Raising a glass to the ghosts of the past...

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. - Mark Twain

When I was a kid I loved those 'Choose Your Own Adventure Books' where every short chapter had multiple outcomes and you got to pick one. You would then turn to your chosen page number and continue the story with that particular twist.

With neurospicy obsession I would read the books over and over and try all sorts of mixes and different options. It was a fun, safe way of exploring the concept of how making different choices can completely change the outcome.

Fast forward to Ōtautahi July/August 1992, the streets are dusted with elderly British cars and the sky is the colour of concrete.

Out of the blue I am telephoned by reporter Melanie Reid to see if I am interested in doing a piece on being a woman in heavy metal for 60 Minutes. For any young'uns reading this back then -pre-internet - being on TV was a really big fucking deal. Huge. What do I do..?

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that all to the poor, yeah - War Pigs, Black Sabbath

Being a 'chick thrash singer' all started in the early 90s when some mates asked if I wanted to be the singer in their aspiring garage metal band. I had no real musical background but was always up for a go.

So one day I rocked up to their lounge room jam session, belted out War Pigs accompanied by a three drum kit and one of the guitars running through a stereo speaker, and was promptly welcomed on board. Seems I could sing well enough and why not. Some of us eventually settled into proper rehearsals as a four piece with a guitarist who had gear.

Christchurch was the thriving epicentre of NZ's metal scene at that time and every young long haired male wanted to be a guitarist. The female role models overseas were the old-school women rockers but none were really doing the heavier genres anywhere.

It's almost unimaginable now to comprehend the number of gigs and band residencies that were thriving around the city and surrounds. A vibrant touring circuit of pubs and halls hosted the likes of bands like Shihad and Head Like A Hole. Some weekends you could go to multiple venues in a night and pay $5 on the door for a live band or some even free.

Bruce Rae's Colombo Street HQ Ace T-Shirts was the only place you could buy shirts for the heavier bands, especially before songs like Metallica's One saw more mainstream airplay. TV1's Radio with Pictures ruled the airwaves and it didn't get any heavier than Rae's regular 'Metal Primer' segment. It was a community, a flourishing sub-culture, and being Aotearoa "everyone knew everyone or someone who knew someone."

Our garage band 'Slayground' was a bit fractious and mismatched but managed to get through enough rehearsals to do a couple of live gigs. Our first gig was in a warehouse with a sheep carcass hanging in the foyer. The almost-all-male crowd went wild and made us play our 6 song set twice. There were no women singers doing material like Slayer, Metallica, Motorhead, AC/DC etc - and we gave it heaps although we were rough as guts.

The more-established thrash band we opened for ended up being pretty cool in the end - they had the most pumped crowd they'd had yet - but they were being dicks before the gig, one of them rang me up on our flat landline, laughing, saying something like "we were just wondering, what does a chick thrash singer sound like?" while the others laughed in the background.

I unleashed my loudest most heartfelt scream down the phone line at him and hung up.

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes".- Andy Warhol

Mid 1992 I got a call from TV journalist Melanie Reid who said 60 Minutes was planning a story on heavy metal. and was I interested in appearing in it.

Reid told me a pastor was criticising heavy metal saying it was evil and corrupting young people and causing suicides. Reid said she was looking to put the other perspective across for balance, a bit of a documentary of our metal community. I was the only woman in a metal band she said wanted to show wider range than the dominant male perspective.

Meanwhile the USA evangelical Christian driven "Satanic Panic" was continuing to create waves of hysteria in the USA and more widely. I didn't realise the story being planned was the "disturbed teenage guy shoots his face off and sues Judas Priest" story which was being used as the main angle to spoonfeed, legitimise and amplify christofascist hysteria to a global audience.

I had quite a bit more to say about suicide in the interviews, none of that footage was used because I said things like you could just as easily accuse religion of being a cause, it was preferred to amplify the stuff I would call 'filler' not substance.

I think a lot of us from that metal scene felt a bit tainted and let down by that piece - it was not just me and my own personal cringing embarrassment. It was a bit grungy and sexist but also a lot of good people who looked out for each other.

As a childhood sexual abuse survivor it's also very triggering to feel like your agency has been undermined and your character has been misrepresented. It feels quite violating.

