My Facebook was filled with entries from the night. Many from one of the community pages I like - 80's The Golden Ages Of Metal. Usually it was filled with YouTube links to songs by groups like Poison and Warrant. These were not my favorite groups and I usually browsed on. For the past few days, the administrators of the group were throwing in songs by some of the lesser known groups of the 80s. That morning, I ran into an entry on a song by "one of the lesser and most under-rated metal groups of the early 80s". The group was called Anvil and the song "Metal on metal". The thumbnail of the song showed the face of the lead singer singing into the microphone. His expression had an interesting combination of mean and mischief. It reminded me of Eddie Vedder's expression in the video of "Ten" - A bit of mischief with an overwhelming dose of meanness.
I clicked on the link and the song came up. Crunching guitar, pounding drums and a mean voice - the perfect combination of heavy metal cliché. The song was loud and heavy with a lot of chunka-chunka guitaring. The singer sounded like a cross between Scorpian's Klaus Maine and AC/DC's Brian Scott. It sounded like a classic thrash metal song from the mid-80's. But this song was from the early 80's before the big four of thrash came by but this group was hardly heard of. So I opened the Wikipedia and searched the group. Anvil is a group from Canada formed in the late 70's and sure enough they influenced the big thrash groups of the 80's - Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica.
The site also mentioned that there exists a documentary film, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, about their career. I have been a sucker for movies on music bands for some time now - Woodstock, Doors, The last waltz, Rush. Fascinating movies that described the route a set of people took to reach the pinnacle of rock's Mt.Everest. So I got this movie and watched it. It turned out to be more than fascinating. The movie starts off with the statements "In the summer of 1984", "Some of the biggest rock bands in the world toured Japan together", "Scorpians", "Whitesnake", "Bon Jovi", "All these bands went on to sell millions of records", "Except one", "Anvil" and then band comes on stage to sing "Metal on metal" . The movie goes on to tell the struggles that the lead singer and drummer goes through to keep the group kicking. Rockers in their 50's trying to make that one record that will take the world by storm while driving trucks for Children's Choice Catering.
A very emotional movie on the sufferings that the group had to undergo touring Europe, making an album and trying to sell it Music executive. There are a lot of arguments and tears in the movie. All seemed genuine and did not seemed staged. A brilliant movie that brings out the passion these two people have towards their group and music. A passion that started almost four decades back and continues till date. I am so glad I came across Anvil and will be their fan through my life.
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