There’s A First Time For Everything: David Bowie, Stryper, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Robyn Hitchcock

Stryper, The Yellow and Black Attack

I’m not going to lie and pretend that I didn’t buy this cassette for anything other than ironic reasons. It was 1985 and the concept of a heavy metal Christian band was too dichotomous to pass up. I had heard that they caused fights in their audience by throwing tiny Bibles out into the crowd, and just had to hear what on earth they would sing about.

The album was released in 1984 and it’s actually a pretty darn good collection of classic heavy metal for the time. The music is well played and clean, and the vocals are the quintessential warbling soprano. If you like early heavy/hair metal, then you won’t be disappointed. But the cherry on top is that every song on the album is about how Jesus is great and the devil is bad: Satan is a fool/ And it’s so insane (yes it is)/ Some people think he’s cool/ You play with fire, you feel the pain.

I had some Ozzy Osbourne and Kiss already, but this was actually some of the first contemporary metal I ever had. I remember listening to this tape on the way to percussion lessons, but I never asked my classically trained teacher to help me with my double-kick technique. The tape stayed in my car for months. Eventually, the songs grew on me and I listened to them not just for laughs, but because I actually liked them. They never ended up recruiting me to their side, but I did collect all of their albums. That’s probably all they could have asked for anyway. My one regret, though, is that I got rid of the tape. It turned out to have been an earlier mix of the album, with a rawer sound to it—later releases are more slickly produced and mastered, which I’m sure I would like better if I didn’t have the original mix memorized. That’s the way I’m going to remember The Yellow and Black Attack: raw and earnest.

Click to read about. . .

David Bowie, Soundtrack from Christiane F.
Stryper, The Yellow and Black Attack
Siouxsie & The Banshees, Hyæna
Robyn Hitchcock, Fegmania!

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