Milton Keynes National Bowl
July 10th 1999
Confession time: I missed about half the bands on the running order.
We could blame the traffic (a long-established favorite excuse, but that only covers Mercyful Fate, whose set for me was the word "Thankyou", carried by a freak gust of wind as far as the A5 car park turning).
We could blame the fact that, as a journalist and writer, I'm structurally idle, unprofessional and developing the attention span of a gnat. All points are true and if it makes you happy to throw them in may face, then Allah be with you, chummer.
We could blame the bands for being shoddy and poor, but if we do that straight away, with what would I fill the remaining few thousand words.
We could blame the weather, a typical over-sultry British July weekend, exacerbated by the huge crowd that pushes surface temperature up to body temperature, which makes the mosh-pit intolerable.
But the truth is that reviewing a modern, day-long music festival single-handed is becoming a virtually impossible task. Back in the old days (pulls up comfy arm chair, lights pipe and waits slipper-bearing bassett hound) festivals were compact beasts. Take Donnington, 1990. Five bands. I'm not kidding. Half hour break between each one. Hilarious, when you look at it now. It could explain why heavy metal was associated with fat old drunk men with long hair: there was little to do for much of the time but consume vast amounts of wallet-gougingly pricey and rehydration therapy weak beer, then throw the traditional bottles of urine at the crowd in front. You had to do something to break the between-set monotony. Now the situation is reversed: in between second stages, increased bill sizes and the establishment of a series of globe-spanning festivals that have made the warm season the touring rather than recording months, you actually spend some time getting away from the music as a welcome release.
Case in point: the latest in Metallica's occasional Big Days Out, a once in a while day-long festival of no fixed abode or even nationality. Twelve support bands in nine hours. Longest break in between sets was about three minutes. The average queue for a cup of fresh lemonade was about eight times longer than that, so omissions are inevitable. Mea Culpa. I confess, I missed Queens of the Stone Age because stoner rock tests my sensibilities. I missed Symposium because their brand of pogo-happy funk rock needs four walls and a bar to really fly. I missed Creed on purpose, because five more minutes of their cod-rock fronted by a Stars In Their Eyes Eddie Veder impersonator would have brought out some of my more vile tendencies, but trust me when I say they should be stopped NOW! I missed the point of Monster Magnet, whose spacious histrionics I freely admit I just don't understand.
Bizarrely, and contrary to what should be well-established journalistic instincts, I even miss the essentially controversial Marilyn Manson. Not all of his set. I stayed around just long enough to clear up a little point, something that had been niggling at me for ages. There he was, with his sub-Bowie theatrics, his glittery trousers and TV bustier clashing style-wise with the Rob Halford studded arm bands. The self-declared God of Fuck (as an associate of mine pout it, he'd always expected the holder of that title to be taller, but that's a side point) stamps, stretches, wriggles and writhes around a band of overly made-up punks whose prime instinct is to thrash out like bastards and are probably resenting those high collars and lame pants round about now. There's some form of rumbling, shrieky noise emanating from the speakers that does a very good impression of going nowhere very, very slowly and awkwardly. But that's not it. No, no, there's something hideously familiar going on here and I just can't place it... no, no, wait, wait, I've got it. Dah! That's It! I know where I've seen him before. OK, cast your mind back to the 1970s and pick a detective or lawyer series, any one you want. Could be Petrocelli, could be Ironside, could be anything. Now remember the episode in which there was a glam musician that was shocking the great and the good by singing about teen rebellion, and the detective or lawyer kept saying how they just didn't understand this kids music and played some lounge jazz instead, and then the rock star turned up dead from a drugs overdose but it turns out that they weren't an addict (remember, it was the 1970s, there were no recreational drugs users, just addicts back then) but they were really very cultured and refined and they'd been murdered, usually by the manager, because of some complex sub-plot involving demo tapes? You must remember that episode, they all had it. Anyway, Marilyn Manson is just like that dead glam star. A showman. He may dress up his act in suggestions of social commentary about the alienation of youth but really it's brilliantly conceived vaudeville, no more culture-killing than Motley Crue and no less mannered than Bob Hope. I remember this the fifteenth time around and if the young kids get a kick out of it, then so be it. True, the music now obviously lacks the structural and creative impulses that former collaborator and producer Trent Reznor brought, so all that is left is a grab0bag of borrowed histrionics. The on-stage swearing, the cod-politicizing, the leaps into the crowd to start a fight (which is just so Hole 1995, my dears), the tantrums, sticking his hand up his own ass: it's a brilliant performance but, like Captain Hook or King Rat or any other pantomime villain, just not one I'm interested in watching.
