Hale Hale Rock 'n' Roll

A life in one concert

Tuesday morning and my ears are still ringing because I went to a heavy metal gig last night.  Or maybe it was hard rock. I am not really clear on where the line is, where hard rock becomes heavy metal. It probably takes a physicist who also likes rock music to define that one with any accuracy.

The crowd was great.  Lots of leather, nasty beards, and black t-shirts. With hindsight my white Talking Heads t-shirt may not have been the best sartorial choice, but thankfully no-one seemed to mind because they were all having a great time.  About the coolest thing in the crowd were the smattering of mum/dad/daughter combos, all losing their hearing on a family outing.

I specifically mention daughters because the band we were all at the Town Hall to see, listen to and to hold up our hands in the devil-horns of rock at every given opportunity, was Halestorm.  Halestorm’s lead singer is Lzzy Hale.  Lzzy Hale is a heavy metal/hard rock role model for women young and old.  Because Lzzy Hale is, quite simply, an awesome force of nature.

Lzzy Hale opens the show, walking out onstage, alone.  She steps up to the mic and starts to sing, acapella.  The voice that emerges is jaw-dropping. It is like Janis Joplin, but turned all the way up to 11.  It also terrified me, because I was worried her vocal-cords were going to explode and then she would projectile vomit blood all over the stage.  Which, come to think of it, the crowd would probably have totally been into.  I mean, Ozzy Osborne bit the head off a bat, right?

But I need not have worried.  By the end of the show, the same voice, at the same volume, with the same degree of awesomeness, was still pouring forth from Lzzy Hale.  As Halestorm took their bows and left the stage, as we all did the devil-horn thing one last time, I hoped that she had a nice soothing cup of herbal tea waiting for her backstage.

Herbal tea and the Talking Heads t-shirt are probably giving you the impression that I was out of my normal environment at a Halestorm gig.  This is only partially true.  Yes, Halestorm are very much my wife’s thing and my previous exposure to them has largely been by osmosis, in the house and in the car, when Tanz seizes control of the means of music. 

But rock music, tending towards hardness or metalness, has always been part of my life.

One of the good things about being at a hard-rock/metal gig where you don’t know any of the songs is that while everyone else is singing along, if you shut your eyes and are gently banging your head (i.e. nodding it) in time with the music, then you can both be an active, participating, part of the gig and also off in your own world.  As long as you remember to do the devil-horns thing at the end of every song.

Thus it was that I spent a lot of Halestorm both in and out of the concert.  I was still having a good time, but I was also far away, wandering down memory lane.

I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the suchlike, so hard-rock/metal is very much in my DNA. Then I tragically wandered off into prog rock for a while, before punk and New Wave came along and saved my musical soul. 

By the time anything heavy or metallic came back onto my radar it had evolved into hair bands like Poison and Twisted Sister, which were not even close to being my thing.  Far too lightweight for me, in terms of the periodic table of metal.  Nowadays the only time you will find me singing along to/dancing to this sort of thing is when it turns up as the first dance at a wedding. 

(Sorry Dantonia.  Couldn’t resist.)

(Oh, and the above musical disdain obviously does not include Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” which is still a work of genius.)

If ever there was going to be a time when my hard/metal genetics kicked back in, it should have been when we were making Outrageous Fortune.  But weirdly, apart from a couple of outliers like The Datsuns, OF turned out to be remarkably free of metalness.  It turned out the Wests were much more classic radio rock than anything heavier and darker.  And The Veils.  The Veils became our go-to-band when writing a song into a scene to such an extent that eventually we had to ban them for a while.  

Thus, when Westside rolled around, I made it my task to find some metalness, to make amends and honour the Rock Gods of my youth.  It took a while but sneaking in Knightshade’s epic ballad “Last Night in the City” right at the very end was almost enough to assuage my heavy guilt.

Trying to get the music of my palagi upbringing into Sione’s Wedding was always going to be a bridge too far so I did not even try.

Weirdly (or perhaps entirely logically) it was during the first big COVID lockdown that my metalness re-emerged – in an unexpected and strange way.  Stuck at home, writing dark and gnarly episodes of Bad Seed 2 (which never got made) I found myself watching Metallica and Rammstein clips on YouTube. To this day I have no idea how this happened, for I had no (and still have no) affinity to either Rammstein or Metallica.  It just became a thing I did.  Weird times lead you weird places. By the time I had watched most of Rammstein live in Paris I knew something was wrong.  When I found myself heading down to the industrial end of metal town, watching Nine Inch Nails clips, I knew had to go cold turkey on it. 

So I did.

Last night, having drifted in and out of the Halestorm gig, with all these thoughts headbanging in my head, I kind of re-emerged into the real world just in time for Halestorm to be playing this song. 

By the time they had finished I had a tear (or two) in my eye. 

I don’t really know why.

I just did.

So thank you Lzzy, Arejay, Joe and Josh for a fucking great night (and lifetime) out.

Halestorm, you rock (in both the heavy and the hard way)!