My birthday falls one week into the start of a school term. If I’d been born a week earlier I’d have finished high school in 1985, not 1986. I often wonder if this was a factor in my disruptive behaviour during my final school year. I felt keen to start working, so landed a summer job at a local printers. In the meantime I enrolled at a technical college for art and design students. My taste in music was expanding into alternative rock and heavy metal, as UK chart music began to feel overly corporate.
By the time I started college in ‘86, I bought my first cheap, electric guitar and learned Black Sabbath riffs. By the second year, I had formed my own hardcore band with college friends. Our music was unkempt and blisteringly loud. We reflected the emerging Skateboard Metal scene imported from the USA, while also looking up to the more established British bands like Iron Maiden , Motörhead or Judas Priest.
By the end of the ’80s, alternative rock music offered an unlimited licence for self-expression. The social world of London’s rock clubs was diverse, friendly and welcoming. While this subversive, post-punk scene felt like a counter-culture, the popular metal bands of the day were selling lots of records, without much radio airplay. Live concerts were the driving force behind the success of loud guitar music.
My social life centered on the venues and clubs of Bohemian London. There was a sense of community and a shared passion for alternative music, free of dress codes and corporatism. Music fans mingled with bands, who weren’t really viewed as celebrities. We appreciated their dedication to music and it seemed accessible. There was the hope that, maybe we could try music ourselves with no formal training required.
Hard rock had soon crossed over into Funk and Hip Hop, stirring up a melting pot of subversive genres. The new metal bands were as anti-establishment as rappers Public Enemy or Ice T, who formed his own metal band Body Count. It was this crossover approach to rock that inspired me to form a band. The sound we made wasn’t for the faint-hearted. Like punk, hardcore metal was a commentary on world events, on the flawed human condition and predominantly made by working class musicians.
If the system wasn’t working for you, then loud music and subversive lyrics provided the perfect platform to channel your apathy with elites.
As an 18-year old, the local underground scene in East London was a menagerie of generations. There were middle-aged hippies, in their 30s and 40s, who had lived through the psychedelic era of the 1960s. While younger Gen Xers, like myself, admired the music of veteran bands such as Deep Purple or Venom our ears were also tuned to the hardcore bands emerging in the USA, like Slayer, fronted by Chilean vocalist and bass player Tom Araya, formed in 1981 by guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman (1964-2013).
Slayer’s third album Reign In Blood clocks in at under thirty minutes. Their music defined Thrash Metal, rock played at breakneck speed. The producer Rick Rubin, a populariser of Hip Hop, was the catalyst for Metal/Rap crossover as Public Enemy soon sampled Angle Of Death for She Watch Channel Zero?!.
The records spun by DJs in London rock clubs covered a wildly diverse range of music, including British indie artists Primal Scream or early Blur. Alternative music in the late ’80s and early ’90s was liberating, non-violent and creative. The irony is that alt-rock and indie would soon become the mainstream.
Faith No More’s breakthrough Funk/Metal single We Care A Lot, featuring original vocalist Chuck Mosley, recalled the Punk and Dance records I’d grown up with in the 1970s. It was now okay for hardcore music to have a Jazzy, syncopated rhythm. While Led Zeppelin had dabbled in Reggae and Funk, the crossover rock of the late ’80s was firmly rooted in a diversity of cultural upbringings.
New Yorkers Living Colour fused Jazz and Soul with Hard Rock. Kings X revitalised Prog Rock with elements of Gospel and Blues. There was a comfort zone for everyone, distinctive niches to forge your own identity as both a fan and musician. And all these seemingly disparate musical cultures could happily coexist in a social context. We all shared a common aim to be unique as individuals, with music as our voice against the establishment. Aside from the odd bike gang scuffle, I never witnessed any violence or hatred.
By the early ’90s Washington’s Nirvana, who were already on our radar with their debut album Bleach, suddenly exploded onto the UK pop charts. We were all collectors of, what was then, obscure music from the USA, that included eclectic artists like Bad Brains, Black Flag and the relatively unknown REM.