuck I have been a little slow with my Blog posting of late. Fuck off, it was only three days ago that I last posted. I was going to write a new one last night but tiredness overcame me and I was unable to lift my head, never mind write anything of note. And what brings on this bout of torpidity? Drink, pure and simple, drink. I'm an old man now, I can't drink as much as I could ten years ago and my body tells me that every time I try to drink as much as I did ten years ago. Which is pretty much what I have been doing for the past four days. I'm sure you will recall I spent Friday and Saturday both on the batter. I was going to have a wee rest for myself on Sunday until Vin texted me at about five o'clock to tell me he was engineering sounds at a METAL gig at Stereo. York and Metal are two things that don't always mix so I thought I'd take the very rare chance to check out some of the local bands.

York's attitude to Metal...

The main band Cairngorm, were OK, the lead singer had a fucking amazing growl on her. She just needed to drop the clean vocals and they would be a million times better. The other two support bands were very mediocre, so much so that I can't even recall what they were called. Mind you, I was already against one of them when Vin told me their guitarist had stolen his missus years back. I told him he should mess his guitar sound up as recompense. But he's a professional and refused. So I offered to fill my bottle with piss and sling it at him instead. I digress. The best band by far were the second on the bill, Fortress, total black thrash attack. They were fucking great with their battle armour and spikes. They cleared the room as well, which gave them points in my book. Afterwards Vin invited me to the open mic night at Dusk. It made quite a change, listening to white man's Delta blues. It was like being locked up in a cell in an Alabama prison. Except we could leave when we wanted and wouldn't get raped in the showers. This evening finished at three o'clock when I finally crashed out in my bed, pissed as a newt...

Who's house is this?

With the taste of a dead cat in my mouth the next morning I walked over to King's Manor for the First Year Exhibition of the excavation that I had been supervising on. I was there mainly for the free wine. As I arrived I saw steams of students walking out. I asked why they were leaving and they told me that the wine was disgusting. Fucking trust fund babies. In my student days we would have drunk bleach if it was free. Anyway, after the wine had gone I went along with the remaining students to various pubs, where they all got drunker and drunker and clumsily flirted with one another. This seemed to involve punching one another or bellowing in each others ears. Who said romance was dead, ay? I found myself in the pit of Hell, also known as the Willow Restaurant, the maddest ex-Chinese resteraunt (they lost their food license) in the North of England. Taking my leave, I don't remember how, I ended the night at Alia's house saying goodbye to her for the 67,927th time this week and stumbling into a taxi after twelve hours on the sauce. There was meant to be one final drinking session last night at the end of year King's Manor party, but my body reacted against me and I couldn't even move out of the house.

Taxi for one!

And finally. I posted John's Satnav back to him on Tuesday at about two o'clock. I texted him to let him know that I had and to tell me when it arrived. He thanked me in the reply and I asked him if it had arrived yet. The conversation then went as follows:

He: No, I'm stood at the front window waiting for it. I saw a parcelforce van go past but he didn't stop. He might have just got lost, I'll tell you if he comes back

Me: Keep me updated, I'm gasping to know what's happeneing.

He: I saw a black man outside on the street! You have no idea how rare that is here. He looked lost too. Still no parcel.

Me: Fucking Post Wankers, I sent it two hours ago, what are they playing at?

Then I heard nothing until 11:54pm when I got the following text:

He: I don't think he's coming today. I might go to bed in a bit.

Me: Hmmm, I'm not sure you should. There may have been a crash on the motorway that delayed the van. Give it a couple more hours.

At 07:44 the next morning I receive this:

He: I'm really tired. It must have been a bad accident because he still isn't here yet.

Then at 10:28 the final text comes through:

He: OMG it finally came, the man looked okay I don't think the accident was all that bad, I'm going to sleep now, thanks alex.

You really can't make this shit up.