Heavy metal lyrical themes come down to one appetite, and it has not changed since 1970: the song has to be about something larger than the man singing it. For fifty-six years the style has gone through three thousand years of storytelling like a burglar through a national museum after closing time, putting a boot through the glass case of Crimean sabres, prising the Book of Revelation off its lectern, lifting Coleridge's albatross down from its hook and walking out past the sleeping guard wearing every exhibit at once. Nothing has been returned.
The love song was left on the pavement outside, and when the Sunset Strip carried it back in during the eighties, wrapped in a power ballad, much of the older audience treated it as a stowaway.
The Aston bassist who wrote most of the words on the early records of Black Sabbath, raised a Catholic and reading occult paperbacks and science fiction on the side, was Geezer Butler. Across the two albums of 1970 he laid down nearly every subject the style would ever need: generals spending the lives of the poor in "War Pigs", a black figure at the foot of a bed in the title song of the debut, a mind that will not stop turning in "Paranoid", and in "Iron Man" a time traveller turned to steel who comes back to punish the people who ignored his warning.
Everything after that is elaboration. Each later branch of the family took one of those subjects and ran with it until it had a genre of its own, a history told through the roots, the scenes and the branches of the music. Thrash took the bomb and the news bulletin, death metal took the dissecting table, black metal took winter and the burning church. What stayed in the old house, with the twin guitars and the clean high voice, was history, myth, the library and the street.
War and history, from Balaclava to the Somme
Sabbath's war was the one on the television in 1970, a war of generals and draft boards on the far side of the world. The generation that followed went back to the history books instead, and found that a battle more than a century old could be sung with more conviction than one still being fought. The dead of Balaclava could not write in to complain.
Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854
The East London bassist who took Tennyson's poem and rebuilt it as a four-minute single was Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, and "The Trooper", released on Piece of Mind in May 1983, puts the listener in the saddle at Balaclava on 25 October 1854, riding down the valley into the Russian guns with the rest of the Light Brigade. The narrator does not survive the song.
The band kept returning to the subject. "Aces High" put an RAF pilot into the summer of 1940, and on the tour for Powerslave in 1984 and 1985 the band walked on to a recording of Winston Churchill's speech of 4 June 1940 about fighting on the beaches. Very little of it cheers. Most of it mourns, loudly.
The trio that had spent fifteen years refusing to slow down for anybody was Motörhead, and its 1991 album 1916, the band's first release on WTG Records, carried a title track built on marching drums and a cello, with Lemmy mourning a whole generation cut down on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. The album was nominated for a Grammy. Nobody expected the song.
Heavy metal's war songs look backwards, and that is the line between them and thrash, whose wars were still to come. The Barnsley five in Saxon rode to Jerusalem on the title track of Crusader in 1984, and the German veterans in Grave Digger gave Tunes of War in 1996 over to the Scottish wars of independence, from the medieval clan wars to the long road to Culloden, the first part of a trilogy about the Middle Ages that closed with Excalibur three years later.
The Swedish band that turned the military history shelf into an entire catalogue, from the Normandy landings of Primo Victoria in 2005 onwards, answers to the name Sabaton, formed in Falun in 1999. It goes through the twentieth century like a clearance crew sweeping an old battlefield for unexploded shells, lifting one battle to a song, carrying it onto a festival stage and setting it off before tens of thousands.
Heavy metal's war songs look backwards, and that is the line between them and thrash, whose wars were still to come.
Olympus, Camelot and the Book of Revelation
Myth walked straight in. Iron Maiden made a hit single of "Flight of Icarus" in 1983, turning the Greek fable into a quarrel between a son and the father who built him his wings, and nine years later the style made its most complete attempt on Homer.
The four Americans who opened The Triumph of Steel in 1992 with a single piece running past twenty-eight minutes were Manowar, and "Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts" follows the Iliad from the death of Patroclus to Hector's body dragged behind a chariot round the walls of Troy. Nobody has ever called it concise. On any honest reading it is also the most serious thing the band recorded.
Virgin Steele, from Long Island, went further still and set the Oresteia of Aeschylus as a metal opera in two acts, The House of Atreus, released in November 1999 and October 2000. Camelot had its turn when Grave Digger closed its medieval trilogy with Excalibur in 1999. The Norse gods turn up on the same shelf now and then, though their proper home is viking metal, which built its longships out of them.
