Featuring in order of appearance:
Persecution / Ion Drive / Renegade / Depression / Bengal Tigers / Abramelin / Nothing Sacred / Mass Confusion / Taramis / Tyrus / Hobbs Angel of Death
If you were a Melbourne metalhead worth your weight in salt growing up in the 80’s or 90’s you would have heard of or even had the privilege or setting foot into the sacred place that we knew as ‘Metal for Melbourne.’
Starting out in a small toilet sized cubicle in Flinders St (at number 4), then around the corner to a premises marginally bigger (number 12) and then to the vault at Banana Alley.
Metal for Melbourne was the Mecca for us metal-heads; a shrine and place of worship if you will for the disenfranchised youth looking for expression and a place to find solace with like-minded brothers and sisters who got us and didn’t judge us for our taste in attire and musical preferences.
Founded and run for a long time by our Matriarch and Queen Greta Tate every single person present at The Corner on Saturday night had a story to tell about an experience with her and in the shop itself.
Mine is, I bought my first metal t-shirt from her at number 12. An Ozzy tee from “The Ultimate Sin” era and another time when I asked if she would play “The Real Me” from W.AS.P’s “The Headless Children” as I heard it on rage the Friday night before! (back when from midnight ’til 4 am the ABC would play all the new metal release videos, and we all stayed up and watched or set our VCR’s to tape em to watch first thing Saturday morning).
She asked me sternly, “WHY?
I said to Greta, “I heard it last night on Rage!”
To which she responded… “Well, we don’t play hits here!”, and I walked off with my tail between my legs!
Then there was the first time any of us saw Alan Thomas [R.I.P] from Triple R in there. We recognised THAT voice, and I’m pretty sure it may have been the first time any of us as young metal heads were mildly awestruck. We all listened to his show religiously on a Sunday night from 10 – midnight. The whole experience of growing up in Melbourne listening to metal was a full package and was truly a fucking awesome experience and one I wish our younger brethren could have now.
Stories of old and how we nurtured our misunderstood fractured selves were relived and retold on Saturday night as all walks of Melbourne’s, even Australia’s metal elite joined in unison to enjoy our past for eight magical hours like we were 16 again! It was fucking awesome. Baring in mind awesome readers that we were not only punters at The Corner but a collective of people uniting in an unbreakable bond.
All of the bands aside from one or two reformed to raise the horns once more and get that rush that we all felt and witnessed seeing their presence on stage for the first or final time or even once again. Due to age and ability, some of our brutal brothers may not be what they once were so we put that aside and ignored it completely. Preferring instead to autotune in our heads the excellent vocal talents of yesteryear and shredding/pounding abilities we remember with fondness. This is coming from what I have previously written as metal heads being a fickle beast and forgiving nothing. We didn’t care if there was an issue, we just cared about The TRUE birth of Heavy Metal in our magnificent city.
I saw every band even if it was for only one song because they deserved respect and attention from those of us that wanted them on the stage one more time. I had my highlights for sure, but it would be rude of me to praise any one band over another from Saturday night as they in all of our collective minds were as awesome as the band before or after them.
Not one glitch was noticeable, the stage sound was magic ALL night, the lighting was great, the organisation was without compare thanks to amazing efforts Rob Wog and Sham Hughes, Metal for Melbourne 2017 ran like clockwork and as technically articulate as the finest metal guitar slayer.
To give the event one more raising of the horns, all the money raised is being donated to help the homeless in Melbourne. That’s metal. \m/
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