Comments on: EUROPE – “The Final Countdown”

By: Steve Mannion

Steve Mannion — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:31:03 +0000

What about RHCP and The Black Crowes? Not exactly metal but probably capable of filling some stadiums just before, around and still after the time of ‘Nevermind’. Depressing to think that RHCP were still some 10 years off their commercial peak at that point!

By: CarsmileSteve

CarsmileSteve — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:08:25 +0000

early 90s pop/stadium metal you say?

extreme, warrant, TIGERTAILZ (not that they got as far as a stadium, but deffo pop bless ‘em)…

debatable whether one could count thunder/quireboys/little angels/dogs d’amour as 90s pop metal, they were pretty much over once Nevermind came out…

By: Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:08:12 +0000

Re: #88, this sounds familiar – Nirvana were the key band in terms of my group of friends at school getting into music in a big way and their crossover appeal in terms of Kerrang!/NME meant that some of us went the indie route and some the rock (I was largely the former though partial to heavier stuff at times).

Looking back it was perhaps a transitional era for the genre, the big names were those who had roots in thrash (about which me and my friends knew nothing) and who helped lay the foundations for nu-metal – bands like Rage Against The Machine, Fear Factory, Pantera and – later on – Sepultura’s Roots album and Korn’s first couple of records. I could never fully commit myself to the metal lifestyle – I never really liked the look for starters – but I admired it in a way and I always found myself annoyed at the snobbery displayed in the indie weeklies towards the music and its fans.

I’m not sure what the early/mid-’90s equivalent of Europe-style pop/stadium metal would have been – Def Leppard and Bon Jovi still had hits around ’91/’92 but beyond that I’m stumped.

By: AndyPandy

AndyPandy — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:50:16 +0000

1968 seems to have been the “first” year for a few genres that never really died

FUNK: although people often cite “Papas Got A Brand New Bag” in 1965 as the first funk track (but that’s almost like saying “You Really got Me” was heavy metal ie an extremely tenuous and abstract connection to the respective sounds the genres came to symbolise).
But by 1968 we had the sound that dominated black dance music up until at least the mid 80s when after existing in tandem with hip hop for a few years until it finally died as a sound of young blacks.

REGGAE: about as near as such things can ever be to one year indicating a definite starting point for a genre (as opposed to the ska and rocksteady that went before)

RAP: a bit more controversial but the Last Poets are invariably cited as the first rap group and they began performing in 1968.

re my 92: it should have read “although signifying virtually NOTHING alone”…don’t usually bother correcting my many typos but that one makes the whole thing complete gibberish

By: taDOW

taDOW — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:53:18 +0000

acc. to wiki in some electric flag review for rolling stone in 68, describes them as “Nobody who’s been listening to Mike Bloomfield—either talking or playing—in the last few years could have expected this. This is the new soul music, the synthesis of white blues and heavy metal rock.” it sorta credits metal mike w/ cementing the term, bangs/creem w/ popularizing it.

By: koganbot

koganbot — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:35:16 +0000

apparently barry gifford (!) was the first to use it as a genre term #67 Don, are you sure? When and where? The earliest I know of in print is Mike Saunders in Rolling Stone in mid '70 and in Creem in his May '71 review of Sir Lord Baltimore - not that I've seen those reviews, just heard of them.

By: AndyPandy

AndyPandy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:33:57 +0000

70: Obviously “heavy metal thunder” wasn’t referring to a type of music but I have read that from the use of it by Steppenwolf (in a massive public-consciousness invading hit containing much that became to define the genre) onwards there existed a vague connection to a useful shorthand for hard rock.

And of course it was just ONE of the signifiers (although signifying virtually alone) appearing in 1968 which when taken in context pointed to 1968 as the year when the ingredients that made up the metal brew all came together.

By: AndyPandy

AndyPandy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:05:22 +0000

86: doesn’t the ‘ardcore/hardcore continuum refer to a nuum centred on hardcore as in rave music from the early 90s?

By: Conrad

Conrad — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:49:25 +0000

84, and “Are Friends Electric”, sort of…

By: thefatgit

thefatgit — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:21:40 +0000

#76 I kind of agonised over including any grunge or thrash in that list. I suppose I could have included Faith No More. The 90′s seemed quite a chasm although Steve Hillage was still active, I believe. Plenty of proggy metal in the noughties though.

By: MichaelH

MichaelH — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:17:45 +0000

PPS Having listened to the previous single, I’d say this is False Metal. It’s got the skkkrng guitar, the wailing vocal – but the chord progressions are all pop. No sign of the devil’s interval.

By: MichaelH

MichaelH — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:13:39 +0000

PS Also, this parrticular single shouldn’t be discussed as a metal song, regardless of the rest of their career – that’s what the opening line of my first post was meant to imply.

By: MichaelH

MichaelH — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:04:55 +0000

I think Europe having been totally ignored in the UK before TFC is why I can’t think of them as metal. I don’t remember them being in Kerrang!, though of course they might have been. Certainly, I’d never even heard of them till TFC, and by virtue of my friends, I usually knew what was happening on the scene (albeit, that as they’d got older, they moved away from mainstream metal towards Nuclear Assault and the hardcore crossovers. Ot the hardcore continuum, if you prefer).

