The 80’s was undoubtedly the most revolutionary decade in cheese production, cultural cheese of course. I shouldn’t need to make a list. Pioneering the hair metal form of cheese were a jewish Canadian band called Anvil, they released 3 “classic” albums in their genres golden era and played to sold out stadiums along side the likes of some of the biggest names in rock music of the period. When the masses started to tire of watching leather cladded men masturbate on stage to played out metal themes and went on to discover ecstasy and redundant drum machines, Anvil stayed true to their thing and carried on to produce another 9 albums clearly demonstrating their capacity to stay amused at the , with such titles as “Forged in Fire” and “Strength of Steel”. The Story of Anvil is not to be confused with This is Spinal Tap, in fact if it they hadn’t been releasing albums for a quarter of a century before the decided to make a documentary, I’d have found it hard to believe it wasn’t a bad Spinal tap rip off… they even visit stone henge! I can’t help but think that they can’t have seen Spinal Tap because they don’t seem to acknowledge how wonderfully ironic the whole thing is. There is one big difference, the characters are loveable for all the right reasons. The documentary picks up in 2008, where all of the members work hard at their 9-5’s to barely pay their mortgages and Anvil is their weekend release. They get an random email from a european woman who declares her love for the band and proposes to be their manager, she says she’s assembled a european tour and they eagerly pack their bags. What ensues is enough to put you off pursuing a career in music, on the slim prospect that you might end up on a tour that resembles anything like the Anvil europe tour ’08. However they take it very well and come out smiling because they got to rock on out in front of their fans, even if they did only average 5 people a show. I managed to find a strange dynamic when watching TSoA, first of all I thought it was a documentary of a band who was big in the 80’s and were happily playing on for the pure love, but a bit further into documentary it becomes very much apparent that Lips and Robb the two remaining original members were very much still chasing the rockstar dream. Interviews with their family members dominated by the subject of how long Anvil will drag out their delusional fantasies, but little did they know the power of emotive documentaries. Lips borrows 13k of his sister, and they go to England to record with their original producer what they insist is their best record yet “This is Thirteen”… after getting turned down by all the main record companies things aren’t looking to peachy. But you can be sure that the documentary does reach its happy pinnacle in the form of a scene spookily reminiscent of “Searching for Sugarman”. No matter what you think of hair metal, you will be overloaded with Joy at their success, my girlfriend cried, I almost felt like it myself.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 08:34:13 +0000
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