This is a reproduction of the article as found in The Age newspaper March 31st 2006
and can be found in it's original form here

Power Surge- The heavy metal army is growing. Michael Dwyer dares investigate.
IT'S only Sunday night in St Kilda but the stage at the Palace looks like a dungeon in the House of Usher. Gothic candelabrum tower in the corners. Hanging on the back wall is a pentagram bent into a heart shape, which throws a surreal light on its Satanic implications."We want HIM! We want HIM!" The chant cuts through a chord of doom that shakes the floor. At last, Finland's foremost "love metal" band, His Infernal Majesty, to bestow their full title, emerge from the smoke to face a forest of forked-finger salutes and mobile phone cameras.
The chant escalates. "HIM! HIM! HIM!" The capacity crowd strains upwards, like a godless mass writhing in some ghastly post-Christmas sale. An ominous synthesiser line and brutish staccato guitar riff gather momentum as we're swept in the general vicinity of mayhem.
We never quite get there. By the time they lumber into their fourth song, a cover of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, for heaven's sake, His Infernal Majesty have proved roughly equal to Avril Lavigne on the metallic scale of punishing evil.

Still, like evil itself, metal wears many shades of black. More importantly, like any self-respecting force of darkness, it is ever strengthening its power in our midst, and will ultimately laugh upon our graves.
"In terms of figures, it's getting bigger for sure," says Melbourne promoter Chris O'Brien. "The bands are coming out with some great albums. There's no metal tour we have that's not working."
In March he had a full house for a double thrash bill featuring the Haunted (Sweden) and Exodus (San Francisco). Last week he handled two sell-out shows for American prog-metal outfit Coheed and Cambria, plus the chocka turnout for HIM's debut Australian appearance.

Meanwhile, ticket sales for returning Swedish prog-death band Opeth are well into a second night at the Forum.
American nu-rock/hardcore hardboys Korn, Hatebreed, Disturbed and 10 Years are squaring up for "the metal tour of the year". Extreme British power-metal warriors Dragonforce are scheduled to pillage in May. "That's gonna sell out too," O'Brien predicts.

Love metal, hate metal, black metal, death metal, goth metal, doom metal, speed metal, glam metal, grindcore, hardcore, metalcore, deathcore, rapcore, thrashcore - as rock'n'roll grows old and pale in the mainstream spotlight, its metal-plated hellspawn seems to be prospering like an undetected virus. The only danger, it seems, is the most elusive strain of all...

"Death to false metal!" Dick Carruthers says by way of greeting. The English filmmaker is best known for his exquisite Led Zeppelin DVD package of 2003, but he's widened the net to bursting point for his latest project, a two-hour DVD documentary called Heavy Metal: Louder Than Life.
It's a film that defines its subject by example, rather than hard-and-fast rules. The forthright, often conflicting opinions and variously ball-tearing riffs of a cast of thousands, from Deep Purple and Judas Priest to Anthrax and Napalm Death, paint an overview as colourful and complete as any headbanger could desire. Well, so Carruthers fervently hopes.
"With a project like this, you have a vast amount of work to do and a huge responsibility and very little room to f-- up if you want to retain the use of your legs," he says. "It's a poisoned chalice.

"So much of what heavy metal is, culturally, is people with different levels of knowledge and different affiliations of bands wanting to get together and debate, swap, disagree, argue about it.
"To try to capture that in the film, we actually staged a forum with about 10 or 12 really serious metal fans. The idea was that it would reflect what we imagined people would do at home, watching the film. As it turned out, to distil all of that - it didn't really work."
"Well, there was a lot of beer involved as well," Carruthers' producer, Jim Parsons, reminds him.
"Oh yeah - there was. A lot of beer."
And so the purportedly "definitive" film about one of the more intriguing counter-cultural phenomena of the past 40 years is rendered inconclusive by imprudent beer consumption. That's a conclusion in itself, perhaps. To quote metal demigod Gene Simmons, "You certainly don't want a member of the intelligentsia tapping you on the shoulder and asking questions. It's not gonna be a long conversation."

