Jimmy Kay from Canada’s ‘The Metal Voice’ recently spoke to Heavy Metal author Martin Popoff on his new book Who invented Heavy Metal?  A book charting metal from the very beginning of time to the 1970’s. Martin Popoff recently spoke at  an international academic research conference in Finland on the discussion of  Modern Heavy Metal along with Scott Ian of Anthrax and Alex Skolnick guitarist of Testament

When asked about the roots of Metal from the Ancient times

“We start the book at 1250BC with the horns of Jericho, the fables of knocking down the walls with music. The first crazy rock concerts being with Romans and the Greeks and how things got wildly out of control.  There is Vikings in there, there is a little about war and Scottish bagpipes. The idea that music was used a s a scary tool. Then we get into classical music and we get our first rock stars like Paganini who apparently sold his soul to the devil.”

When asked about how the Heavy Metal vocal style has evolved over the years

“We start hearing guys going crazy singing, Jerry Lee Louis, this is piano based music, Elvis a lot of it is acoustic guitar based music, but you hear guys starting putting a little more inflection and sexuality in their vocals and then it goes into the Beatles. There are so many Beatles records throughout this book because you know the Beatles in some of their earlier songs twist and shout for example there is a lot screaming going on and it’s almost like a new powerful kind of scream.  Robert Plant is probably you first quintessential Heavy Metal singer. Ian Gillan has a new thing that goes on top of Robert Plant which is kind of a new savagery to his singing,  like drunkenness to his singing. There is very little talk about Ozzy  in this book  because  I don’t really put Ozzy or Bill Ward for that matter with his drumming style as two of the guys in Black Sabbath that had a whole heck of a lot to do with Heavy metal.”

When asked about the structure of this book

“With this book I really wanted to do the timeline with quotes because the arguments we all have around the kitchen table and around the beers and the bars are like when did things happen . Talking about who invented something  its really cool to see month by month day by day and in some cases year by year when things are being invented . I’ve got quotes from  126 different people . What I wanted to do with this book is put in everybody that everybody that ever talks about as part of this argument. Everyone gets their due.”

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