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.