Many years later I became a print media reporter for a while, and I never forgot that feeling.

Telling people's personal stories is a sacred responsibility that should always be treated with respect and reverence; because powerful stories have a way of travelling and finding homes in hearts and minds far beyond their source and badly told stories can have serious, life altering, consequences.

When the shit hits the fan

I discovered I liked playing and writing music and wanted to get better at it and wasn't fussed by the attention and continued embarrassment from the TV piece so moved to the West Coast in early 1993 to study singing and audio engineering.

I ended playing in a pub rock band and in a relationship with a guy so I stayed on there. He had a young son, maybe not quite three years old at the time.

One afternoon 'the kid' ended up having to come with me for the afternoon to do a few errands in Greymouth.

First stop was a doctor appointment and expecting to be through quickly left him sitting in the waiting room. He'd obviously got nervous and needed the toilet, I wasn't a parent and didn't know I needed to check in on that stuff often and he didn't say anything. So I got interrupted during my appointment with the receptionist opening the back door of the Dr 's room to the loud sound of very distressed crying - he'd had an accident and locked himself in the loo.

Code brown. It was like my worst childless-person nightmare come true.

I looked at the Dr and receptionist feeling helpless and they just looked back at me...

So somehow I went through to their patient loo and talked down this kid, got him to calm down and let me in, cleaned him up, whipped his pants into a plastic bag and gave him my big oversize metal t-shirt - a Slayer t-shirt - to wear like a dress over his bare bum and told him he looked super cool. I swaddled it round him and tucked him into my lap and finished off the Dr appointment both relieved and adrenalised.

Next stop was Greymouth SuperValue.

We'd made it through the code brown, the kid was sitting down inside the trolley tucked into my Slayer t-shirt, and we were joking away about keeping his knees together and not flashing people accidentally, when out of nowhere a menacing voice rolled over me with a soft growl – "Why is that kid wearing a Nazi shirt?"

The pinky promise

I turned to look and saw a big gruff-looking guy wearing a navy blue hat and military style clothes who had stepped into our path staring at me.

I looked straight at him, stepped between him and the trolley and said "it's my t-shirt, he's wearing it because he had an accident at the doctors and isn't wearing any pants."

I turned and looked at the kid, the screaming skull on the front of the shirt had a German helmet with SS insignia on it. As crazy as it sounds I had never paid enough attention to process the implications of the design - because it was delivered through artwork for a band I listened to I didn't really 'see' the insignia, just the skull part. When I looked with his eyes he was exactly right, the kid was wearing a Nazi branded shirt and I'd subconsciously given it a pass because it was the only Slayer shirt I could get and I liked the skull.

The guy was a US special forces service-member who, like tens of millions of others, had seen me on the 60 Minutes segment. He had tracked me down to Greymouth and was confronting me in the supermarket.

He asked me why I had a Nazi t-shirt, was I a Nazi? He told me people were willing to die fighting people wearing those symbols.

There was no way I was going to look him in the eye and defend it.

So I said something like:

"I know about the the Nazis and the Holocaust, I know about the camps, I know what they did. My uncle was a Spitfire pilot who fought the Nazis."

"I wear the shirt because I got on TV singing a song by the band, but I am not a Nazi, I won't defend it, and once we get home I will never wear it or any other Nazi symbol ever again."

I turned to the kid and said, "Until we get home we'll turn it inside out and black out the Nazis."

I leaned over and gave the boy a grocery item to use as a 'fig leaf', maybe a tin of peaches or something, and we turned that shirt inside out right then and there in the supermarket aisle and tucked him back into the trolley. I turned to face the man who had challenged me.

I told him I understood people had sacrificed, fought and died for our freedom. And it was up to all of us to remember, I was glad he reminded me to pay attention, not let things slide.

He just kind of stood, staring at me for a few moments and then said to be vigilant about that stuff creeping back in, finding pathways back.

Then he look at me straight in the eye, dead serious, and said "and if you see any Nazis you call the Marines" and then he repeated it adamantly, looked at me like he wanted to say more and made me pinky promise I would, hooking our little fingers making eye contact.

I kept my promise.

I never wore the shirt again.

I never saw the man again.

Many, many years and some even wilder twists later maybe I think I know who that man was ...but that's another story for another day.