Mike Weatherley MP: “Screaming Guitar is music to my ears”

Mike Weatherley MP is MP for Hove

Everyone loves music. And often people tend to like most music. But heavy metal? Usually not - reasons include "terrible screeching vocals" to "you can't dance to it". This is an exchange I often experience:

Me: ‘What sort of music do you like?’

Me: 'Ah, so you don’t like my music then.’

No really – I like all music.’

Me: ‘Even heavy Metal?’

‘Oh no – of course not heavy metal!’

Heavy Rock/Metal has never been socially acceptable (unless one adds in the likes of Bon Jovi and Guns & Roses into the definition) and, for many, this musical sub-culture is something to be avoided.

When I was in my early teens, I always preferred my music guitar-based – any single that had a guitar riff in it got my vote. Others liked something you can dance to, but I liked guitars. It wasn’t until Deep Purple brought out ‘In Rock’ when I was 13, closely followed by my introduction to Black Sabbath albums, that I found a genre I could call my own. And once found, it becomes tribal and almost an obsession. Actually, scrub ‘almost’ – it is an obsession. Blues is good, thumping bass and screaming guitars even better. Disco, to quote a 70's slogan, sucks.

Most people have hobbies – something they become passionate about. Something that moves them. It could be hitting a golf ball sweetly in Portugal, following a football team and checking the results every Saturday, or going to Tolkien conventions. For me, it’s always been about music. From hours spent sifting through the racks at the local record store, to reading the specialist magazines or whatever. Given the time spent on this hobby, I suspect that if I had been this passionate about chemistry I would have invented a cure for something by now!

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