The Bible was the thickest book on the shelf. Judas Priest took their name from a Bob Dylan song of 1967, "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest", and in 1982 the title song of Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast opened on a spoken passage from the Book of Revelation, written, by Steve Harris's own account, after a nightmare that followed a late viewing of Damien: Omen II. Religious groups in America staged protests and public burnings of the record through that year's tour. The song is about a man who witnesses a black mass and is appalled by it.
The accusation of Satanism missed the point from the start. Black Sabbath's "After Forever", on Master of Reality in 1971, was a Christian lyric by a Catholic bassist, and fifteen years later the Californian four in Stryper made To Hell with the Devil the first Christian metal album certified platinum by the RIAA and threw Bibles into the crowd at their shows. The imagery was the same. Only the side had changed.
The fantasy shelf: Tolkien, Moorcock and Howard
Tolkien arrived before the style had a name. Led Zeppelin put Mordor and Gollum into "Ramble On" in 1969 and sent Sandy Denny to trade verses with Robert Plant on "The Battle of Evermore" in 1971. The paperbacks were in every student's bag. The songs followed them there.
The California band that named itself after the pass into Mordor is Cirith Ungol, formed in Ventura in 1971, and it hung Michael Whelan's paintings of Elric, Moorcock's albino sorcerer king with the soul-drinking sword, on its sleeves from Frost and Fire in 1981 onwards, repurposing the same artwork Whelan had painted for Moorcock's own book covers across all four of its studio albums.
The English novelist who had invented Elric in 1961, in the novella "The Dreaming City", was Michael Moorcock, and he did something no other author on the shelf did: he wrote the songs himself. Blue Öyster Cult recorded "The Great Sun Jester" in 1979, "Black Blade" on Cultösaurus Erectus in 1980 and "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" in 1981, all with Moorcock's name in the credits. The sword on the record was his own.
Robert E. Howard reached the style mostly through Frank Frazetta's paintings on the Conan paperbacks of the sixties and through the 1982 film, though Manilla Road went to the stories themselves, and "Hour of the Dragon" and "Road of Kings", on Open the Gates in 1985, take their titles straight from Howard's own Conan fiction.
The Krefeld quartet that took on the book most readers abandon by the third family tree was Blind Guardian, and Nightfall in Middle-Earth, in 1998, sawed The Silmarillion into twenty-two tracks the way a timber merchant saws an oak into planks, songs and spoken interludes laid side by side, then stacked Hansi Kürsch's voice on itself until one man sounded like a choir of a hundred monks.
| Source | Writer | Song or album | Band | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | "Ramble On" | Led Zeppelin | 1969 |
| "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" | H.P. Lovecraft | "Behind the Wall of Sleep" | Black Sabbath | 1970 |
| The Elric stories | Michael Moorcock | "Black Blade" | Blue Öyster Cult | 1980 |
| "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" | Edgar Allan Poe | "Murders in the Rue Morgue" | Iron Maiden | 1981 |
| The Rime of the Ancient Mariner | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" | Iron Maiden | 1984 |
| The Silmarillion | J.R.R. Tolkien | Nightfall in Middle-Earth | Blind Guardian | 1998 |
| The Oresteia | Aeschylus | The House of Atreus | Virgin Steele | 1999 |
Lovecraft, the ghost story and the haunted house
Horror came in with the first album. Black Sabbath's debut carried "Behind the Wall of Sleep", its title bent out of a Lovecraft story of 1919, and the cosmic dread of the Providence writer has sat in the style's cellar ever since. Iron Maiden carved him in stone: the tombstone on the sleeve of the 1985 live album Live After Death, painted by Derek Riggs, carries a couplet adapted from Lovecraft's "The Nameless City".
The same band read Poe and watched late films. "Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1981 took Poe's title, and "Children of the Damned" in 1982 borrowed a 1964 film about a generation of uncanny children. These are not songs meant to frighten. They are late-night films retold by men who had watched them as schoolboys.
The Danish singer in black and white face paint who left Mercyful Fate in 1985 and turned his solo albums into full-length ghost stories is King Diamond. Abigail, released by Roadrunner in 1987, installs a young couple in an old mansion in 1845 with the spirit of a stillborn child for company. The records work like a fairground ghost train whose cardboard skeletons have been swapped overnight for real ones dug out of the churchyard, the carriages still rattling round the same rail at the same cheerful speed, verse, chorus, verse.
These are not songs meant to frighten. They are late-night films retold by men who had watched them as schoolboys.
