HELL BENT FOR LEATHER

Amusing, sweetly ramshackle compendium of a British lad’s heavy-metal memories.

Londoner Hunter’s debut traipses through the cultural funhouse of the 1980s, an era when sleazy, parent-offending metal achieved mainstream prominence. He recalls the enthusiasm first ignited by AC/DC’s “Let’s Get it Up,” when he was ten: “The world suddenly became three dimensional and my ears popped open.” The accessible lasciviousness of AC/DC and KISS provided Hunter with a valuable template, offering this clueless, nerdy adolescent a darker world of rebellion and sexuality. His dreary education became subordinate to his telescoping obsessions with bands like Judas Priest and Manowar, and after learning three guitar chords, he formed his first metal band, the comically inept Armageddon’s Ring. Hunter writes in a digressive style that allows him to track metal’s development from the decayed dreams of the late ’60s, which produced angry powerhouses like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, to the time of his immersion in the genre, when the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” was ascendant and iconoclastic, imaginative bands like Iron Maiden transcended cult status to become a commercial force. Hunter examines metal’s secret language, encoded in strangely shaped guitars, overwrought soloing, and obscure tour T-shirts, a knowledge key to young fans’ snobbish allegiances. He alternates these passages (and tangential narratives regarding the international thrash/death-metal underground) with the tale of his stumbling musical ambitions. Hunter dropped out of school at 16 and grew his hair obsessively while laboring in bands like eXposed, Noise Royale, and Rag’n’Bones, whose misadventures ricochet off the big time but do make for droll reading. Although the narrative covers territory familiar from previous metal memoirs like Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City (2001), Hunter’s may be the funniest yet: his self-deprecating British humor highlights the absurdities inherent in the self-serious gloss of metal’s performers and fans capable of remarking with a straight face about Metallica, “What a silly name. . . . They won’t last long.”

Winning blend of headbanging trivia and adolescent fantasia.