CHAPTER 7

SHOWING ALL 12 RESULTS

Quiet Riot

I got hold of Quiet Riot in early 1983 and it was the start of some golden years of metal.  Their cover of ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ went straight to the top of the charts and the anthemic album opener ‘Metal Health’ with it’s cry of ”Bang Your Head” must have been played out of the windows of a couple of million cars in 1983.  It was a party band of note.

The influence of MTV in the 80’s cannot be over emphasised. I doubt whether any of these 80’s hair metal bands would have sold as many albums as they did without it. Suddenly rock music was in everyone’s living room. This video is pretty typical of the times and although I wasn’t getting MTV in South Africa, it’s influence was felt by the way there seemed to be a new band every month. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, the 80’s was a great time to be between 15 and 25.
JAMES DAUBENEY

Autograph

I got into this band while I was in Hornet, it was one of those songs that we were all trying to subliminally replicate.  Songs like this were suddenly all over the US charts and guitar solo’s were king.

The budgets for the video’s steadily got bigger and bigger, it was getting to a point where record companies were paying out a fortune to all sorts of directors and film makers in an effort to compete. Video’s were costing more to make than their albums but without them you wouldn’t get on MTV and without getting on MTV you weren’t gonna be seen.
JAMES DAUBENEY

Tom Petty

Tom Petty had been around for a long time, His breakthrough album Damn the Torpedoes was released in 1979 and he was a great favourite at high school.  Tom Petty was one of the artists who really made some great video’s and the MTV explosion really benefitted him greatly.

One of the reasons Tom Petty has had such a long career is that he is such a great songwriter. Tom has been able to go from full blown AOR records to more mellow bordering on country / folk albums like Southern Accents. He has had massive hits and then he just seems to throw it all away and refuse to be a pawn in the record companies game.
JAMES DAUBENEY

Lynryd Skynyrd

Skynyrd were really a 70’s band and the matrics at school were listening to them when I first went to Potch.  It was only after I finished school that I could actually afford to get some of these albums.  Len and I used to sit in his pub and have a whole lot of toots mixing in all the brand new 80’s stuff like Quiet Riot, Q5, Night Ranger and Autograph with timeless bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Journey and ZZ Top.

Skynyrd is timeless and they are the best example of Southern Rock that you will find. In today’s great resurgence of Southern Rock they all acknowledge the debt that the world owes this band. This video is just so good, check out Gary Rossington’s slide guitar on this, it just doesn’t get better.
JAMES DAUBENEY
ZZ Top

ZZ Top

ZZ Top are probably the least likely band to suddenly become international superstars after being around since 1969 and not really getting anywhere.  While most bands were pretty much broken up or in the twilight of their careers the ”Little Ol’ Band from Texas” suddenly blew up like a supernova and sold 10 million copies of their album Eliminator.

This is the classic video that pretty much everyone growing up in the 80’s saw first. It had it all: hot chicks, Hot Rods and these 3 strange looking dudes. Eliminator was a fantastic album and ‘Gimme All Your Lovin’ ‘ was a huge part of why it sold so well. Once the ZZ guys cottoned onto this formula they rode it for all it was worth \m/
JAMES DAUBENEY
John Cougar

John Cougar

John Cougar never wanted to be called John Cougar he wanted to be called by his real name John Mellencamp.  The record company didn’t want to hear fuck all about John Mellencamp so he was marketed as John Cougar.  It didn’t take long to hit the big time and as soon as his American Fool album went to No1 on the Billboard 200 he could pretty much call himself what he liked.

I recall a classic story I heard in an interview with John Mellencamp. He reckoned that he is a very lazy guy and all he wanted to do was sit around all day and listen to records. His dad was one of those ‘wearing a vest and clutching a bottle of moonshine’ type dudes and he told John he needed to get a job cause he wasn’t ever gonna make a living playing records. John set out to prove him wrong and became a successful DJ, then the classic bit… John reckons I started playing guitar and singing cos DJ-ing was too difficult, too much work 🙂
JAMES DAUBENEY
W.A.S.P Live

W.A.S.P.