Madness, machines and the electric eye
The singer Black Sabbath let go in 1979, who then built a solo career on a single subject, was Ozzy Osbourne. "Crazy Train", on Blizzard of Ozz in 1980, was a song about the Cold War driving the whole world out of its mind, its words written by the bassist Bob Daisley, and Randy Rhoads's riff dragged it into every rock club on two continents.
Diary of a Madman followed in November 1981, the last studio record with Rhoads, who died in a plane crash in March 1982, and its title song ends the album with a narrator who cannot tell which of his two selves is speaking. Madness in heavy metal is almost never clinical. It is a costume, a threat, and occasionally, as here, a confession.
Iron Maiden took "Can I Play with Madness" to number three in Britain in 1988, a song about a young man and a prophet who will not tell him what he wants to hear. The asylum door in these songs only ever opens inwards.
The machines came next, and Judas Priest wired them in. "Metal Gods", on British Steel in 1980, imagines the robots taking over, and "Electric Eye", two years later on Screaming for Vengeance, is sung from inside a surveillance satellite that watches every private life on the planet from orbit, a camera bolted to the sky with nobody left to switch it off. Orwell never had a riff like it.
The dystopias grew longer. Queensrÿche put a computer-run future into "NM 156" on The Warning in 1984, and Iron Maiden named its reunion album of 2000, Brave New World, after Aldous Huxley's novel of 1932.
Heavy metal lyrical themes at street level: the road, the dole and the fist
Not every subject came out of a book. The road came out of the tour itself. Saxon wrote "Motorcycle Man" and the title song of Wheels of Steel in 1980 about machines they could actually afford, Judas Priest's "Freewheel Burning" in 1984 went round a racetrack at the speed of the drums, and Motörhead wrote "(We Are) The Road Crew" in 1980 for the men who carried the gear and never got their names on the sleeve.
Work, or the lack of it, was the other subject nobody had to read up on. Judas Priest came out of Birmingham and the Black Country, Saxon out of the South Yorkshire coalfield, Sabbath out of the factory streets of Aston, and in 1980, with British unemployment climbing past two million that autumn, up from one and a half million the year before, "Breaking the Law" told the story of a young man with no job, no money and nothing left to lose. The song is a half brick with a lyric sheet wrapped round it, lobbed through the plate glass of a jobcentre window and still lying on the carpet forty-six years later.
Anger spread from the dole queue to the whole of authority. Accept built "Balls to the Wall" in 1983 on a crowd rising against the people who had kept it down, and the next year Twisted Sister made "We're Not Gonna Take It", on Stay Hungry, into a teenager's refusal delivered straight at a father, a teacher and anyone else within range. Nobody in either song asks permission.
Songs about the songs, and the album as a novel
Rebellion turned inward soon enough, and heavy metal started singing about heavy metal. Anvil made the title song of Metal on Metal in 1982, Manowar made Kings of Metal in 1988, and Judas Priest called a song on Ram It Down the same year, quite simply, "Heavy Metal". The style has a whole creed written into its own lyric sheets, and it recites it at every show.
The Barnsley band got there first. "Denim and Leather", the title song of Saxon's 1981 album, is written about the audience, the jackets, the clubs, the fans who hitched to the shows, and "And the Bands Played On", from the same year, remembered the first Monsters of Rock at Donington in August 1980. The fans were the subject. The same hymns to the music went abroad and came back in a dozen languages, a story told in full in heavy metal around the world.
A song about loving heavy metal, played to three thousand people who love heavy metal, is either a salvo of self-regard or a congregation singing its own hymnal, and the riff decides which.
The largest ambition was the whole album as one story. Steve Harris read Orson Scott Card's novel Seventh Son and wrote a record about a child born with the gift of prophecy, and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, released on 11 April 1988, went straight to number one on the UK Albums Chart. The same year Queensrÿche released Operation: Mindcrime, the story of a junkie turned into an assassin by a man called Dr. X, and the concept album stopped being prog's property.
After that the form became a pantheon of its own. Savatage made Streets: A Rock Opera in 1991, W.A.S.P. told the story of a rejected son turned star on The Crimson Idol in 1992, and Judas Priest spent two discs on the French seer in Nostradamus in 2008. Critics split hard over the last of those, several calling it the weakest record of the band's career. The fans bought it anyway.
None of it has stopped. The young American band that named itself after Michael Moorcock's hero who is reborn in every age is Eternal Champion, out of Austin, Texas, and its songs take their swords from Robert E. Howard's own pulp-era fiction as if nothing in between had happened. History, myth, the library and the street: the list of heavy metal lyrical themes has not grown in fifty-six years, and it has not needed to.
