The Observer 12/12 John Peel: Loud and Proud

[Tom Roche]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1371336,00.html?gusrc=rss


Loud and proud

John Peel was not just a great DJ, but also a fine journalist. Here, 
in this exclusive extract from the introduction to a new history of 
death metal, he recalls his first exposure to the joys of grindcore.

Sunday December 12, 2004
The Observer







The sun shines. Trees bud. If I opened the window, I'm sure I would 
hear birds singing. And this morning, when I took the dogs for a 
walk, I found a fullygrown deer dead in the stream that gurgles past 
our house, half its head blown away by a hunter. This, I thought, as 
I watched the dogs evacuating their bowels at the roadside, is an 
omen from God - or if not from God, from Vashti, Hand Maiden of Baal 
or someone like her - to warn me that I'd better sit down and write 
this. But where to start?

Well, I could whirl you back to the mid-Fifties and try to explain 
the impact that hearing Elvis for the first time had on my young and 
bourgeois life, or I could tell you about the gig I did with Hendrix, 
but it might make more sense to return to a riverside pub in Putney, 
London, at the end of 1986.

I'd trekked to Putney to see the Stupids. Punk, let me remind you, 
had happened nine years earlier and had evolved into art rock 
sub-genres every bit as beastly as the muck that it had, in theory, 
swept aside. What was needed, my BBC Radio 1 producer, John Walters, 
and I felt, was a return to rousing vulgarity. What we were looking 
for was a band that, metaphorically at least, lit their farts on 
stage. The Stupids were that band.

They were funny, fast, loud, clever/stupid and they took the piss out 
of Walters and myself. They also came from East Anglia, where I still 
live and where the deer discussed above died. They were shit hot and 
local. How could you not love them? They also told me - warned might 
be a better word - of another local phenomenon, Extreme Noise Terror.


ENT, with Mick Harris on drums and blue-haired Dean Jones on vocals, 
played from time to time at the Caribbean Centre in Ipswich, so I 
took Sheila, my wife, and our son, William, to see them play. That 's 
the way to bring up your kids.

ENT were amazing. So were their fans. Any track more than 20 seconds 
long was greeted with derisive cries of 'too long, too slow' or 
'fucking prog-rockers' from the faithful, most of whom looked as 
though they had but recently risen from shallow graves alongside the 
A12, the arterial road that runs from London to Ipswich. The only 
disappointment for Sheila, William and me was that the band weren't 
loud enough. We wanted to leave the show with blood trickling from 
our ears.

Well, one thing led to another. At one of those Ipswich gigs, ENT 
were joined by the even faster Napalm Death; at another by the 
short-lived but murderous Intense Degree. All three bands recorded 
sessions for my radio programmes and most of the tracks they recorded 
ended up on the Hardcore Holocaust compilations. Almost everyone I 
knew who heard these compilations, or tracks from them, thought they 
were all crap. A result, I thought. Then along came Carcass.

Who could have failed to be appalled by titles such as 'Exhume to 
Consume' or even the essentially meaningless 'Empathological 
Necroticism,' both recorded and broadcast repeatedly by the BBC?

Then, early in the 1990s, something went wrong - for me at least. The 
wilfulness, the wildeyed exuberance went out of the music, to be 
replaced with... with... what? Well, I suppose it was, to a degree, 
heavy metal. I'd really had enough of that in the Seventies to last 
me several lifetimes, so Slayer, Metallica et al never meant a thing 
to me, I'm afraid. There was also the breaking down of the music into 
subgenre after sub-genre, to the point at which it became somehow 
incomprehensible. The same thing happens, to be honest, in dance 
music. Take happy hardcore, for example. Ludicrously fast, basic to a 
fault, oafish and wonderful - dance purists hated it. Now it is 
called hard trance - or was last week anyway - and they still hate it.

They're missing the point. So it's 2004 and I'm still wandering the 
record shops, still standing among the boys searching the racks 
marked 'metal'; boys who probably assume that this old fella is there 
to touch their pert, young bottoms, and I'm still hoping to hear 
something that will thrill me and make me laugh out loud as Carcass, 
Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror did.

-John Peel






· This is an edited extract from the introduction to 'Choosing Death 
- The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore' by Albert 
Mudrian, published by Feral House (feralhouse.com)