Dark Juan’s Mixtape!
The Mix Tapes
Written by Dark Juan
There are discussions about all kinds of things in the Ever-Metal.com staff group on the internet, not least of which are just why I can’t help myself and say ridiculous things or why my imagination seems to be composed of slaughterhouses and violence and vampiric sex and very little else, and whether my love of Murray Head and Futurepop and obscure 80s Electronica or Rory’s love of Charli XCX means that we are not very Metal anymore.
The answer is, of course, that we are all people for whom Metal (or in my case, Industrial) is our one true love, but that does not preclude our enjoyment of other things, and other music. I mean, you’re just as likely to find me listening to Cabaret Voltaire or Nouveau Arcade as you are Cannibal Corpse or Emperor or any more contemporary artist or band. I am, after all, a child of the 80s and 90s, and much of my listening for pleasure goes back to that era – Think Prong, Old Lady Drivers, Ultraviolence, Underneath What?, White Zombie, Deicide, Anathema and stuff like that.
Anyhow, this got us all thinking back to our youth and the joy of home taping. I was on the edge of the UK tape trading scene anyway, but there was a peculiar magic, way back when, in the 80s and 90s where the art of the mix tape was at its zenith. Everyone was armed with what they had managed to rip off Tommy Vance’s Radio 1 Friday Rock Show, or what they had borrowed from other friends. With me, it was when I swapped my Pet Shop Boys album, “Actually”, for Iron Maiden’s “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”. That was the catalyst for a thirty-five year and counting love affair with all things Extreme (NOT getting the funk out, although “Extreme II – Pornograffiti” was not the absolute shit album all the Metal purists made it out to be, although they have to be put up the wall and shot simply because of the second most shitcringingly awful ballad ever committed to record, this being ‘More Than Words’. It was fucking everywhere, and it was terrible, shrill bullshit that would have had Saddam Hussein surrendering inside three seconds had the US military bothered to think of taking it with them to Iraq to use as psychological warfare. “III Sides To Every Story” was, however, utterly shocking. Now, you need to know what the worst ballad ever written is, and I will tell you. It is Mr. Big’s ‘To Be With You’. Everything about that fucking song makes me want to set the entire band on fire and immolate them until there aren’t even any ashes left because it so just so fucking cheerful and chirpy and saccharine and BLEUUGHHHH. And it was just wet, gooey shit from the moment it started until the moment it mercifully finished, but girls fucking loved it, and wanted it played incessantly because “Eric Martin is so cute” which just drove me deeper into Throbbing Gristle’s “Second Annual Report” and nihilism, and probably onanism too, because anything is preferable than ever having to listen to that appalling piece of jangly foetid rat wank ever again) and it led to hundreds of now sadly discarded mix tapes – normally done according to genre or driving tunes or just shit I liked regardless of genre. The point was that it was all music I liked, and it was portable, and a metric fuckton of them got dragged around in my cherry red Mark 2 Ford Escort. Many an hour was spent driving to and from Manchester with my mates Oz, or Daniel with mix tapes blaring everything from the whole universe of Metal and Hard Rock, although I was always roundly mocked for my love of Journey’s ‘Separate Ways’ and my assertion that it WAS a fucking HEAVY song. You’d find Queensryche rubbing shoulders with early Sepultura, who were bumping uglies with Poison (everyone had a Poison single somewhere no matter what they were listening to at the time. That and ‘Black Velvet’ by Alannah Myles, because that was the nearest Hard Rock music had been to the charts for quite some time. Until WASP made it into the UK charts quite surprisingly with ‘Forever Free’, which is a truly execrable power ballad (which I shamefully bought on 7” because I was a MASSIVE WASP fan at the time), for which there was a bit of an appetite in Britain for a short while, as Queensryche’s ‘Silent Lucidity’ troubled the UK charts for a couple of weeks, which led to the utterly preposterous scenario of them being announced by Simon Bates (a chubby, bespectacled, terminally uncool old bloke even then) on Top of The Pops, shortly before 2Unlimited caterwauled, “No, no. No no no no. No no no no. There’s no limit” ad nauseam, rather than thrilling to a bunch of lads from Seattle looking EXTREMELY out of place and worried about the pack of confused Brits milling about in front of them while they were performing a gentle, affecting song about dying with a preposterous title on the UK’s premier Pop TV show. At least when Faith No More went on it, they fucked about that much they got instantly banned, and did more for their UK career in that one appearance than if they had behaved themselves).
