Henry, what the hell is this s£&t? 30+ years ago and I can still remember it like it was yesterday…….

Sorry, nothing to do with fishing today. An old album release flashed up in my Facebook feed the other day, which in turn means that it was about 33 or 34 ago when my dad ran upstairs, stormed into my bedroom, and poured forth the sort of words that every teenager wants to hear from their parents: “Henry, what the hell is this shit you are listening to?” I was a boarding school kid at home for the holidays, I didn’t have much of a clue about the real world, but in 1986 when I was 13 I discovered thrash metal via Slayer’s mighty and utterly peerless album “Reign in Blood” - and my life just got a whole lot better…………..

If you are old enough then you will remember when we used to read paper magazines if you were into something like music or fishing, and at my boarding school I would buy a magazine which I think was called Metal Forces. I was seriously into all things metal by the time I was 13, and in due course I started reading about another kind of metal which was starting to evolve in the US and Sweden especially. You couldn’t go on YouTube back then to check out what a band sounded like, but I do remember reading some album reviews, saving up some money, and then taking the bus to Reading when I was next home. Clutching my cash I went into a record store and bought two shiny LPs which I could hardly wait to get home and spin on some crappy record player I had in my bedroom which at the time I obviously thought was the height of sonic sophistication. “Slowly We Rot” by Obituary and “Leprosy” by Death. How could a teenage bloke who was into metal not want to hear stuff like that? The band and album names were evocative enough, but what the hell did they actually sound like?

So I am 15 or 16 years old and the song above is the first ever death metal song to pour forth from my record player. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but a lot of the fun back then was reading a review and building up a mental image of the band - without knowing whether you would like it until you dropped some cash on a record or cassette. I do know that I started grinning like an eejut at how wonderful and heavy and just bloody glorious this music was which was pouring forth from the spinning vinyl. My stereo was pumped as loud as it could go and I would imagine that the crappy speakers were close to blowing, but damn this was some proper music. My door suddenly bursts open - lucky I wasn’t doing anything untoward! - and in comes dad: “Henry, what the hell is this shit you are listening to? Turn it down right now!”

“Dad, this is death metal. How amazing is this?” My poor folks must have wondered what the hell their eldest son was up to, and of course they uttered those immortal words “you will grow out of this in no time at all.” Here I am though, many years later, a father of two teenage girls who pays taxes and has a mortgage, drives a quite Epic Berlingo, and who never did grow up and out of the best music in the world.