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You have to give Nicko his due for (last year) coming out on tour at 71 years of age, 6 months after a stroke, and trying to knock out Caught Somewhere In Time every night.

Also, my two have it in their heads that Cozy Powell is the drummer in every band they hear.

"Daddy, does Cozy really have Sooty on his drumkit?"

Cozy Powell, yesterday:

I've got too many thoughts, I think I'm going to faint.

Stewcretia
Mash Is In Your Mouth
Frozen Buns
Mechflanix
I Ain't Souperstitious
Fryer
Poisson Was The Cure
Foreclosure Of Ice Cream
Blood Of Gyros
A Secret Plaice

Honestly most of the chat round here has been about Max half arsing it or flat out not playing guitar at all. I thought he was on the money and Igor was flat to the fucking mat.

Not sure how I feel about bands bringing two 60 inch flatscreens out on tour. A desperate amount of fucking about with those intros and what felt like a good 5 minutes break between the sections.

Good show though.

I think the shite he came out with after the fight speaks to his character.  Seriously just fuck up - say you thought you won the fight, move on.

I find him fundamentally unlikeable. 

Not really.  Too many trailing cables and a pain in the arse to set everything up each time.

Get mesh pad ones if you can, far less audible and more transferrable to a real kit.

Sound wise, the biggest thing to bear in mind is if it's in a flat or first floor of a house the kick pedal is going to make more noise than anything else for the room underneath you.  Especially if you're learning double kick.

Limelight 1 is a bit optimistic for this surely?

Hopefully Ellefson pulls a crowd as well as he pulls something else.

Cryptic Writings had one or two bangers but it's a mess of an album

Mess is the exact descriptor for it.  She-Wolf, Disintegrators, FFF, Vortex and Trust are all great tunes.  There's a couple of others that are fine but it's the sheer gap between something like She-Wolf and absolute ballix like Have Cool Will Travel.

Samuelson and Menza are both absolute animals. 

I went to Keep It True Rising last October. I really enjoyed it but it was also a little weird. So many people rigidly sticking to the uniform. I think I was the only lad not wearing a black t-shirt both nights. I felt quite out of place, visually. It just seemed like an odd thing to try, being almost 50, to look like I did when I was 14. It also felt odd seeing so many kids dressing like a generation from long before theirs. When I was that age we never would have done that. Metal was ours, it was fresh and new. The thought of dressing the same as someone's grandad would have been unthinkable. I struggle with that aspect of the current scene. The music means as much to me as it ever did but I've long since given up trying to look the part. It just isn't me. I take solace in that I've been an awkward cunt since my teens, happy to go my own way, if it didn't feel right to go with the crowd. At the same time, part of me was delighted to be in a room with people for whom the music still meant so much they would travel abroad just to attend a gig, just like I had. I remember the line from Join The Army, "it's the size of your heart, not the length of your hair" and that'll do for me. The music will always be huge a part of my life but, as much as I love metal culture, I've spent a lot of time outside looking in, in many ways.

This just about nails it; Keep It True etc. is great and I really enjoyed it.  The roomful of young lads dressed in spandex and bootrunners etc. does feel like what I imagine the Teddy Boy revivalists in the 60s were like.

Went down like a sack of shite.

1916 is the low point of the 90s for me, everything else is very solid.

80s stuff is great top to bottom but it's the Overkill, Bomber and Ace Of Spades trilogy that are top of the list. Orgasmatron is a personal favourite.