Did you know that when some film prints are too worn to pass the animating flicker of a projector again they are destroyed and re-formed into plectrums in a cheapskate bid to squeeze a last penny or two out of their worthless celluloid carcasses? Your guitar pick could have started its working life as your favourite blockbuster or fuckfest flickershow. Now imagine, if you will, the sound that would issue from a guitar played with a plectrum struck from a decommissioned print of (insert name of film here…)
Saturday night, and the big gig that hundreds of Scottish death metalhead teens had been anxiously waiting for:
Nobody could touch them for sheer raw, brutal earbleed power; not Slayer, not Deicide, not Macabre, not Cannibal Corpse, not Brujeria, not My Dying Bride, not Necrophagia, not The Gumstabbers, not Foreskin Supper, not fucking nobody! This night had been long awaited. It had had taken the band nearly a year to reach this point on their extensive world tour, insanely blasphemous stories following them wherever they went, and their fans were more than ready for a visceral slice of their favourite Christian-picketed psychos.
The crowd inside the ex-ballroom milled in electric bovine expectation. The whole spectrum of pseudoamerican teen foreplay ritual had been, well, foreplayed. Garish overpriced bloodscream tee-shirts had been snapped up, watery beer in plastic cups consumed, old acquaintances renewed, joints smoked, grammes of sulph either snorted or bombed, drunken push-and-shove slanging matches indulged in and the ‘special guest’ band Bloody Ring alternately jeered at and danced to. So much for the cat-and-mouse shit: now it was time to unleash the real power and swim in the unfathomable demented depths of the best band ever to grace the bad old US of A’s sunshine state. Just what the hell was the hold-up?
The lights went down and the warcry went up.
CANKEROUS STENCH! CANKEROUS STENCH! CANKEROUS STENCH!
The moshpit, already full-to-bursting, got several dozen new arrivals belatedly throwing themselves into the scrum, determined not to miss a good thrashing.
CANKEROUS STENCH! CANKEROUS STENCH! CANKEROUS STENCH!
A couple of strategically-placed spotlights suddenly threw everything into stark blacknwhite relief, upon which cue dry ice from two hidden machines began to squirt-and-slide milky tentacles of nonsubstance into the crowd. There were a few coughs as the air turned thick with atmosphere and cheap theatrics.
The fog made it a bit more difficult to breathe as you danced, making hyperventilation just that bit more accessible, but who the hell fuckin cared onywey? Jist whit the fuck wur ye daein it a Cankerous Stench gig if you couldnae hack the pace? It shouldnae be a problem tae the likes ay yersel tae chuck yer carcass aboot aw night long n still come back fir mair if ye wur a true fan ay the Stench, n that
Dark forms flitted briefly in front of the spotlights. The crowd roared as one: the chosen few had come to bestow their timeless musical wisdom on their eager whipping-boy pupils. An inverted ten-foot cross began to pulsate a fiery, bloody red behind the drummer ‘Bomber’ Ellessdee, whose dark flowing locks stood out against their blasphemous background like a satanic crown-of-thorns. He was one of the best drummers in the world, or so the buzz went in fanzine and industry circles; why he’d chosen Cankerous Stench to play with was anybody’s guess.
Ellessdee started to rattle his sponsored drumkit to a primal speedbeat the human ear could scarcely comprehend in a crazy call-to-arms. That such a pace could be maintained by a mere mortal (or was he?) over the course of ninety minutes was scarcely credible. The drummer grinned as he saw the effect his skins-pounding was having on the crowd, who were beginning to gyrate and vibrate wildly to the soundpower. They were screaming and whistling as they did so, and Ellessdee knew he was definitely going to be on a drum roll ronight. RACK EM UP!
As Ellessdee’s personal spot lit up a deep, crunchy bassline began to chug workmanlike in time to the crushing skinsound. ‘Killer’ Pagan was ready to pingpong the fans off every wall in the place before they hit the sweat-dripping roof and came fallen-angel-style back down to earth again, hard. Pagan had come from being a warehouseman in
A whining buzzsaw guitar glasscrashed into the ever-more frantic aural fray without warning, slicing through several hundred eager young skulls on its journey onwards and downwards. Rhythm guitarist ‘Crusher’ Larsen had made his presence felt and the ears of those in the building would never be the same again. His spot illuminated his Carcass tour tee-shirt-clad six-foot-three frame, the image supplemented by a half-empty bottle of Tenafly Viper bourbon at his feet.
Cankerous Stench, kickin’ ass live on the 2022 ‘Human Hamburger’ tour. Glasgow, the victim on their aural altar of sacrifice. But the apex of the band’s power hadn’t been achieved yet, not by a long shot. That point would only come when singer ‘Acid King’ Kasslin had stroked and spiked the crowd with his demongrowl voice and surgical Strat. An axe hero to thousands of teens, Kasslin provided a safe arena for the metalheads to rebel and piss off their old hippie ex-punk parents. What the fuck, it was all showbiz.
Kasslin’s distorted voice began to rend the ears of those on the receiving end with his ‘hellish screams of the tormented damned’ (as his throatgash vocals had been billed on the two Cankerous Stench albums, Demons Rip Your Flesh For Breakfast and Satan Wants to Fuck You Up The Ass You Christian Shithead) and the place went insane as his spotlight threw its harsh glare his way. The idol of the death metal fans in the flesh for the first time in
‘We got some crazy death metal motherfuckers in the crowd tonight. Ain’t that right GLASGOW?’ ranted Kasslin at his tortured devotees, pronouncing the silent ‘w’ in the city’s name the way all the clueless yank bands did. The crowd responded overwhelmingly. TOO FUCKIN RIGHT PAL! THIR WIR NAE CRAZIER DEATH METAL MOTHERFUCKERS IN THE HAIL FUCKIN UNIVERSE – PROBABLY – THIN THIR WERE HERE THE NIGHT!