By: anto

anto — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:48:27 +0000

The observations about metal and its fans make a lot of sense.
One of my best friends at school was a metal-head who was ridiculed by some for favouring Korn and Limp Bizkit (so imagine my bemusement when in my first year at college both groups became astoundingly popular).
This friend was opinionated about what was heavy and what was not.
He didn’t share my appreciation for Nirvana (not metal enough) and anything too overtly indie we tacitly agreed to disagree about.
He seemed honestly surprised when I admitted to ownership of Pulp albums.
However it was my metal-loving friend who pushed me towards my favourite ever group by loaning me some tapes of Manics album tracks.
Previously a band who I liked better for their image than their songs
the Manics appeared to have something in common with Guns n Roses but equally just as much in common with the Jesus and Mary Chain to bridge the gap.
A few other groups we could agree on Smashing Pumpkins (who I always think of a making a kind of baroque metal), Placebo and Therapy?
This to me points up the curious commonality between metal and indie fans and how it occassionly mingles as does the fact that two of the few weeklies still on the shelves are Kerrang and the NME.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:17:01 +0000

(actually that solo is definitely metal)

As for the mark, what can I say? I really like it. Rather than marks creeping up it’s partly a reaction to a run of more or less dreary #1s though: was nice to have something with a bit of ridiculous gumption to review. Think of it as a 7 in the way King Of The Road, Quinn The Eskimo, In The Summertime, Yes Sir I Can Boogie and Pass The Dutchie are 7s if you like.

Oddity aside you’ve picked a lot of the songs I underrated though! (I get another tilt at Jailhouse Rock I believe so a rare opportunity to revise the mark…)

By: Rory

Rory — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:16:31 +0000

Thanks, Tom. Sounds like standard-issue early-80s metal to me; I used to listen to plenty of stuff just like it. I wouldn’t have called it top-drawer metal, but it’s metal all right. “Hard rock” would have signified quite different vocal styles, guitar solos, the lot.

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:08:08 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qajDhtnpBhA – here’s the first single from their previous album. Hard rock, yes. Metal? Possibly. Borderline I’d say. No sign of TFC’s pop nous though.

By: Rory

Rory — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:00:17 +0000

MichaelH @77: that’s an astute comment, but the trouble is that none of us in the Anglo countries knew anything about Europe apart from this track. I still have no idea what their other songs sounded like, particularly their stuff before this, but can only assume that they were metal and that this was an aberration. Their guitarist objected to it as such, apparently (shades of Berlin and “Take My Breath Away”).

If all we knew of Van Halen was “Jump”, we would no doubt be saying they weren’t heavy metal either. David Lee Roth’s subsequent “California Girls” and “Just a Gigolo” would have provided further evidence. But do those examples really mean that they weren’t, any more than this means that Europe weren’t?

By: Steve Mannion

Steve Mannion — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:45:28 +0000

A little bias towards your own time is surely unavoidable.

By: Pete Baran

Pete Baran — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:45:01 +0000

I always like to think that The Final Countdown as a sequel to clouds across the moon, and the galactic battle having moved to Earth has destroyed it and thus we are scurrying off to Venus to retreat.

I will come back to this thread vis a vis my own metal past. Just safe to say I was the singer in a band called Stormchild for a while (until they threw me out for refusing to wear leather trousers).

And I would certain;y agree that The Final Countdown is as good as the tracks you mention (except Jailhouse Rock with is an 8 or 9 for me).

By: David L

David L — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:19:48 +0000

Do I detect a touch of score inflation over the past few years? I can certainly accept that TFC is silly but in a good way, but is it really on a par with Space Oddity, Are Friends Electric, Jailhouse Rock, Help!, Day Tripper, etc., who also got 7s?

By: MichaelH

MichaelH — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:03:26 +0000

I think talking about this in terms of metal misses the point. I was a metal fan till the mid-80s, when my allegiances shifted to indie, but my group of friends included a lot of metal fans. They didn’t like Bon Jovi, but they respected them, and some of them bought Bon Jovi records. Same with Def Leppard. Van Halen were the inventors of modern metal (ie metal that wasn’t recylced blues) and were venerated. Quiet Riot were considered proper metal. Coverdale’s past earned Whitesnake kudos. There were violent schisms over Motley Crue. But not one of them thought Europe were a metal act: they were a pop act with long hair. No one even cared about Europe’s existence.
If there’s a hair metal continuum that runs Aerosmith-Halen-Crue-Ratt-GNR and so on, I think there’s a parallel one, filled with the “metal” bands who weren’t really metal, one that features the likes of Europe and Extreme, with Jovi floating somewhere in the middle, JBJ clearly realising that to keep a career you needed the metal core onside, but to keep the career enormous, you needed the pop fans too. Extreme and Europe only realised the second part, to their cost.

By: Steve Mannion

Steve Mannion — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:57:36 +0000

Marillion to Mars Volta is an insane jump. Or rather, yay the 90s!

By: farflung sukrat of very metal shr3wsbury

farflung sukrat of very metal shr3wsbury — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:54:07 +0000

that list begins with king crimson! they invented metal and prog!

actual real metal begins with judas priest though

By: thefatgit

thefatgit — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:46:12 +0000

The Prog to Metal Arc:

ELP
Focus
Gong
Yes
Genesis
Marillion
The Mars Volta
Mastodon
Cradle Of Filth
Children Of Bodom
Nile