The mix tape was an object lesson of just how much you could fit on a TDK C90 tape if you chose wisely (or those hideous multi-coloured Memorex ones that broke within fifteen seconds of being shoved in the car’s tape deck). Countless hours of my youth were spent in my bedroom using the deck-to-deck recording on my hi-fi (remember those?) or recording from vinyl. It was a singular experience for an entire generation of Metalheads, and one that has sadly been lost to time in favour of streaming playlists.
There were howlers along the way, however. Like me putting LL Cool J’s ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ just after Carcass’s ‘Manifestation of Verrucose Urethra’ and just before Siouxsie and The Banshees’ ‘Cities In Dust’, which I am sure you’ll agree is a fairly jarring transition. Or in fact having Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight Up’ on any form of recorded media at all. Actually, ‘Straight Up’ isn’t too bad. ‘Opposites Attract’, with MC Skat Kat, on the other hand, is one of the worst pieces of American Pop bilge ever released. However, here is a list of what’s on the last remaining mix tape in my possession, which I have been carting around with me for many years and don’t want to throw away even though I haven’t played it for well over two decades and it’s probably fucked.
SIDE ONE
Hellbastard – Interrogate Them. When Crust met Thrash, this is fucking crunchy as fuck and is still required listening in Crow Cottage when Mrs Dark Juan isn’t about. Scruff is a top man as well and ‘Interrogate Them’ is possibly the best song Hellbastard ever recorded. “Natural Order” is a full-on classic banger of an album as well from back when Earache was a great label. How the mighty have fallen. Earache I mean. Not Hellbastard. Scruff gave me a copy of an alternate mix of “Natural Order” on tape which I still have, because he’s an angry, but generally all-round good egg.
Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force – I Am a Viking. Look, I was too young to know any better, OK? But, in all seriousness, way back when this first came out, Yngwie was a wunderkind on the guitar and his arpeggios were to die for. However, this was also about the time he turned out to be a right arrogant twat, so he has tainted his legacy. I sometimes go back to “Rising Force” and “Marching Out” for a bit of a nostalgia-fest, but the cringe level is beyond astonishing if you are more than sixteen years old, and I rarely last more than four songs. Not to mention all his solos sound exactly the fucking same as you get older, basically arpeggios until his fingers get tired, a bit of string bending and squealing and then more arpeggios until he actually remembers that the singer has been staring at him for nearly forty minutes because he has, you know, an actual fucking verse to sing that Malmsteen HIMSELF wrote but has chosen to ignore. Also, he really wanted to let you know he had a Ferrari for many years. However, a Ferrari is merely a fast, posh Fiat with increased unreliability, which is saying something for a Fiat in itself.
Vixen – Cryin’. Do NOT have a go at me. I was a teenager with rising sap and Jan Kuehnemund was the most gorgeous person on the planet, and she could play the guitar as well, which made her the perfect woman in my hormone-flooded teenage years. There were no other criteria for the Dark Juan teenage boner. The song itself is the most awful kind of middle of the road American Hair Metal, all peroxide, tight pants and posturing, where verses are merely poorly written vehicles to get to the anthemic chorus, but out of this in later life I made friends with Share Ross (nee Pedersen), ex-bassist. Which is nice. I still listen to this song, to my eternal shame. I even sometimes watch the video and cringe horrifically at the male gaze aspect of it, what with its long passes up and down the bodies of Janet Gardner, Jan and Share. They would have done it to Roxy Petrucci too, but she got to hide behind a drum kit, because she’s a lucky lass. They were a one-band hole in the ozone layer, such was the sheer quantity of hairspray employed just for this one video.
