Paradise Lost, metal and babies

You gotta love metalheads! Last night I, along with my 34 week pregnant belly, went to a Paradise Lost gig at Islington Academy in London – as fan and music journalist. So whilst the husband and his photo pass were hanging out with the important peeps up front, I made my way upstairs – wisely thinking that my baby girl, although a fan of Paradise Lost, would not appreciate being crunched against a hoard of sweaty metallers for two hours. Luckily there was a nice comfy couch with my name written all over it, so I sat my ass down to wait for the metal masters of doom and gloom to inflict their brilliance on the night.

After doodling in my notebook for about half an hour, with opener Katatonia blasting away in the background, the dude next to me (aka Mr Metal) offered me a drink – I politely declined. He then asked me what magazine I write for: my little black notebook being a dead giveaway. Side note: pregnancy has forced me to upgrade my typical note-taking and setlist scribbling style that usually involves scrawling on scraps of paper and old movie stubs, dug out of my bag in a frenzy whilst gyrating around with the masses, to a more subdued form of comprehendible sentence construction formulated in my little black book – clearly method two makes me seem more important. Anyway, I told him about ClinkMusicMagazine (the online mag I do some freelancing for) and the ensuing conversation progressed from a discussion about Paradise Lost to metal to gigs to babies.

Mr Metal is married with three boys: his wife is into Cliff Richard and Boyzone and his sons are mini-metalheads who spend their time moshing to System of a Down in their bedrooms. After conversing for fifteen minutes, I established that we have completely different metal repertoires and that it would probably be a bad idea to get into an argument about Rammstein with Paradise Lost due to play in ten minutes. When Mr Metal asked me if I am going to watch Slayer at the end of November, I pushed out my pregnant belly as I told him that Slayer is not really my thing and that my baby may not appreciate being born at a Slayer concert even though it would make a great story (which may well happen at the Killswitch Engage/In Flames gig I am going to on December 2). And that’s when the baby advice started. Mr Metal gave me the whole ‘mediocrity is a bunch of BS’ speech and informed me that it is totally okay to be extreme with babies: take them to watch rugby matches, dress them in black if you like, play them metal straight after birth – instil in them a sense of extremism that defies the fearful mediocre stance adopted by most of society. I thought that I was speaking to a dude version of me: it was kind of a weird moment but it reminded me of why I love metal so much.

As defined by society, metal is an extreme genre that bows to an ethos of defiance and thus tends to attract extremists oozing passion, obsession and opinion. Metalheads can be annoying as arguments about the musical credibility of bands and artists can go on for hours but that’s what metal is about. A sense of arrogant intellectualism often characterises members of the metal fraternity who believe themselves to be a part of a radical movement that defies social norms. Unfortunately, the ironic notion of being part of a collective – as a member of society and as a member of the metal brotherhood – undermines the notion of metal existing as a defiant culture, and this ambiguity often remains lost to metalheads. But this is a topic for another day. What struck me on this night was how the equivocal essence of metal is physically manifested at gigs, which are physical enactments of how the sense of intellectual superiority, created through the supposed exclusivity of the metal genre, is rendered ironic through the barbarism that accompanies this attitude. As Paradise Lost accosted the stage, the evening’s conversation was lost to an impassioned madness, as Mr Metal proceeded to air guitar, sing out of tune and inform me of the name of every song the band played – I let him have his moment and love metal all the more for it.

Tags: mediocrity, metal, Paradise Lost