One day I’m going to get sick of funny metal covers. Until then, you’re going to have to bare with me. Sorry.

Let’s be honest, no one wants to be a bass player.
If your nickname at school hadn’t been awkward dork, you’d be a frontman, blowing the clothes off the nearest member of the opposite sex with your tight leather pants and matching lungs.
If you could handle 6 strings without your fingers falling off you’d be a guitar hero, super talented and super sexy.

The bass is where the dorky boring member goes, eschewing even the rage of the drummer for a life of A pedal anonymity. Look at AC/DC. One of the tightest, finest exponents of hot rocking ever to stride the face of the earth, but Cliff Williams seemed to have lost his personality along with his leather wristband in 1976. He stands at the back. He plays an E. Admittedly he makes millions of pounds a year but it can’t be the most creatively satisfying career can it?

Despite this there are a few hardy souls who buck the trend, bass players who appear to be there by mistake. Tweaking the nose of treble clef superiority with their subsonic superpowers, they’re the leanest,meanest and coolest guys in the band – Check ‘em out:

Steve Harris – Iron Maiden

When I was 16, I spent most of my time drinking cider and enjoying intimate moments with a well used VHS Kathy Lloyd Playboy special .Steve meanwhile spent his formative years knocking out something altogether different-rock classics like Phantom of the Opera and Running Free, and possible the greatest band logo in rock n’ roll history. Employing a slightly odd and very,very difficult slap n’ tickle playing technique, his playing meant he managed to come out looking good despite a penchant for pinstripe spandex. The fact that he’s regarded as one of the nicest geezers in rock only adds to that sinking feeling you get when you realise you have no friends and struggle to pump out twinkle twinkle little star on your instrument of choice (The ukulele).

Joey Dimaio – Manowar

Roadies. They smell, they’re thick, they’re only good for tightening lug nuts and carrying speakers right? What they certainly aren’t is musical geniuses just waiting for the opportunity to crank out a solo 12-string versions of the William Tell overture, followed up by a 42 minute operetta based on The Iliad that somehow gets them signed to Geffen records. Sure Manowar are fucking ridiculous, but its a rare 4 string sorcerer indeed who can come out ahead in a band that features a singer with a 7 octave range.

Lemmy – Motorhead

How may drugs have you taken?How may people have you sexed up? Lemmy would laugh at your pathetic attempts if he had time between swigging from that whisky bottle. His name may have come from blagging ciggarettes from all and sundry (lemmy a fag mate…) but in return he gave us some of the tightest,dirtiest,all-round greatest rock n roll on the planet.

John Entwhistle – The Who

Outwardly the man known as The OX is everything a bass player should be, he’s quiet, resolute -hey, he was even raised in Chiswick. But look at that buzzard Bass, listen to those monolithic grooves. He may be the most boring man Bill Wyman has ever met, but he’s a groove-layer par excellence.

Stig Pederson – D.A.D

Throughout his career with never quite as popular as they deserved Danish rockers D.A.D, Stig has elevated bass playing to Zen levels, realising that minimalist is the way to go and dispensing entirely with 2 superfluous strings. His position on the list isn’t based on musical prowess however, but on his bubble perm, rocket shaped choice of axe and predilection for dressing up as a recently ejected fighter pilot-complete with parachute. Despite his status as a comedy Scandinavian, he still manages to anchor down some of the most lyrically complex, layered and just plain great pop rock of the last 20 years-do yourself a favour and check them out.

Billy Sheehan – Mr Big

So, there’s this guitar player right? His name’s Steve Vai. He was in this band with this dude called Frank Zappa-maybe you heard of him? Well little Stevie managed to be in that band and not ever get upstaged by big Frankie Z. And when Steve got hired by a certain ex-Van Halen frontman, he hired a bass player.Who was better than him. Most people know Sheehan’s later project Mr.Big for the insipid ballad ‘To Be With You’. What they don’t remember is the ultra high velocity rockin propelled by Sheehan and his ridiculously dexterous down tuning.

Cliff Burton – Metallica

There’s a lot of middle managers out there that think latter day Metallica are great. They’re wrong. Want proof?Listen to what’s going on in the background on ‘Trapped Under Ice’. Now listen to ‘Load’(actually,please don’t).Cliff’s demise may have marked the start of Metallica’s supergroup status, but it also started a slippery slide into creative bankruptcy that left most original fans wondering what might have been.

John Paul Jones – Led Zeppelin

Hey hey mama gonna make you move. JP never quite seems to get the kudos afforded fellow mudshark incident survivors Page and Plant, but would Kashmir really sound so awesome if it wasn’t for the greatest rhythm section in rock history? Despite hanging out with a post Kyuss Josh Homme a little too much lately, he remains a down with the kids wrinkly talent,

Geezer Butler – Black Sabbath

The heaviest, Loudest member of the band. Oh-the band is Black Sabbath by the way. The awesome moustache and ability to create relevant, amazing albums outside his day job only adds to his brilliance and makes you realise just how far Ozzy really has fallen.

Colin Grigson – Bad News

His name is Colin Grigson,and he gets the fucking night bus home. Only in the band because he owns a PA system, Colin still managed to cobble together the middle eight’s to such all-time classics as ‘masturbike’ and ‘Warriors of Ghengis Khan’,he’s the only one here who’s playing resulted in his throat being slit at a major rock festival. Currently working as deputy branch manager for Crouch End Nat West.

