I like money. The less I have, the more I want. And right now, I‘ve got none. But what I do have is about 1,000 heavy metal CDs.

I’d left them in my parent’s loft for a few years. First while I went to University, then while I hopped from flatshare to flatshare. Until finally, I lived somewhere big enough to put them. But I don’t need them. I have all the music I want streaming free these days.

So why don’t I get rid of those CDs? If I make 20 pence for each one then Ill have… erm… 1,000 20 pence pieces! Yeah! I could spend that in the pub.

So I dug the boxes out of the attic and began scanning them into MusicMagpie (Other CD buying websites are available. I expect). And a curious thing happened. I fell deeply in love with the music again.

Metal had been an immense part of my life in the past. I’d played in bands, I’d spent all of my money of trips to festivals, leather trousers and yes, even music.

Every Friday and Saturday night would see me blow my wages in the local rock bar, usually showing off the latest T-Shirt I’d purchased. Metal has a strange and unique ability to completely take over your life and bank account.

Many genres are products of their social and economic background, but metal is weirdly ubiquitous, and doubly-weirdly all-consuming. Right now there are kids in African townships wearing head-to-toe black leather and studs.

There are underground bands in Iraq who are quite literally willing to be executed in order to play songs about turning people inside out, once a month to four people in a squat. That’s really fucking metal man. Anyway…

While I was at University, I had a rather ‘complex relationship’ that didn’t end well. It’s fair to say that I was rather down in the dumps afterwards. Possibly clinically so. And during that time, I stopped listening to music for a while. And that meant that it was less important.

I still flirted with the scene, but it never had quite the same hold on me. I went to gigs, but I‘ve always sort of felt like I was going through the motions. So opening up all these boxes, I didn’t expect to feel anything special.

But I did.

I’d forgotten about the power of physical artifacts. Artwork, pictures of dorky guys from Iowa with B.C. Rich guitars, albums called ‘Burning Nun’.

I was going to sell them, but I realised that having them physically in front of me made me remember the sheer extent of my collection. Hundreds of albums and bands I’d forgotten even existed.

And I was secretly pleased to find that I liked them all. Some were good, some were ostensibly bloody terrible, but I had a reason for liking them all. There’s no way Late Night Romeo’s seminal (in every sense of the word) ‘Wild & Wikked’ album will ever be troubling the Grammys, but I have dear memories of watching them play to 20 people in a tent while I was very hungover, and giggling at their sheer ridiculousness.

The process led me back in time, through the three big stages of metal fandom: Who knows, maybe everyone goes through these, or maybe they are unique to heavy metal…

1) The Mainstream Hero:

This is the stage you’ll hit when you first discover a genre.

For most people, that means the big guns. For me it was Iron Maiden, for some it’s Metallica. It’s bands you hear occasionally on the radio, lurking around the fringes of mainstream culture.

Everyone has a breakout heavy band when they are 16, and it will either last about a year before you stop caring and get that job in Foxtons, or it will propel you down into steel hell. After passing through endless realms of different subgenres, you’ll arrive at the pinnacle of metallitude…

2) The Puritan:

How metal is too metal?

None.

Or something.

This stage is hard one. Expect to get paid just in time to pay the credit card, because you already spent all your wages on a Manowar box set. Expect to spend your vacations in a field in Germany, watching someone scream about being “the black-winged messenger of Shaitan”. Expect to live in the pub. Expect to join a band that writes songs called ‘Atomic Necromancy’. This is your entire life, and you will live it well. Not to do so would be un-metal. Oh, and your career options may be limited as well. Suitably metal careers include: Sheet-metal worker, submarine pilot, and assistant in HMV.

3) The Grand Old Wizard:

Or ‘maturity’ if you want to be a stickler. This is the point where you figure out that scenes are ridiculous, and you just want to hang about in a good pub that plays Danzig sometimes.

And that’s fine. You’ve got your submarine pilot pension/continuing assistant in HMV role after all. Go to any rock or metal bar on the planet and you’ll see three or four guys in their sixties on stools at the end of the bar. They have long white hair, moan about the new bands that play at the pub (Or are embarrassingly trying to keep relevant by reading Metal Hammer).

They’re nice blokes, you should talk to them more often, man. Go on. Ask them if they’re going to see Sabbath at the NIC.

*****

So I ripped the CDS. Almost 90 gigs of music (it took a while), and I sold them. But now I listen to them every day. FLACS at 1440 really do sound a hell of a lot better than MP3s, even if it means I can only fit one album at a time on my phone.

But I like listening to albums now as well. I’d forgotten about that. Hearing 12 tracks by a single artist in a row. And I‘ve started buying whole albums again.