My my, hey hey, hard rock will never die. OK, it doesn’t scan quite as well as ol’ Neil’s line, but you get my drift. For all its deep unfashionability, loud guitar music will ALWAYS return to save the day, kicking the butts of ephemeral pop trends like the stomping comic-book villain that it is.

Twenty years after I stood in the grey drizzle of Donington watching Monsters Of Rock (AC/DC, Whitesnake, even the Blue fuckin’ Oyster Cult), I’m standing in another field in another millennium and heavy loud hard metal geetar rock is still kicking butt. The beast simply won’t die.

Fave moments at Ozzfest #1: Coby Dick, nu metal’s very own testosterone-crazed linebacker, saluting "some motherfuckers from Wales in the house..." (Are there any motherfuckers in Wales? And were Black Sabbath fans "in the house" in the heyday of Paranoid?)

In the "Hospitality" tent — yes, Friston’s still allowed into such inner sancti of the hard-rock hierarchy — the Kerrang! hacks gather for their measly ten minutes with Casey Chaos or Corey Taylor while a gaggle of bottle blondes in ripped black tees flounces about "promoting" the Columbia website hardplace.net.

I snatch a bottle of Holy Water ("each one personally blessed by Ozzy") and try to explain to my eight-year-old son — take a bow, Metal Freddy! — why we can’t penetrate any further inside the Ozzfest backstage fortress. It’s the first time Metal Freddy (right) has heard the word "laminate" and I’m trusting it’s the last.

I thought Papa Roach was music for eight-year-olds until my kid freaked at the sight of all those moshing metalheadz. As we beat a retreat from the maelstrom, I realised that Papa Roach is indeed music for eight-year-olds, just eight-year-olds living in 17-year-old bodies.

"We play this shit from the heart," avows Roach mainman Coby Dick. (Yo, Moby, eatcha skinny l’il heart out!) "One love!" And then as an afterthought: "One evil!" (Best play safe, right?) These all-blacks of nu-metal rap-rock are all rage-by-numbers and jejune ranting about broken homes. "Take my money, take my possessions!!" How ’bout your Dreamworks advance, Cobes? Can I take that?

"Today would be a good day to die!" yells Master Dick. "If anyone has a gun out there, shoot me now... I’d die a happy motherfucker!" And then as another afterthought: "Better still, shoot George W. Bush!!" Metal Freddy is happier when, much later, Papa Roach’s fat peroxide-blond drummer is ferried past us on the back of a cart.

Fave moments from Ozzfest #2: The dark tribes — empinkened by the Midlands sun — chanting "SATAN! SATAN!" as one. And while we’re at it, let’s break them tribes down into 1) Old Sabs diehards/Mullethead bikers, 2) Epicene Marilyn Manson goths, 3) Pumped-up rap-rock Roach jocks, 4) Unreconstructed punks in search of "the chunk", and 5) Pure "no logo" nihilists in black and nuttin’ but.

I know nowt about Tool, other than that Beavis and Butthead would almost certainly go, "He said ‘Tool’... [snigger snigger fnar fnar]" But clearly they’re atrocity exhibitionists of the first order, a sort of black-hearted Jane’s Addiction with a zealous interest in horror and alienation. Instead of lurching about Coby-style, Tool’s singer — clad only in fetching leather shorts and boots — writhes on a little platform to macabre goth-metal bass lines as wormlike mutants squirm and wriggle on the big screen behind him.

My guess is that Tool [snigger snigger fnar fnar] are all about hellish torment for the suburban disturbed, their bleak riffs low on what Slipknot call "chunk" but high on nihilism. And when you think about it, it ain’t such a long way back from Tool’s ‘My Shadow’ to the Sabs’ ‘Into the Void’.

Fave moments from Ozzfest #3: A guy dancing in a Voices Of East Harlem T-shirt. Or did I hallucinate it?

Welcome Amen. After Tool, Casey Chaos’ mob are like a proper rock and roll band a la Stooges and Pistols, but via ’80s hardcore. Amen have come for your parents and they’ve even been on the cover of NME. They’re proud to be anti-American and they want the best of both worlds: punk cred and nu-metal exposure.

Amen are hoarse bleeding-throat vox over squirgly wah-wah Ron Asheton licks, with songs like ‘Piss Virus’ and ‘May Day’ dragging us happily back to ‘T.V. Eye’ and Fun House. These are real grinding rock riffs, not just noo metal chunk fed through massed amp stacks. "We want to thank you for sticking around for this shitty little punk-rock band," shouts Chaos. It’s as disingenuous as anything else I’ve heard this afternoon, but I can’t help liking the dude...

... a lot more than I like Slipknot, an insane clown posse of boiler-suited would-be psychos whose set is as neatly choreographed as an N’Sync show. What a super-slick operation this is: a plunging into twisted midwestern abjection that’s a good deal less menacing than a Hammer horror flick.

With their Hannibal Lecter masks and 666 insignia and their comical football-jock indignation, this chunktastic nonette merely drags Marilyn Manson back into the realm of angry machismo. For all his desire to speak for America’s forgotten "maggots", Corey Taylor can apparently think of nothing more rabble-rousing to yelp than "Make some fuckin’ noise!" (repeat x 10) If Slipknot could write riffs as true and pure as ‘Supernaut’ or ‘Sweet Leaf’, it might be a different story. Fact is, they’re pussies next to all those Scandinavian death-metal merchants: the new Kiss, if they’re lucky.

Fave moment from Ozzfest #4: The very butch lead singer of Disturbed asking us all to shout "Fuck!" Have we really not advanced beyond Country Joe’s 32-year-old Fish Chant?!

Finally the reason I’m at this ’fest at all: the four Brummie putzes who invented this shit in the first place, the mighty and ageless Black Sabbath. Ozzy, Tony, Geezer, Bill. Four doofuses who’d probably be on the dole-queue scrapheap if fate and the former Sharon Arden hadn’t combined to enshrine them as the true godfathers of HM.

Time-travel from the grimy blues-rock dives of Brummingham to the multi-million-grossing phenom that’s Ozzfest and you have to doff your cap. There’s something about Ozzy’s stumpy tat-smothered arms and mad, frightened eyes — eyeliner running, hair matted over his face — that suggests he deserves every dollar he’s made. "It’s playtime with the madman!" he bellows, but he looks like Ozzy Agonistes.

And then there’s the "Earl’s Court gypsy violinist" with his blood-red SG and his knee-length leather coat and his giant crucifix... not forgetting the steel fingertips that widdle those solos. Tony Iommi was never an Angus Young or a Buck Dharma, let’s be honest, but he can still lay down big slabs of mogadon riffology. And out they all come, with Geezer Butler and the post-heart-attack Bill Ward thumping busily away underneath: ‘Snowblind’, ‘Fairies Wear Boots’, ‘War Pigs’. Even a new one-chord grinder called ‘Scary Dreams’ smokes.

As Ozzy re-emerges in his famous fringed sleeves for ‘Iron Man’, he looks like some absurd bird of prey. One bar into that timeless HM classic, every last metalhead in the National Bowl — every geriatric and every babe in arms — is singing along.

© Al Friston 2001

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