It's made even more laughable by the performance earlier in the day by Sepultura. When most bands dare to perform the line "Chaos AD, tanks on the streets", they'd be laughed out of town. When most of the line-up are from Sao Paolo, you know that they may have a slight clue about what that means. That they are dumped in a mid-afternoon dog slot, while Manson merely encourages people to consider an early supper with his much vaunted special guest status, and that in half an hour they are still one of the defining powerhouse performances of the day. Restricted by time and an audience that is still unsure of them after the departure of Max Cavelera, they pass on the more tribal and world music aspects of their catalogue, charging full-speed into thirty minutes of thrash classics. Yet their diverse influences, from Brazilian tribal rhythms to Discharge covers, permeate their work so much that even a simplified set is more berserk, diverse and masterful than ten thousand ambient albums. If Max's parting has left one problem, it is in that the guitar sound is slightly spartan, rather than the old sound of a thousand jungles being uprooted as one, but it does allow a concentration upon percussion. They're sill the sound of something primitive stirring and if you can find a primal roar to match Roots as a set closer, you'd better already be manning the barricades.
That Manson was billed over them is a crime: that Ministry, from whom so much of his work is directly pilfered and then rendered anodyne by his Ratt tendencies, have probably left the county by the time he's finished waxing his chest is just implausible. If you want to talk about spontaneity, about on-stage craziness backed by the soundtrack to a possible Armageddon, there can only be Ministry. Recently deprived of long-time hired hand and cohort William H. Tucker, who tragically died at his own hand a few weeks ago, it could have been an ill-rehearsed mess, but if Ministry have ever managed one skill, it is musical perfection. Swollen to a five-piece on stage, there's never a note out of place, even on severely re-modeled tracks such as a grungified Psalm 69 and a far more grinding retelling of Thieves, performed by session men that make the tracks their own. At the core remain messrs Jourgensen and Barker, a pairing at odds in every way but still inseparable. Barker, bleach blonde, impossibly cool, striding onstage and reshaping rather than playing his jet-black bass. Jourgensen deranged as ever, no longer the dark lord of threat that Rob Zombie has copied note-perfect for so long, but instead the twisted fool, aping every rock cliche. Clad in a hockey shirt that comes to his knees, wielding an electric banjo and clutching his knee to his chest, miming falling off an invisible monitor, blowing the mike out one minute than sloping off to hop on to a speaker stack and fake-conduct the proceedings. No-one, seemingly even Barker, could tell if he was going to make the set a classic or take a ten-minute fag break. Yet the performance merely highlighted how much of the two men it represents: Barker's sense of order provides contrast and context for Jourgensen's total devotion to chaos. This band isn't just too smart for a day like this. They're too smart for civilization.
Neither band got the best reaction of the day, but that's not due to the performance or the crowd, but the air. It's not purely the weather, although that's a significant factor. The British festival season is plagued by the weather, attempting to find a happy medium between too hot and too damp or to cold and too damp. However, this year the swelter was a crowd killer until the late afternoon, giving a strange twist to the bands that received good reactions. Yet even they couldn't defeat what has to be one of the worst sound systems I've ever seen at a sizable gig. Non-existent treble, mid-range that seemed to flick between speaker stacks and bass under water suppressed the elegance and structure that is essential to both, to the point that several Ministry tracks that revel in a multi-layered studio version on album were scarcely recognizable even to determined fans like myself.
Both Sepultura and Ministry have established fan bases and so have space to fight back from any failures of the day. Pitchshifter, the UK's leading industrial hopefuls, need this kind of stadium exposure, just need to be seen, so that people can judge them fairly. I actually refuse to review them under these circumstances, because I know that their approach to music is to create as make your ears bleed by insinuation and penetration, not brute force. Rarely has such a promising band been so ill-served by a gig.
The day required someone who can swim over technical difficulties by just ignoring them. Not surprisingly, Terrorvision came, played, boogied, had a laugh, went away. It's a testament to the all-welcoming nature of the metal crowd that a band that tap so directly into the primitive roots of rock and roll have become such a sensation. Short hair, white suits and a woman on keyboards (a woman? At a metal gig? How absurd! Call the Queen!) can't disguise that a superior party band, bastard offspring of The Kingsmen, can play a fifty-thousand strong crowd like a Frat house. Mad Tony, deranged drummer Shutty, the two lean greasemonkeys on guitars and a tiny, ecstatic keyboardist show everyone how this is done and reminds the world that a day like this is supposed to be fun.
However, their presence is less of a surprise than that of either Ben Harper or Placebo. Now, let's be clear about these people: Ben Harper, lap-guitar folk-funk guru, and Placebo, effeminate art-indie rock. No place here, eh? Wrong day, eh? Well, no. Harper has his audience, who appreciate his musicianship and warmth or performance, a professional with a grace that Manson will just never get. In a small club, probably scorching. On a stage like this, maybe ignored by many but undeniably a welcome respite who got more than a handful of cheers. As for placebo, to suggest that they don't belong here is insanity. Of course they belong here: maybe en years ago, no, but ten years ago gumby metal was on the verge of being eviscerated by the hardcore and thrash scenes, both far more socially and politically inclusive than their beer-bellied ancestors. Anyway, they sound like Rush circa Permenant Waves. Make-up or no, they rip through the brittle Pure Morning and Nancy Boy like Pantera out-takes and, ironically for a band that claimed to not be at all metal enough for this bill, indulge in a five-minute feedback atrocity for an encore. How very King Crimson.
All of which may have you wondering what kind of metal day this is. What could Terrorvison, Sepultura, Ben Harper and Monster Magnet have in common?
