Okay I knew this is right up my alley when I heard that.
This is one of the more entertaining audiobooks I have listened to this year. Not only is Andrew O’Neill a very colourful and energetic writer, he’s also an excellent narrator with an almost limitless amount of enthusiasm for the subject at hand.
Metalheads are an argumentative lot that love being contrarian and are more than eager to split into separate little sub-cultures at the drop of a hat. They are a broad, chaotic church. So any given history of heavy metal is going to be divisive. As a huge metalhead himself, O’Neill knows this, and decides to pre-empt all arguments with the following:
This account of heavy metal is a deeply personal, opinionated one. Metal is a huge subject and whole books could easily be written about each and every band herein. So tracing a line through the history is a matter of editing. Every key band could be substituted for another. While this book makes no claim to be comprehensive, this is my history of heavy metal. I hope you dig it
Fair enough I feel!
So O’Neill takes us through the very earliest of the bands all the way to the present day covering about 50 years worth of music history; never shy with his biases.
O’Neill has a very specific definition of Heavy Metal. Despite some objections, bands such as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, while they influenced the development of the genre and its sound, are technically not metal to O’Neill. And as much as I love these bands I have to agree with him. There’s not enough horror, and maybe too many hippy-trippy ideals.
Grand Funk Railroad are not heavy metal. You can like them, but Grand Funk Railroad not heavy metal. And for a band that he doesn’t technically call heavy metal, O’Neill spends quite a bit of time talking about AC/DC. For me, they are on the very fringes of hard rock. But I agree completely with O’Neill’s assessment that they focus a little too much on their balls…
The real founders of metal come from England’s Midlands: Black Sabbath. I should’ve worked this out earlier but I didn’t really until it was pointed out, but the Midlands are responsible for a lot of heavy metal groups. This is a region that really shapes the genre
The book goes in chronological order from here and each chapter is associated with a different subgenre. I myself am a big fan of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (Which also gets called ‘Dad-metal’, sheesh!). I’m especially fond of Iron Maiden and O’Neil goes into quite a bit of detail here about how they are still sort of seen as a bit daggy by outsiders. He also states that they are consistently overlooked by the music press which is fine by us—metalheads love a consistent underdog. Even if that underdog has conquered stadiums worldwide with their massive tours—of which I’ve attended two.
You can also tell what O’Neill’s favourite genre is: he spent two whole chapters extolling the importance and virtues of Black Metal. He then pops Doom Metal, Pirate Metal Prog Metal and Folk Metal all together, squished up, in a chapter named ‘Genre Inflation: Too Many Cooks, Too Many Cooks!’ So I’m guessing he considers them less important. Although the comments he makes about Manowar are some of the funniest I’ve ever heard.
But provided you not coming into this too seriously—and with metalheads you never know—A History of Heavy Metal is a fantastic read. Or a listen. Because I seriously recommend the audiobook. The issue is when he mentions a certain band, your Spotify or other streaming service is really only a few clicks away… it’s going to take some time to get through the book.
(My first introduction to Andrew O’Neill was years ago when he appeared on the music quiz show ‘Spicks and Specks. And sung of folk metal version of ‘Highway to Hell.’ Which for some reason I can’t remember—because I cannot find the original footage— it heavily used the phrase ‘have a banana’)