Carcass – Corporal Jigsore Quandary. Scouse vegans writing Splattercore. What’s not to love? At least on “Necroeroticism – Descanting The Insalubrious”, from which ‘Corporal Jigsore Quandary” is culled, they learned the art of having a proper producer instead of relying on a 17 year old YTS trainee called Dwayne recording their music from two rooms away with Fisher-Price toys as equipment, like on “Reek Of Putrefaction”, and this song remains a timeless classic and one that stands up superbly to the test of time, from a British band that absolutely broke new ground in extremity. This never got played when I asked for it in Jilly’s. It’s almost as if I don’t like danceable, popular music. Aussie madmen The Berzerker covered ‘Jigsore’ with added Gabba madness and did a surprisingly excellent job of it. Unlike the absolutely fucking hilarious cover they did of T.a.T.u’s ‘All The Things She Said’, being a paean to teenage lesbianism sung by young Russian girls pretending to be lesbians, and then a bunch of hairy and frightening Australian mental Grindcore bastards who REALLY ARE OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER had a bash at it. If you can find it, listen to it. It’s fucking GRIM, lad, lasses and people of all other genders. The video is comedy genius.
Cubanate – Vortech I. Criminally underrated, aeons better than they were given credit for, and genuinely unique, Cubanate were the archetype of genre-bending bands with their melding of Techno and Metal guitars. Marc Heal’s guttural voice simply added to the shiny, polished aluminium aesthetic of their music, and ‘Vortech I’ still remains one of my great favourites to this day, as do Cubanate as a whole and Marc Heal’s other work with Cyber-Tec (Shortened to C-Tec). The French language version of ‘She Left’ on C-Tec’s last album really is a piece of supreme Electronic Industrial brilliance. It’s a travesty that Cubanate weren’t fucking huge.I’ll never forget seeing Cubanate supporting CARCASS of all people at the old Bradford Rio’s, and watching the sheer consternation of the Grindcore crowd while Cubanate absolutely killed the venue stone dead with super hard Techno grooves.
Cradle of Filth – The Black Goddess Rises. This is one of the most incredible songs in the history of heavy music to me. Cradle of Filth were so unique and special in the increasingly moribund UK scene of the early 90s, and the lyrical ability of Dani to tell a whole story during a few scant minutes of full-on Gothic Black Metal raging is beyond compare to this day. Still chugging along in their own inimitable furrow to this day, Cradle of Filth were the first band to meld Gothic pomposity with the savagery of Black Metal, even if they err more towards the Gothic pantomime nowadays and deny they were ever a Black Metal band (although I still have promo materials in my possession where Dani loudly proclaimed that they were “The UK’s ONLY Avant-Garde Black Metal band.”) Not that I am bitter about it or anything…
Rage Against The Machine – Fistful of Steel. First heard on the Friday Rock Show on Radio 1 with Tommy Vance, whose tape of this song broke on air, and he was so impressed by the band he put on the backup tape rather than move on, this was a song that embodied sheer fury and was VASTLY different to the late 80s/ early 90s scene. Zack De La Rocha’s impassioned howl took elements of Hip-Hop but made them Punk as fuck and the music was just harsh and uncompromising and not really bothered about things like melody or tunefulness. Manchester’s local Metal fans all changed when they heard Rage Against The Machine, and they were on the PA every time I went to the Thursday all-nighter at Jilly’s Rockworld. More than once too. Obviously, it was a popular song, so it was never me that requested it. I always preferred Senser, but Rage Against The Machine’s self-titled debut record was one of those epoch-making albums that took an increasingly moribund style of music in Metal and jammed a bunch of fireworks up its tired arse and lit the blue paper before running off giggling.
Rollins Band – Liar. Let’s face it, Hank’s a fucking legend, isn’t he? And “Weight” is his magnum opus – there isn’t a bad track on it, but ‘Liar’ (the proper version, not the shortened crap MTV one) is a storming, stomping, sneering monster of a track, Henry Rollins changing character and style in the song multiple times and then terrifyingly laughing right in your face before proclaiming that he’s a liar and it makes him feel good and he isn’t going to stop. Alright, Hank, I’m just going to back away slowly… This song, too, was all over Jilly’s Rockworld. Normally just after Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Been Caught Stealing’ had been played, leading the teenage me to believe that the DJ knew a really hot Grunge chick, wanted to get in her pants and played all of her stuff instead of my requests for Lord Belial’s ‘Hymn of The Great Misanthropic Spirit of The Forest’ and Extreme Noise Terror’s ‘Damage 381’. The bastard. At this point I’d huff off to the Goth room or downstairs (before it became a Jazz club) and get stoned to Ozric Tentacles records. Although I did get to enjoy ‘Zero Signal’ by Fear Factory through it. Once.
