It’s really hard to be a metalhead if you have the wrong sort of hair. As a teenage thrash-metal fan in the 1990s, I was at a disadvantage: while my friends’ hair hung long and lank, mine sat immobile, like a young Douglas Hurd’s. You can’t headbang effectively with a brillo pad stitched to your scalp.
This was a problem. For a while I tried a bleached-blonde mohawk — I looked like a prat, but you couldn’t fault the commitment. A chin-only beard was a nice idea, but I was not a hirsute teen and after several months’ growth I looked as though I had a tennis ball made of pubes stapled to my chin. But, of course, the obvious option for the wavy-haired metaller is to go full skinhead, and that is what I did: buzzcut, grade zero.
In 1998, aged 17, three friends and I went to OzzFest at the Milton Keynes Bowl. It was a heavy metal festival organised by Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath; it had various luminaries of the metal scene playing, including Fear Factory, Slayer and Pantera. My scalp was freshly shorn. It was a blazing hot day; I was too young and self-conscious to want to show weakness by applying suncream, and, of course, I was drinking and smoking weed all day, because that is what you do at a festival when you’re 17.
On my second or third venture into the moshpit, the physical activity, and the drink and weed, and of course the relentless sun on my gleaming bonce, became too much for me, and I started to faint. Fainting in the middle of a large moshpit is not a very good idea. Luckily, a group of skinheaded young men spotted me going pale, grabbed me by the arms, and cleared a path out of the crowd for me. I like to think they were doing so out of solidarity.
I’ve been thinking about metal lately, because recently, one of the formative albums of my youth turned 30 years old. Metallica’s self-titled album, also known as The Black Album, was released in August 1991. I graduated slowly from rock to metal in my teenage years, going from Queen to Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam, to Metallica and Faith No More, and eventually Pantera, Carcass and Fear Factory. It was probably The Black Album which did as much as anything to push me along that route. And Metallica were the first band I saw live, at Earls Court in 1996.
It’s probably not so true nowadays, but in my youth metal still had a hint of danger about it. Men wearing make-up and long hair was still mildly shocking to people who remembered the 1950s, and a lot of people still did back then. When the Columbine massacre happened in 1999, conservative voices blamed it on Marilyn Manson (and the video game Doom, something else I spent a lot of my youth playing). Not that long earlier, there was a serious societal concern that heavy metal was encouraging Satanism among American youth. Geraldo Rivera made a documentary saying that heavy metal encouraged devil-worship.
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