Well, one could ask whether it is even a metal day. After all, very little of it goes grumble-grumble-WAH! And that's normally an indicator or metallic tendencies. But that's too simple an assessment, because it might lead one to believe that metal is a dead genre. It's the old game: there's a perennial claim that heavy metal is dead, that no-one is interested in listening to that long-haired gumby nonsense. Then mid-way through the summer one of the biggest one-day festivals of the UK summer music scene turns out to be (gasp, shock, horror) a metal festival.
Metal is no more likely to die out than pop or jazz or the blues: it's also no more likely to survive any longer than any other musical form and considering that none of them is over a century old, they've still got to prove that they have the same innate survival instinct as madrigals (hey, they may be dull, but people still play 'em). However, like any other music form, it evolves, has peaks and troughs, shifts in popularity and content. It's hard to recognize the technometal of Korn and the hyper-thrash of Fear Factory as even being the same genre as the metal of the eighties, all poodle perms and budget re-releases of Topographic Oceans. However, it is now extremely diverse. Last year's Ozzfest, held on the same sight, was possibly the greatest possible gathering of thrash acts around, but it was channeled to that purpose. The Big Day Out has always been more about the diversity, much as Metallica themselves are: take the original, back in San Francisco in the early nineties, with a line-up that took in the juggernaut grind of Soundgarden, the punk gentility of Pearl Jam and the prog bombast of Queensryche. A band as heavily influenced by Bob Seger and Blue Oyster Cult as they are by The Anti-Nowhere League and Motorhead, Metallica have explored the limits and brought people to the fold by creating a sound so unique but so much part of a host of traditions that it's almost impossible to dislike every track they have ever done. One could almost say that metal is the music liked by people who like Metallica.
Metallica are an institution. If there's any givens in this world it is that, every couple of years, Metallica will release an immensely successful album and then tour for what seems like a decade. They'll always perform One, they'll save Enter Sandman for an encore, they're pretty likely to refer to the audience as "Friends" and James Hetfield will say fuck a lot. You turn up for Metallica, you know what you'll get. Two hours plus of huge, powerful music. The hairstyles may change, but they're the Metallica touring revue. You know what you're there for, they know why you're there and there will be much loud noises. The end.
That's the problem. Everyone thinks that they know Metallica and they've become predictable. People forget that what they are predicting is The Greatest Live Act on the Planet. The End. They could turn up, mid-afternoon, play a half-hour warm-up set for a supergroup comprising Johnny Cash, Bill Gould, Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, John Bonham and Bill Ward and Martin Atkins, while Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks wander through the crowd telling knock-knock jokes and your only comment on the way home would be "great gig but hey, did you catch that support band?"
They're the band that everyone forgets that they love. The metal crowd waffles on about whether Machine Head will ever put out a good album again and whether Glenn Danzig should go back to the Misfits. The old man balding rockers will bitch about how nobody has recorded anything to match Deep Purple In Rock, then settle down with some cocoa to watch a fifth generation copy of Slade In Flames on Betamax. The non-rock crowd will argue about whether Steps or S-Club 7 are the future of teeny-bop. Find one person amongst that cross-cultural sprawl whose gut instinct to the opening chords of Nothing Else Matters isn't to lift their lighters aloft and recite the lyrics that they all have memorized note-perfect, I dare you. Find someone that won't punch the air to King Nothing.
At the end of the day, words like metal don't help in talking about Metallica, because it's a limiting definition. It may be loud music from men in black, but there's something else at play. It's the something that picked them out from the crowd of thrash hopefuls of the eighties to be one of the biggest bands of the nineties. It's an honesty, a vibrancy that makes them fresh and vital. This isn't a band that has been churning out the same old, same old for a decade and a half. When they charge out to their fanfare of Breadfan, the only sign of age and experience is the skill with which they turn what could be a spiky mess into a stadium-filling shockwave. An audience that had been wilting and waiting to falter risks permanent damage by banging the head that had given up being banged when they got their mortgage, while junior rockettes up way past their bedtime flail like spasming furbies. The passion and excitement ripples through the air, channeled direct from the speakers. This is huge and all-encompassing.
It's hard to take a step back and really analyze what seems to be an adventure powered by gut instinct, but Metallica are undisputed masters of this kind of gig. After a decade of solid stadium tours, they better be, but it's the grasp of tempo that they have achieved. It's not just about whipping the crowd into a frenzy: indeed, there are times when slowing the gig down, to allow recovery time or to give the crush at the front time to find its feet again. An unexpected game or call and response between bass and crowd, or a rendition of Thorn Inside that was calming the crowd back before it had a name, keeps the audience alive enough to relish the caustic nailbomb of Of Wolf And Man or the cry to the damned that is Thing That Should Not Be. It's a further testament that, after so many gigs, they can still turn out a few surprises for the die-hard fans. A full version of Master Of Puppets is thrown in, along with the long-forgotten Battery as a final encore.
What can't be ignored is that, amongst all these bands and all these styles and all these songs that have turned up and played and been performed today, Metallica will still be talked about in twenty years time. Every gig they do and that you attend is like being able to say you say Elvis before he went into the army.
RMW