Music

Metal Monday: Manowar

'Eavy Metal, Music, video
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Manowar arguably is the metal band that does the most to confirm all the prejudices normal people have about metal bands. As The One True Poster over on Bluesky has it, in their consideration of metal albums that should be included in any best of ’88 competition:

KINGS OF METAL is an act of self-flanderization so extreme it rewrote the perception of Manowar entirely, and created a love-hate relationship with metal fans who saw the band as by turns true-believers, jokes, or jokers. To this day there are those who can’t quite believe Manowar is an entirely-serious proposition, despite half a century of rigorous commitment.

This perception of Manowar comes down to the version presented on KINGS OF METAL, and maintained ever since—a ridiculous band making absurd pronouncements of their own mastery on songs that could be self-parody if the band ever winked. Manowar, as a concept, an ethos, a representation of metal, is such a big part of the genre’s psychic real estate that I think the album that captures them at their most Manowar is simply an essential for consideration.

I first encountered Manowar listening to VARA’s Vuurwerk, a Dutch metal radio show presented by the lead singer of the country’s second most famous new wave teenybopper pop group (their sole attempt at an English song, translated for Eurovision), Henk Westbroek (and who’d later be the front man for a right populist local party but then nobody is perfect). For a couple of years the program would run an annuel top fifty with the songs chosen by the listeners and in 1989 Manowar’s Battle Hymn was number fourteen. Heady stuff for a fifteen year old kneedeep ine pic fantasy to listen to.

It immediately madeM anowar one of my favourites, despite or maybe because of how over the top and ridiculous their songs were. You can call it camp, but it’s genuine camp, made from the heart and without an ironic wink at the listener; just look at the absurdity of that live performance: three drummers, motor cycles on stage, flames everywhere. This is high camp but it refuses to be in on the joke. Manowar is the perfect exemplar of something that’s been part and parcel of metal for at least as long as Rob Halford has been swanning around in macho leather outfits.

So yeah, having gotten in the mood for some metal thanks to this I thought I’d return to an old series of mine, last updated in *good lord choke* 2010.

As for my essential metal albums of 1988? I’d go for Death’s Leprosy, Slayer’s South of Heaven, Metallica’s …And Justice For All, Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime, Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and Carcass’ Reek of Putrefaction as the first half dozen that come to mind. These are the albums I listened to as a budding metalhead: they still hold up for me. That decade and a half between roughly 1982 and 1998 or so will always be my peak metal era.

I Am from Bosnia – Take Me to America

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If we have to have quick cash grabbing World Cup tie-ins, make them more like this:


Turns out Dubioza Kolektiv is actually a pretty right-on ska/rock band from Bosnia-Herzegovina, active for all sorts of leftwing causes, if we can believe their Wikipedia page. They originally recorded this song under its proper name, U.S.A. for their 2011 album Wild Wild East. Then it was intended as a satirical take on the desire of many Bosnians to, well, migrate to America. But then Bosnia-Herzegovina actually qualified for the World Cup for the first time ever, by beating Italy even and so…



As the report from TRT above shows, there’s a history behind all this that makes both Bosnia’s appearance at the World Cup and this song so poignant. Today they’re playing their first game at the finals, so it feels fitting to post this. That it’s a skanking ska song makes it even better.

Meet on the Ledge

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Richard Thompson talking about writing Meet on the Ledge as quoted in Andrew Hickey’s podcast about Fairport convention:

It’s a fairly vague song open to a lot of interpretations, I’m proud people can find different things in it. I certainly don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it – a 19-year-old trying to take on big subjects, like transition, youth, old age, friendship, blah blah blah. Sometimes you just hit something. Being young sometimes means you’ve experienced nothing, but in moments you see everything.

That struck me, listening to the podcast on the commute back from work today. It has long been a song full of meaning to me, from the first time I heard it on What We Did On Our Holidays a decade and a half ago. For me it’s always been about grief, mourning and remembering absent friends and family. That I first heard it when my wife was in hospital, where she would eventually die, may played a part.

Sandy Denny dying at the tragically young age of 31, or the tragic accident that happened to Fairport Convention just after recording their next albume may have also played a role. The band after all, almost sixty years on, still use it to close out their annual Cropredy Convention.

It’s a song that’s aged as fine wine, a defiant remembrance of those who went before us into the great unknown and it never fails to gives me goosebumps. Seeing Richard Thompson, who wrote it when he was nineteen, still singing it at age 71 in the clip above, all that history behind him even more so.

De Jeugd van Tegewoordig: Twenty Years Young this Year

Music, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, video
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Still only available in glorious 240p almost twenty years on, Watskeburt:



This was such a hype when it came out. At the time Sandra and I were living near where parts of the video had been shot, which means seeing it again now, twenty years on, gives me an intense wave of nostalgia. 2005 wasn’t the best of years but did saw us move out from our subrented way too expensive flat into our own apartment elsewhere in Amsterdam Noord and this came out just a few months after we had done so. The first and last Dutch rap song Sandra actually liked.