The Best of Metallica (part one)

 

I’ve seen a few articles online recently where an artist or band’s entire discography is ranked from worst to best. It is something that can lead to great discussion and argument because the writer is invariably “wrong”.

The Fear of Thunder over London

 

This blog has been sadly neglected for a long time, so it’s time to blow the dust off it and crack on.

Planets of the Damned

 

The other day I remembered an utter shit of a man I used to work for. I was a kind of odd job man for him, even though that wasn’t what I was really employed for, but that’s got nothing to do with this story. He would sit in his “office” which was actually his spare bedroom where there was just enough room for him to sit at his computer due to the piles of utter tat and rubbish he had piled up to the ceiling. He would play music very loudly through some quite decent speakers while I painted his stairwell or cleaned his bathroom or grouted some tiles or took the rubbish out to provide entertainment in between bouts of screaming at me for doing everything wrong.

Symphony of Destruction

 

When S&M came out, I was in my 20s, I worked in a pub and I still had a reasonably full head of hair. I wondered why they chose the title at the time. Was it because James Hetfield liked to dress up in leather and smack a heavily restrained and ball gag-wearing Lars Ulrich across the buttocks with a plank of wood with a nail sticking out of it while yelling “FIRE WO-MAN!” at the top of his voice? Or was it just short for Symphony and Metallica? Probably the second. Or at least, something close to that.

Start Today

You know you’re at a hardcore gig, because the singers of hardcore bands at a hardcore gig have between song banter like “this is a hardcore gig” and yell out “HARDCORE!” during instrumental breakdowns.

Everything Went Blackpool

I’m a bit late with this year’s review because, well, I had to spend a week piecing together the fragments of a drunken weekend like a 1,000-piece jigsaw with five pieces missing and where 90% of the remaining parts are near-identically-shaped pieces of blue sky.

Sleazy Does It

Morecambe is grim. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Despite the sunny day when I arrived and the lovely view of Cumbria across the bay which has claimed the lives of many a Chinese whelk-picker, it is still an absolute rectum of a town.