From Lace to Arsenic

Heavy metal, the impregnable domain of hyper-masculinity, is being infiltrated by iron maidens

Nigel Britto

It was an icy evening in Worcester, Massachusetts, in January this year. The temperature outside hovered around zero. But inside the Palladium theatre, Arch Enemy was rapidly raising the heat with a vicious display of death metal: shrill guitar riffs, a skinhead drummer pounding his double-bass pedals at the speed of light, a hyperactive vocalist snarling incomprehensibly into the mike. The only thing missing was an unkempt beard on the leather-lunged singer’s face. But that was okay too, since the growler was the tall, blonde Valkyrie Angela Gossow. 

The women in the mosh pit looked fawningly up at the reigning queen of metal who had taken a largely obscure Swedish band and transformed it into one of the most revered death metal acts on the planet. Gossow’s word was law inside the Palladium. At her gruff command, the crowd would scream, fall silent, sing along, crowd-surf, anything. At least one amateur wrestler learned his lesson: Do not mess with women at a metal show. You’ll probably get hurt.

Almost half a century after Black Sabbath invented this most dreaded and cussed genre of music, metal remains a largely male bastion. But even its most testosterone-friendly practitioner will concede that it now has a uniquely feminine side. “Metal’s no longer the male-dominated genre it once was,” Gossow told TOI Crest. Her vocals may be extremely guttural, a technique usually reserved for and mastered by men, but there are other women who are willing to flaunt their femininity even while fronting a metal band. Tarja Turunen, for instance. As the singer for Nightwish, the Finnish soprano merged the band’s power metal with her own operatic style and out came a whole new sound: Symphonic metal. Her influence as a classy metalhead became so inescapable that the Finnish president labelled her the ‘Voice of Finland’. Turunen left Nightwish in 2005 and was replaced by mezzo-soprano Anette Olzon.

In the formative years of heavy metal, the role of women was limited to providing ‘relaxation and rejuvenation’. The loyalist female ‘groupie’ who followed the band around on its tours and fooled around with various members backstage — Kate Hudson’s winsome if drug-befuddled turn in Almost Famous — became a fixture with early metal bands. I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie is a scandalous first-hand account by Pamela de Barres, who spent her best years tailing the rock ‘n’ roll bands she adored. “I would go on tour with them, on planes, in the back of limos, to parties. I would be on stage with Led Zeppelin, the Stones, The Who and The Doors. It was a magic time,” she writes in her book. She details her sexual exploits with some of history’s greatest rock stars. Though de Barres says the debauchery started with Zeppelin, it was the early glam bands like Motley Crue which hit the world’s headlines for their travelling ‘harem’. The lace-clad band’s most popular and enduring hit, Girls, Girls, Girls was about the band’s hard sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and their penchant for living up their nights at Los Angeles’s many strip clubs.

The journey from bed to stage wasn’t easy. Sam Dunn’s landmark film, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey documents this change. In the ’80s, a woman going on stage to perform was unheard of, what with high-energy bands like Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax around. Male metal musicians had two ‘genders’: Men who dressed like men (leather jackets, skin-hugging trousers), and men who dressed like women (the frills of Motley Crue, Cinderella and Twisted Sister). The ‘third’ gender came about when the all-women British heavy metal band Girlschool blasted onto the scene. They didn’t have it easy. Guitarist Jackie Chambers got used to being asked if she was “tuning the guitar for the guitarist”. Then came the artillery invasion, fronted by the leatherclad Doro Pesch of the German band Warlock, a woman so formidably charismatic that she later successfully renamed Warlock after herself, and is now the lead singer of ‘Doro’.

The world over, symphonic and gothic metal have been the areas where women have shone. It accommodates polished and cultured genres at which women are more than competent: Classical and opera. The Nightwish of the Turunen era popularised it, but subsequent bands fronted by women, like Lacuna Coil (Cristina Scabbia), Within Temptation (Sharon del Adel), After Forever (Floor Jansen) and Epica (Simone Simons) have faithfully carried the flag into battle. But Gossow cautions against a band playing the ‘woman metalhead’ card. “You can be sexy and all that, but at the end of the day, it’s all about how good a musician you are,” she says.

In Bollywood-dominated India, metal is still a niche passion, but the Internet has helped nurture a thriving underground scene. Considering Indian metal is a good 20 years behind the West, the presence of women in metal bands is, not surprisingly, low. Not too many Indian parents would be pleased at the thought of their daughters thrashing about on stage before a thousand men. But metal is an astonishingly accurate chronicler of middleclass mores, and as society becomes more liberal, more women are pulling on the leather. Yasmin Claire from the Bangalore-based thrash metal band Myndsnare is probably India’s most famous female metalhead. Off stage, she rides a Bullet. On stage, she wears shorts, and so impresses with her footwork that her peers are quick to concede that she can “kick any male drummer’s ass”.

Where the presence of women is more strongly felt is rock, the first step to metal. Shillong leads the pack. All four members of hard rock band Afflatus are women, three of whom are part-time teachers at local colleges. In Mumbai, 16-year-old college student Pratika Prabhune plays bass guitar and growls convincingly in a fast-rising experimental death metal band called Chronic Phobia. Like every other woman who plays metal, she names Angela Gossow among her main influences. Today, she doesn’t face the patronising comments her predecessors did. “I have had no acceptance issues at all, everyone is cooperative and supportive,” she says. And don’t her parents gag at her growling? “Nope, my mom’s my biggest fan,” she clarifies.

Other women are not as lucky. Sahil Makhija, who runs Demonstealer Records and is a tireless promoter of extreme metal in India, says there have been women in Indian bands off and on, but these bands quickly fizzle out. He attributes this to a still widely prevalent system of “shaadi time”, which ticks in as soon as a woman reaches her mid-20s. But, adds Makhija, things are looking up. “In Mumbai, the number of girls at metal shows has been gradually increasing,” he says. “That’s the starting point. It’s only a matter of time before they make the transition from crowd to stage.” Gossow agrees. “Times are changing, and it’s no longer mindblowing to see a woman doing extreme stuff,” she says, adding “in a few years you'll see a lot more up there.”

This article first appeared on the Times of India, Crest edition dated March 13, 2010