“The more it stays the same, the less it changes.”
On October 13th 1990, I stood in a queue of Heavy Metal fans at Birmingham NEC, waiting to see the Clash of the Titans, a tour of 4 high profile thrash metal bands of the 80’s - Suicidal Tendencies, Testament, Megadeth, and Slayer.
I was idly watching 4 guys unload stuff from a bus, when one of them turned and gave me a thumbs up. I realised that I had just been acknowledged by Tom Araya, vocalist/bassist with Slayer, and my absolute hero at the time. As a not quite 18 year old, alone, attending my first ever gig, it was a core memory moment.
Tom Araya (left), and Kerry King, of Slayer
At 16, I was intrigued by Heavy Metal because I really wanted an Iron Maiden t-shirt, but felt that it would be hypocritical to wear one if I didn’t listen to the music. BBC’s Arena documentary finally got me hooked, and I was a devotee until I discovered Goth music in the mid 90’s.
Me, about to scare the pigeons away. Grimsby, 1991.
As my wife will attest, my long term memory is pretty bad. My dad was a prison govenor, so we moved around a bit, and that, along with my tendency to forget stuff that wasn’t in the beam of my immediate focus (my autistic son does this too. We refer to him as a ‘Lighthouse’) means that my life has been made up of ‘chunks’, rather than a continuous flow.
My dad put his career on go-slow while I went through my GCSE’s, so my love of metal co-incided with an unusual period of social consistency. As a result, many of my favourite (and usually bizarre) teen memories are related to Heavy Metal, and the friends with whom I shared it - my best friend ‘Tall Paul’ arriving at a Manowar concert with a bag of satsumas “for a snack”; watching some teenagers with Down’s Syndrome dance with a gang of bikers at a Motorhead concert in Leicester town hall (from which I still have tinnitis), and supporting bands at the Cornhill vaults in a folk duo that I formed with a chap called ‘Oddbod’ (“His name is JONATHAN!”, his mum would scream.)
The Cornhill Vaults, Lincoln
image: The Lincolnite
In 1990, being a metalhead still meant being part of a maligned, and therefore closeknit social group. I loved the energetic camaraderie and the ritual, but mostly, I loved the theatrical, unselfconscious rebellion of it. For a teenage me, fraught with social anxiety, it was an ironic armour. To feel safe, I had to stand out.
I only listen to metal on the school run these days, as its too distracting at work, and too frenetic to make a decent running playlist (If you want to know my go-to running songs, they’re here, and here), but it’s still there, under the surface.
If you were a metalhead in the late 80’s and early 90’s you probably also knew Chris Needham.
Chris Needham. image; Youtube
Needham hailed from Loughborough, and in 1992, aged 17, he made a documentary for a BBC series called Teenage Diaries - a proto-reality show where members of the public were given a camcorder and invited to make a video diary about their lives (I went to Loughborough art college in 1992, and spent a lot of time ‘Needham spotting’).
Needham’s diary chronicled his band ‘Manslaughter’, and the lead up to their first gig at a school concert. Painfully earnest and unselfconscious, Needham lamented the misunderstood skill and quality of Thrash Metal musicians, and gave a pretty epic binary oration on politics, love, vegetarianism and global warming.
The program resonated with me because Chris Needham absolutely, 100% epitomised what it was to be a 17 year old Heavy Metal fan. Actually, Heavy Metal is incidental. Chris Needham absolutely, 100% epitomised what it was to be a 17 year old. I’ll come back to him in a moment.
I got drafted in to college one day a few years back, to work with the new first years on a drawing exercise around Cardiff Museum. I had a chat with one student who was sketching the cracked and peeling plaster of the museum galleries, rather than the artworks. He found it interesting that so much effort was made to keep the artefacts pristine, whilst the ceiling of the gallery was damp and in disrepair.
We theorised that perhaps the museum was like a freezer. A freezer doesn’t create cold. It draws away the heat, leaving cold in its place. Perhaps a museum is like a freezer for time. It draws time away from the artefacts, halting their entropy, but all that entropy has to go somewhere, so it leeches into the building in the same way that the back of a freezer gets hot.
Chris Needham has a youtube channel, so obviously I’m a subscriber. Every time I watch him, I think about entropy. Well, to be more accurate, I think about letting things in our lives go - either consciously or through the natural process of ageing.
Taking things at face value as an observer, 49 year old Chris Needham looks and behaves very much like 17 year old Chris Needham, right down to the posters on the wall and his ‘mosh to camera’ pieces.
He talks frequently about his teenage diary experience, and I get the sense that it’s been a gravitational force in his life, holding him in an orbit that’s given him periods of both light and dark.
With asbsolute respect to Chris, time does not appear to have been kind to him, and I’m not proud to say that an ugly part of me compares my life to his, and is grateful that I left Heavy Metal behind - or at least relegated it to the background. The relatively early deaths of my parents meant that I abandoned small town Lincoln, along with my cohort of metallers, and the local venues we haunted.
“Not for one second did you look behind you, as you were walking away. Never once did you wish any of us well; those who had chosen to stay.
And if that’s what it takes to make it in the place you live today, then I guess you’ll never read these letters that I send from the valleys of the green and the grey”
But the more I think about it, the more I become aware that Chris Needham has something that I don’t. He has held onto a passion in a way that I never have. He has retained the unselfconscious joy of his teenage years. He lives and breathes it, and if there’s anything worth living and breathing, it’s the immense energy and originality in that golden age of Heavy Metal. There’s a palpable link between the scrawny teenage kid moshing in his bedroom and the grizzled, nicotine stained 50 year old, still moshing in his bedroom.
Chris Needham has resisted natural entropy. He’s dug his heels into the ground at a place he loves, and stubbornly refused to leave. The energy required to do this is considerable - all that entropy has to go somewhere, and it shows on his face, and his (frankly awesome) hairdo. Keith Richards has been doing the same thing for decades, but nobody takes the piss out of Keith Richards because he’s out of the Rolling Stones. But make no mistake - Chris Needham might not be a famous or rich rock star, but he is absolutely metal. When Manowar vocalist Eric Adams hollers “Wimps and posers…”, and the crowd responds, “Leave the hall!”, Chris Needham stays right where he is.
I abandoned my metal principles. I am a wimp. I can no longer wear the t-shirt. I must leave the Hall.
I’ve reached out to Chris Needham, to see if he’s up for an interview. I don’t really want to talk about his teenage diary. I want to talk about his passion for classic heavy metal in a world where its relevance and appropriateness are questionable. Most of all, I want to connect with a god-honest metal legend, re-connect with my metal, and hold back the entropy, just for a bit.