Bought - John Menzies, Argyll Street, Glasgow, 1982

Take that!

I am going to start here, not because it’s the first record I ever got, but because it is the first from which I can trace a line through my teenage years and beyond.

I bought this in John Menzies in Argyll Street, in the space now occupied by TK Maxx. This was my favourite shop throughout most of the 70s, mainly because when I entered it I would inevitably leave with a new scribbling pad and a packet of felt tips, crucially containing a new black one. It was always the first to go. 

John Menzies had a record section right up at the back. I was still sufficiently spooked by Virgin Records on Union Street to avoid it if I was going shopping with my mum. After all, there were punks inside. Who probably sniffed glue.

So, John Menzies it was. It had the added value of a large poster rack, which was liberally stocked with pictures of that tennis playing girl with her arse hanging out.  You could sometimes sneak a swift look on the pretext that you were browsing for an A3 Angus Young.  

I didn’t buy this the year it came out, but the following year. I was sufficiently thrilled at the Number of the Beast album, and knew there were other Iron Maiden albums. This, of course, had the selling point that Eddie was holding a bloody axe, having recently offed some poor Duran Duran fan or something. It was grim, and seemed to be taking place in some neon lit nocturnal world evoking memories of TV broadcasts of the Yorkshire Ripper hunt. There was something really seedy about it too, with the barely glimpsed silhouettes of people getting up to actuall shagging behind the net curtains, starting the trend in Iron Maiden covers for seeking out tiny details in the artwork which used to keep us amused for literally minutes at a time. Our teenaged selves where nothing if not prurient.

Hipsters sneer at metal, possibly because most of them are drawn from the middle class. Despite claims to authentic northern working class heritage, it’s probably a fact (I say probably because I have absolutely no way of knowing; you just have to trust me on this) that most Smiths fans, for instance, were probably nice middle class students. Metal fans, on the other hand, recognised the essential escapism of the music. This was music of the working class, in ways that most other 80s music, with its shiny surfaces and aspirational messages, wasn’t. It also didn’t pander to a kind of frayed cardigan elitism of the dispossessed in the way most indie music of the 80s did. There was community in metal music, and it celebrated it in songs such as Denim and Leather, by Saxon, the anthem of the NWOBHM. It was a community of sweat soaked gigs, of provincial watering holes reeking with the smell of cider and lager, of small record shops and market stalls selling patches and bootleg t-shirts.

Iron Maiden fitted this world perfectly. For a start, their logo was easy to draw on your school folders. All you needed was a ruler and a set square, both of which came handily bundled in your start of term maths set. They also had really cool covers which translated into really cool t-shirts. And of course, they had the tunes. Number of the Beast was a number one album, heralded by a top ten single in the form of Run to the Hills. Looking back on it, it seems utterly mental to think of a song about warring cowboys and Indians sharing airtime with the Wham Rap, but it did. What really sold me on Iron Maiden was the spoken word introduction to the title track, though.  Spooky voiceovers were in at the time – witness Vincent Price’s turn on Thriller, also from 1982 – and from the moment I first heard those words from the book of Revelation, echoing round Chris Taylor’s living room from his big brother’s picture disc edition, I was sold.

The trouble was, my own big brother, as they are wont to do, had already decided to buy the album. Hence, I was content to dip into the back catalogue and shell out for Killers. I can’t remember how I paid for it, but I do remember being quite chuffed to own such an obviously transgressive artefact. However, this wasn’t Bruce Dickinson singing; this was some weird looking bloke with short hair, who sounded like he had been gargling with shattered Irn Bru bottles. It was clear why he had to go. He looked like a punk rocker, and that wasn’t really cool in 1983, at least, not to me. In fact, this was a very different beast altogether, if you’ll pardon the pun. For a start, one of the tunes had acoustic guitars on it. I was reliably informed by my brother that this meant it was “really heavy”. Strangely enough, Prodigal Son has ended up one of my favourite tracks on this album, perhaps because it is so unlike anything the band have produced since.  The album also contains a fair dose of the speeding, punkish energy of the debut album, but the arrangements are tighter and the production (the first by Martin Birch) is slicker and more powerful. I confess I had to dig the album out to check what was on it, and even after listening to it still can’t remember how Another Life goes, but Wrathchild is still a beast of a tune and possibly the best their best from those pre-Dickinson days.  

I will probably return to Metal as I blog my way through the shelves over the coming months. I was a massive fan of Iron Maiden in the 80s, and saw them live probably more than any other band, mainly because they seemed to tour every year. However, most the albums in the house belonged to my big brother, and by the time he flew the coop I had moved on to other things. I still keep a place for Killers, though, mainly because it was one of the first few albums I bought with my own money, and also because every eleven year old needs an album with a horrific axe murder on the cover, doncha think?