METAL MAYHEM

 I took my middle son Arthur to see his favourite band play in Cardiff last night. With some trepidation as he's autistic with very high anxiety and not great in crowds, but I was counting on his passion for the band winning through, and it did.

Sabaton provided an excellent show, complete with flamethrowers, blizzards and a tank on stage, not to mention miniature triplane!

Terrible picture as I'm useless with phones, and tbh and rather concentrate on the band.

For me though, the highlight was the first support band Lordi, and I'm so glad we arrived early enough to see them.

I'd obviously heard of them before, through their Eurovision win, but I'd never heard their music before and it was excellent... along with their amazing costumes it really took me back to my early metal days in the 80s, and is just the kind of thing to listen to when painting Oldhammer figures.

Again a bad photo, but you can just make out the wings on the front man.

Here's a better picture lifted off the net.

This was the first metal gig I've been to for about 10 years, and it was interesting to see how different it was to those I remembered.

There was a much wider range of age in the audience, from 10 year olds to 70 odd. It was also interesting to note that I would say only about half had the full metal uniform of leather/denim , patches and big hair... The rest ( like me)  were just in non aligned garb. Whether this is just a reflection on the broad popularity of the band, or a sign of the times where there is no need to proclaim your devotion to one type of music, I don't know. There was also hardly any headbanging, which is probably a good thing, but I was surprised to see it's absence. Also, it was nowhere near as loud as I was expecting....