Nuclear Assault – Hang The Pope. Thirty-odd seconds of high-pitched Thrash madness to make sure side one is totally filled with music and there is no wasted space. It would have been ‘Brainwashed’ but that song would have been too long and part of the art of the mix tape is that you don’t cut songs off. As we learned when there was the final five seconds of the fade out to Romeo’s Daughter’s ‘Cry Myself To Sleep At Night’. That was mainly because I fucking ADORED Leigh Matty. God, she was gorgeous. Don’t judge me, OK? On one of the now-disposed-of mix tapes there was a Lisa Dominique song. Now there’s a confession for you.It was ‘All Fall Down’, if you’re interested. For those of you who are young and vigorous and have never heard of Lisa Dominique, she was famous for precisely two things, and they were on her chest and thrust at the camera at every single opportunity whenever she had recorded a song. It seemed that her music career was composed of very pedestrian Hard Rock music and some bet with some shadowy person somewhere to see just how much nudity she could get away with before it became pornography. And she’s from Hull, possibly the most unsexy place in the UK apart from fucking Clacton-on-Sea, and that’s because that’s where old people go to die.
SIDE TWO
The Sisters Of Mercy – Some Kind of Stranger. Andrew Eldritch is God, OK? Now we agree on that important point, we can discuss the fact that ‘Some Kind of Stranger’ is lyrically his finest hour and this is the best Sisters song. Actually, it’s not going to be much of a discussion because it simply IS. This song is genius from the quiet opening noise to the final crescendo, underpinned with the baritone crooning of God, building to a heartbroken wail. As the Sisters of Mercy are the greatest band that will ever be, it will be of no surprise to any of you that this song is still in regular rotation on Dark Juan’s various devices, as is the entire Sisters catalogue, including ‘Wide Receiver’. Fnaar fnaar. However, Gary marx doesn’t like this song as he feels that it was meant to be more of a wedding song, as opposed to the love song to every single woman that Eldritch turned it into. Anyway, it has the most profound lyric to ever hit me between the eyes – “Seen the way that careful lingers undecided at the door”. Fucking BRILLIANT!
Godflesh – Slateman. The grandaddies of British Industrial gave me this, the ultimate Industrial song, on a free Metal Hammer/ Earache Death Metal sampler tape. This just goes to show how shambolic an outfit Metal Hammer has always been, as tacking ‘Slateman’ onto the end of a tape that featured Deicide and other Death Metal bands is a bit… knobby, and does an incredible song no justice whatsoever. Anyway, ‘Slateman’ to me is the second finest song that has ever existed. There’s nothing quite like its razor-sharp bleakness and its combination of red raw rage and icy cold sorrow. I WILL fight each and every single one of you who says otherwise. everything about it is sublime genius and if you disagree, you are WRONG.
Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow – Stargazer. Harking way back to a tape that was given to me by one of my dad’s work colleagues when I first got into Metal, ‘Stargazer’ gripped me from the very outset with its epic quality and Ronnie James Dio’s unique pipes not for once singing about elves and shit but instead about a bloke with massive steel balls getting people to build him a tower by telling them that he can fly and he will show them when they have made his tower for him. The question of payment for their labour was never touched upon in the lyric, which rattles on about wind, rain, whips, chains, and the like, which sounded like a decent night out for a provincial lad like me. Unaccountably, he has decided to do this in the middle of a fucking desert, which has always made me, from a young age, wonder about a) the logistics of this fucking tower, b) what about the foundations being built on sand and are none of these people a fucking CIVIL ENGINEER? and c) where do these people live? If they are that gullible I need to go there, and I’ll be King inside a week.
Spoiler alert: The man is a lying bastard, and everyone has been had by the short and curlies.