Kasslin roared again, fibreglass armour rattling against the inverted silver cross which hung from his neck. It never occurred to him to his fans to wonder how somebody who denied god could deify his (or her, or its) counterpart, but theological questions like that weren’t important right now. What was important was Kasslin’s first lead guitar lick.
The band had been in the build-up to Slaughter Your Entire Family And Your Pets And The KILL YOURSELF! from Apocalypse and the second Kasslin gave the song his string-stamp of approval the place would go completely apeshit for the duration of an Old Firm game.
Although, as they were supposed to be Satanists, probably with less religious intolerance.
Kasslin raised his plectrum, specially purchased by a roadie earlier that afternoon from a shop in town…his armour shone…he grinned evilly at the thought of the power to be unleashed…his plectrum hit the guitar…
…and the sound that issued forth from the instrument was not the one expected.
Indeed, the sound that washed over the expectant masses when Kasslin’s celluloid guitar pick struck the strings of his customised hellhammer was not the skincrawl banshee-wail of an undying worm from beyond the bleak black bilious bowels of Lucifer’s domain but that of a slow, gentle, melancholy banjo. The crowd were banjaxed and stopped mid-bounce. What-the-not-Hell?
Kasslin frowned. Were they getting some interference through the PA? He played again. The same sound reverberated unmissably through the venue, this time accompanied by a croaking singing voice.
‘Why are there so many…songs about rainbows…and what’s on the other side…’
Kasslin grit his teeth, a gramme of shit-hot coke filling his coursing blood with Columbian nosefire, and played harderfasterharder!
‘…rainbows are visions…but only illusions…’
One of the kids in the audience who’d been forced at virtual gunpoint the week before to babysit his six-year-old sister with a stack of children’s videos recognised the tune with stunned, slow-dawning comprehension.
‘THE MUPPET MOVIE? WHIT THE FUCK’S WI THE FUCKIN MUPPET MOVIE STUFF KASSLIN YA CUNT? WHIT’S THE FUCKIN SCORE HERE?’
‘…and rainbows have nothing to hide…’
The astute teen’s outraged and traumatised cry spread round like wildhellfire. Cankerous Stench were playing songs from The Muppet Movie and they’d made the crowd pay to hear this shite. The evil and deceitful hellbastards! The fans began to grow ugly as Kasslin tried desperately to make himself heard above the crooning voice of a well-known cloth frog, but to no avail. He grew more and more frustrated.
‘…someday we’ll find it…the rainbow connection…’
‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOIN’, MAN?!’ screamed Pagan at the band’s frontman, who was now completely losing it in his attempts to get a nice nasty sound from his axe, which was currently cutting down the wrong sonic trees.
‘I DUNNO…IT WON’T…PLAY RIGHT…’
‘…the lovers, the dreamers and me…ladadadeedada…’
‘AW SHIT!’ screamed Kasslin in disgust, embarrassment and total defeat. He threw his guitar to the stage and stomped on it, breaking it into several irreparable pieces before storming off-stage like an over-amped petted-lip child.
Which, in effect, he was.
The rest of the band could do little else than exit stage left immediately after their disgraced singer to jeers and numerous plastic cups (not to mention a few lower-denomination coins of the realm) thrown at them by the disgruntled crowd.
But it wasn’t just Cankerous Stench who ended up with musical rotten egg on their smug faces that fateful night. Bands up-and-down the British Isles from Aberdeen to Bristol who’d gotten plectrums from a mysterious widespread batch soon found themselves taken down a peg or two in the seriousness stakes.
An annoyingly non-sexist, non-homophobic, non-racist, ozone-friendly PC punk band called Rights Fight Wrongs soon found themselves performing to a medley from Ilsa, She-Wolf of The SS.
Pale cybergoths Gloomy Room walked off-stage after they found themselves performing Can’t Stop The Music from the excellent 1980 Village People film of the same name.
Indiejanglepopangstwankfunsters Bubblegum Starbum found their floppy foppish fringes wrong for the theme to Footloose and cut loose into the night.
Industrial noise karaoke singalongarebellion specialists Stomp Heavily were bottled mercilessly by their paying punters for assaulting their delicate ears with the tacky theme tune to the 1978 Nicholas Hammond vehicle about Spider-Man, that tacky tights-wearing part-arachnid superhero.
BNP neo-Nazi skinhead favourites White Power Source were taken outside and hanged by their proud Aryan brethren for subjecting their dumb little minds to the funky wah-wah strains of Isaac Hayes’s Shaft theme.
Nobody noticed when Morrissey whined painfully along to Always Look on The Bright Side of Life from Life of Brian.
It was a ritual of misdirected energy. The music press called it ‘the night the music died’ and mourned the loss of their parasitic livelihoods.
However, a few perceptive and intrepid souls in the audience of the bands struck down were inspired by the night’s sonic bonfire proceedings. They took a musical leaf from the books of their fallen mentors and created a new sound, one which swept the world and changed the course of musical history forever.
Let me tell you what it sounded like. Listen:
Do you hear it?
END
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