"Metal is funny on almost every level," reckons Parsons, a former producer of MTV's Headbanger's Ball and a metal maniac of some 35 years' standing who claims to have seen AC/DC "38 or 39 times".
"(Black Sabbath's) Geezer Butler is hilarious in this film. If you take it too seriously you kind of lose what it's all about, although Kiss is one end of the spectrum where, personally, I don't think they took themselves seriously enough musically. But that's just my taste."

Friday night at the Hi-Fi Bar, the first thing you notice about the Five Venoms, local purveyors of "symphonic guitarmageddon", is that there's only four of them. The Spinal Tap parallels pile up as hirsute frontman Chen Wang and his right-hand axeman, Terry Huang, pull every corny metal move in the book. They shake their unfeasible mops in unison, they play their lead breaks in harmony, they straddle the monitors, entwine like sweaty pretzels to play each other's instruments, and even - gasp! - pretend they're gonna smash everything in a hilarious, over-the-top finale.
An aggressive gentleman with a mohawk comes out and calls us "motherf--ers" between bands. He throws out free CDs to guys in Metallica T-shirts who throw them back at him and shout "That's shit!" After an unseemly screaming match about the relative merits of Poison and Slayer, he's yanked offstage.

The headline act is Melbourne's own glam metal zombies, the Deadthings, a sharp, theatrical, low-budget version of Motley Crue with an independent album called Who Killed Holly Would? up their PVC sleeves. They have horror make-up, zebra-striped flying-V guitars and an Addams Family-style logo emblazoned on everything that's nailed down.

"Gonna go off, mate," one of their crew confides as a gaggle of skinny pole dancers warms up the stage. "We got pyro, strippers, everything." Somewhere in the assault are trashy shout-along anthems such as Dead Girlz Don't Say No and One Way Ticket to Hell.

It's all as entertaining as it is vacuous, the kind of old-school metal showmanship that brings the Darkness back to more packed-out Australian beer barns in the next few weeks.

"I wouldn't call the Darkness metal, myself," Dave Collins says with a palpable note of contempt. He books bands at the Arthouse, one of Melbourne's stalwart homes of metal, and he's a fan of "thrash metal, black metal, grind, hardcore, a bit of metalcore, old Metallica, Exodus, Megadeth ... I like the early, more extreme stuff."

For Collins, metal is a serious labour of love that is outside the mainstream almost by definition. He rattles off a litany of worthy Australian bands in a range of subgenres, but laments the lack of heavy headliners.

His next big event, on April 21, is led by German death metallers Profanation, with ample backup from locals Shallow Grave, Anarazel, Here I Die, Kania and the Ocularis Infernum.

"People who play metal in Australia know they're not gonna be huge," Collins says. "You do it 'cause you like it. And there's always gonna be fans for it. For 30 years it's been there. It has its moments in the sun but it's always there."
Collins points to Melbourne band Damaged as one of the biggest Aussie metal outfits of recent years. They settled on the label "hate core" when death metal, grindcore and hardcore weren't pummelling enough to describe their manifesto of "pissed-off people playing pissed-off music".
Perhaps not surprisingly, they've since fallen apart amid some acrimony, but at least two members are resuming hostilities for an imminent return, while former guitarist Chris Hill is rehearsing a new band he intends to sound "identical to Damaged".

For a seasoned purveyor of some of the most scathingly violent metallic noise ever recorded, Hill is a surprisingly moderate and inclusive fan who admits to having "everything from Twisted Sister to Morbid Angel to System of a Down to Cradle of Filth" in his car. "Metal's metal," he says.

"To me it's an emotion, it's a passion. It's socially not accepted but at the same time it's everywhere and it's always been bigger than all other styles of music. It's the most requested music in Australia, but the short of it is that record companies, radio and television and print media don't want anything to do with it.

"Which, when all the distortion pedals and giant stage inflatables are back in their boxes, is kind of what it's all about. Whether you're wearing the murderous grimace of a Satanic Norwegian black metal abomination or the slashed pink vinyl jumpsuit favoured by the Deadthings' J.C. Mephisto, the eternal outsider ethos is perhaps what makes metal immune from the daily slash-and-burn of popular culture. And the further outside you are, perhaps, the bigger you get.

"We did try to get AC/DC on camera but they didn't want to be a part of it," says Jim Parsons about Louder Than Life. "The reason was that they don't consider themselves to be heavy metal. It's very strange. Some people are just scared of it."

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