Surprisingly, the protagonist of the song, who is not the man who had the tower built for a total of £0, looks dispassionately at the blood-and-chunky-flesh-lumps aftermath of a man flinging himself from a tower saying he can fly, and then merely turns immediately for home after years of toil and suffering. He doesn’t even stop for a bevvy or some legal advice first.
Skyclad – The Cradle Will Fall. Clearly, teenage me has arbitrarily decided that side two of this tape has to have something beginning with the letter ‘S’ as a theme. I was a silly boy. Anyway, when Sabbat and Martin Walkyier parted company, Martin went and created British Folk Thrash with Skyclad, and this song shares the same storytelling potential that Dani Filth uses to such good effect. It’s a speedy, rapid number that was a little left of the norm, and that’s why I dug it so much at the time. I’m going to have to revisit Skyclad. Apart from ‘Spinning Jenny’ I haven’t listened to them for years. Walkyier was always a master lyricist whose vocal talents (his visceral, short, sharp bark being ideal for Sabbat) didn’t match up to his writing talent. And it was always amusing seeing a short man in a leather jerkin waving around a large sword only marginally smaller than him.
Xentrix – The Order of Chaos. More British Thrash Metal from Kristian Havard and the boys, but one where they had wholeheartedly adopted the Stateside Thrash sound in the wake of Slayer’s “South of Heaven”. A remarkably chunky production, murderous central riff and a fucking brilliant chorus lent weight to this song, and it was the highlight of the album called “Kin”. A hilarious video that was clearly made for 47p and a packet of Maltesers followed and got some limited rotation on MTV and Kerrang! TV, but lying in a ditch on the West Pennine Moors and filming Preston lads stepping over you in black and white and superimposing a poorly drawn cellophane pentagram on top does not a Satanic experience make. They too went down the route of a godawful power ballad, an unusual thing for a Thrash band to do, this time an ecologically aware one that had a good and timely message called ‘No More Time’. Shame it was still a bit pants. But that could just be because I fucking DESPISE power ballads.
Slayer – South of Heaven. Teenage me had obviously remembered that new, clean, Stateside sound of Xentrix, and had decided to juxtapose the two songs for comparison. I really don’t need to tell you anything about Slayer. I’m sure you know who they are, although I maintain that only “Reign In Blood” and “South of Heaven” are any good, and even “South of Heaven” is a bit dodgy in places. I don’t really like Slayer. I used to when I first discovered them but after “South of Heaven”, every album sounded the same, and I’m pissed with them for “retiring” and then prostituting themselves for money with yet another tour, very much in the manner of the millions of farewell tours Kiss have done. It is a shame when artistic integrity falls before piles of money.
Dread Zeppelin – Do The Claw. Jesus! Well, it’s fair to say it was a bit of fun. It was either going to be this or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s ‘Bell Bottoms’. I’d say that teenage me chose wisely. For those of you who don’t know, a bit of context. Dread Zeppelin were a band that played Led Zeppelin songs in a Reggae style. With vocals from an Elvis impersonator called Tortelvis. They sound exactly as you might imagine them to. Thinking about it now, I wish I had put the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on there. At least that was spasmodic, jerky and exciting instead of some bloke in a ridiculous bejewelled catsuit (the impersonators for some reason never be the Elvis from when he was young, sexy and dangerous, they are always the fat, drug-addled one in stupid fucking sunglasses) crooning, “Doing the claw, I do it Crawford style…”. What the FUCK is Crawford style?
What makes this particular tape interesting in a small way is the things that were recorded over. After Dread Zeppelin finished there’s a small snippet of Pretty Boy Floyd’s ‘Rock and Roll (Is Gonna Set the Night on Fire), which is a truly awful, third-rate Glam Metal song that is as mentally challenged as a British football player, and also the beginning of the long-forgotten Mammoth’s ‘Fat Man’, a band whose entire gimmick was that they were VERY fat men playing music. They were around for as long as you might expect, after one of them promptly shuffled off this mortal coil after a heart attack. I Would NOT liked to have been one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
Well, that written piece went much further than I intended it to, which means you poor sods out there are going to have to read it. Sorry!
Here’s a spotify playlist of my mix tape for you:
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