Well, I know I’ve missed some -Les Claypool is up there, and what about That dude from UB40 – You know the one? Alan Partridge likes him? Plays a sort-of watered down reggea? Anyway, I asked some bass players I know and they said he was quite good apparently, and I wouldn’t want to (red,red)whine about including him here – and apparently one of The Beatles played the bass too… let us know if you think of any others (apart from any members of The Clash or The Sex Pistols -they are shit)

Ahhh…metal. A much derided, mocked and generally-laughed-at genre. And with good reason. It’s ludicrous. It’s juvenile. It’s bloody silly. But it’s also, in my opinion, the most fun you can have with music. It’s great. But playing devil’s advocate or celebrating the spandex is another post for another day. Today we shall be looking at the worst things that have happened to metal, the genre, the musicians and the bands. In it’s long history, metal has seen its fair share of stupidity and tragedy. Let’s take a look at the worst things that have happened to metal…

1. Chuck Schuldiner Dies Of Brain Cancer

Quite honestly the best guitarist / vocalist in the history of Death Metal and one of the best in straight up metal – Chuck Schuldiener was the driving force behind one of the founding bands of Death Metal – Death. Beginning as a Death Metal band, Chuck brought in elements of jazz, prog and classic heavy metal to further albums reaching the pinnacle of Death Metal perfection with Symbolic and the Sound of Perseverance He was widely regarded as one of the nicest guys in the genre and not only a great musician but a true fan of metal, putting out the Metal Crusade newsletter with his girlfriend. Tragically Chuck contracted brain cancer in 1999 and eventually died in 2001, leaving a legacy of great music and a great big hole in Death metal that has yet to be filled.

2. Bodycount Release Their First Album

There are worse albums. There are FAR worse albums. In fact I think Ice T is kinda cool. But this is a symbolic choice. This represents the birth of nu-metal, the awful bastard child of metal and hip hop that blends the worst elements of both and became a blight on the musical landscape for over a decade. Bands that took inspiration from this album like Korn, Coal Chamber and Linkin Park somehow managed to take this album as a blueprint and build something far worse.

3. Ozzy Does Reality TV
Ozzy was widely regarded as the prince of darkness, a legend in heavy metal, a member of the band that invented the genre. A dude so frickin METAL he has bitten the heads off two different living creatures and pissed all over the goddamned Alamo. That all changed on March 5^th 2002 when he whored himself out to MTV. He instantly went from from revered metal god to shuffling, slurring idiot, cleaning up after a pack of yappy, ugly mutts. (I mean the dogs, not his kids.) It also inflicted Kelly Osbourne – a spoiled, post-accident Veruca Salt – on the world. Along with Jack Osbourne, who amazingly has less redeeming features than his sister.

4. Fred Durst’s Appearance On A Soulfly Album
Max Cavalera – we thought you were cool. Every Sepultura album was awesome. Even Roots, which even managed to get away with having ‘tribal influences’. But the first Soulfly album managed to piss upon everything that made Sepultura great. Bringing in fat, balding frat – that twat Fred Durst from possibly the worst band ever – Limp Bizkit – to provide rap vocals and back up squealing on mediocre track ‘Bleed’ was a serious misstep that caused a thousand face-palms in metal fans everywhere.

5. The Black Metal Murders

The early nineties in Norway was a scary place to be into metal. Suicide and murder was rife. If you believe the press. In actuality there were two murders – Thorns stabbed a dude in a park, and Varg Virkernes stabbed Euronymous. Dead from Mayhem shot himself. Crazy shit. However these stupid acts were turned into a media frenzy, blowing Black Metal into the mainstream and inspiring copycat dumbness the world over. Instead of being a fun little sub genre of metal, Black Metal became a kvlt ov evil with idiots trying to apply the most ornate corpse-paint and have the most monochrome album covers.

6. Metallica – St Anger / Some Kind of Monster

Metallica’s first three album’s are untouchable. Amazing examples of a young band pushing at he boundaries of metal and creating a legacy that would last for years to come. A legacy that got pissed all over by this monstrosity. Even through the 90s, Metallica weren’t that bad. You just had to forget that they were once the coolest band in metal and just imagine them as a cool rock band and – hey – they’re pretty alright. But then – St Anger. Trying to cash in on the re-emergence of metal headed up by Maiden and Priest, they record a ‘raw’ album. Full of unbelievably bad songs, shite lyrics (’I'm madly in anger with you’) and a snare that sounds like someone hitting a bin with a brush. And to add insult to injury, they release ‘Some Kind Of Monster’ – that shows the band, people thought to be the very baddest of badass – in therapy. THERAPY. That’s one wet, piss-smelling legacy right there guys. No wonder Jason left.

7. Lars Ulrich Vs. Napster

Metallica again. They are idiots after all. 2000 started as a pretty cool year for music on the internet. Thanks to Napster you could find and download whatever you wanted. Free. Took a while, but the system was efficient and easy. Thanks to Napster I discovered countless bands and had my eyes opened to entirely new genres. Enter Metallica. Apparently they got wind that shit song ‘I Disappear’ for shittier movie Mission Impossible 2 had been leaked on Napster and instead of thinking ‘hmmm…free publicity’ decided to shut it down. The outlaws of the music industry had become ‘the man’, showing how utterly out of touch they had become. Also, the world got to see how big a cock-end Lars Ulrich really is.

8. Dimebag Darrel Gets Shot On Stage

WTF? That was my reaction. I can sort of deal with metal heroes dying from natural causes, but this was just a major tragedy. Completely random, weird and horrid. On December 8th 2004 a mentally unstable former marine named Nathan Gale stormed the stage in a crappy club in Columbus, Ohio and shot Damageplan, and former Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrel dead. This robbed the metal world of one of it’s greatest guitarists and according to reports, one of its nicest guys. Although Damageplan was nothing special, Pantera’s back catalogue is nothing short of genius. Riffs, solos, acoustic bits – everything was brilliant. A dark day for metal, and music in general.

That’s eight… are there more?

Get to the comments!