W.A.S.P. were designed to shock, their whole image was such that it was going to cause controversy.  The buzz saw blades and the blood and songs Like ‘Animal (F__k Like a Beast)’ were certainly going to get a reaction from organisations from the PMRC.  I am not a big fan of the video’s but the music was fantastic.  The debut album W.A.S.P. was one of the heaviest albums I had heard at the time.

Blackie Lawless had a huge influence on the scene at the time, he carried off that great tradition of charismatic bass guitarists who were also front men. Guys like Gene Simmons, Lemmy, Geddy Lee, Phil Lynott and Tom Araya all managed to give their bands a distinctive vocal sound while holding up the bottom end of the band. Blackie had one of the best metal voices around and the band were massively popular at the time. They have gone off the rails a bit in recent times but to my mind nothing will undo the brilliant albums made in the late 80’s.
JAMES DAUBENEY

James Reyne

I heard the video for ‘fall of Rome’ when I walked past the TV when Pop Shop which became Fast Forward was on .  I’d stopped watching because they were playing so much crap but when I heard the opening chords of this track it was a ”ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry” moments.  If you really want to feel the brilliance take a listen to his track ‘Ain’t it Always the Way’ and soak up the 2 or 3 minute guitar solo on the track, a perfect example of a ”Big Chill”

Out of Aussie James Reyne was great, not a lot of people knew him but I love this album and he was like one of my secret discoveries. Looking at it now, about 25 or so years later he looks just like Shane fucking Warne, just as well we didn’t know of Shane in those days or I would never have bought it.
JAMES DAUBENEY

Jimmy Barnes

Jimmy Barnes was another discovery thanks to the record reviews in Scope magazine.  Scope was the closet thing you could get to porn in apartheid South Africa, there were many people who were part of ‘the struggle’ in different ways and as school boys we ‘struggled’ to find pictures of chicks who didn’t have stars painted onto their nipples and we ‘struggled’ to get hear UK Punk Rock.  The Nat’s had the country in a death grip of Dutch Deformed suppression and Scope was one of the things that made life a bit more pleasant.  They had some really good album reviews and the second I read the review for Freight Train Heart by Jimmy Barnes I knew I had to get this album

Jimmy Barnes was another great discovery, no-one I knew had heard of him and he just struck a chord with me in the way Springsteen did. The opening slide to the Track Driving Wheels and then the sound of the piano coming in before that fantastic voice kicks in is one of the greatest things I have ever heard. This song is so good that when I bought Black Adder 3 I used it as the opening song to get that car out of the show room and onto the highway. The video for No Second Prize is a better video but just check out the whole album you won’t regret it.
JAMES DAUBENEY
Cold Chisel

Cold Chisel

Cold Chisel was Jimmy Barnes first band and I only got into them quite a few years later.  They were massive in Aussie and basically nowhere else which is why Jimmy needed a solo career later.

This is quite an odd video and I found it by accident, I’ve included it here because it just has a certain Hank Moody type feel about it and I reckon all blokes feel like this at some time in their lives.
JAMES DAUBENEY

Metallica

I discuss the first time I heard Metallica in some detail in The Story of Rock and Roll.  The fact of the matter is that Metallica was exactly what I needed to find in the early to mid 80’s when Bon Jovi were riding high with Slippery When Wet and the biggest smash of the year was Europe’s The Final Countdown.  In the mid 80’s everybody was a metal head for a brief period and to those of us who grew up on this shit it was a bit annoying.  It really needed a shake-up and no-one shook it up better than Metallica, Exodus, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer.

This is an awful clip, bordering on unwatchable but it’s here for two reasons, firstly it is one of the few clips where Metallica still had Dave Mustaine in the band and secondly at the time I discovered them they were so fast, so raw and so heavy that there wasn’t any real commercial footage to back up what they were doing. even after they started to become very popular with master of puppets they still wouldn’t make a video. At that point in time Metallica would do anything not to be considered commercial, funny how things work out given that they ended up probably the most commercial band in Metal.
JAMES DAUBENEY
That other clip is so bad I had to put in sometime else as well. Metallica did a great version of Thin Lizzy’s ‘Whisky in the Jar’ and I always loved this video, real rock ‘n’ roll given up giving a fuck stuff.
JAMES DAUBENEY