Why I Owe My Life To Slayer

For those among you that haven't cottoned on by now, I'm a bit of a goth. I don't mean that in the traditional, platform boots, residency in Whitby sense, but I am partial to the colour black. And Joy Division. Oh, and red wine. Dark, solitary spaces. And if I'm going to be completely honest, I find graveyards places of serenity and beauty, rather than fearful expanses of land, in which I am continually spanked in the face with tombstone-shaped reminders of my own, lumbering mortality. I am largely unaffected by gore. I love a bloody horror movie. I appreciate any form of music/film/art that challenges the socially acceptable, much of which, as a result, is often considered deeply offensive. I wish black magic was real. I wish unicorns were real (not so goth). And I can't stop reading stories about serial killers.

OK, FINE.

I'm a lot goth.

But it is within the dimly lit world I choose to inhabit that I continually source my own light. And it all started with one record: Slayer's Reign In Blood.

Perhaps it was fate that brought us together. I'd grown up listening to metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, AC/DC and Megadeth, thanks to my older brother's stellar taste in music and my excellent tape-stealing skills. Whole childhood holidays were spent buried away in a back room, Walkman in ears, listening to hours of blistering Bay Area thrash while my pals learned the words to Wannabe by the Spice Girls. Hell, my dad used to get us to sleep as babies by playing Black Sabbath's Paranoid on repeat, so it's fair to assume that the aurally intense has always provided me with some form of comfort.

But it was during some particularly difficult years as a young adult that those sounds started to feel as redundant as I did. The primary-coloured melodies of Maiden and Megadeth did little to provide the catharsis I now needed. Plus, it's hard to seek solace in the music of a grown man who refuses to take to the stage dressed in anything other than school uniform.

So it's funny to think that just nine months before I was born, four men - Tom Araya, Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo - and one production legend, Rick Rubin, set to work on the album that would not only define the emerging US thrash scene and propel the development of extreme music, but would go on to colour my not-yet-existent life for the better.

I'm almost certain it was no coincidence that 7 October 1986 was the date Def Jam chose to release Reign In Blood into the world. I was born just one week later, a true child of Slayer from the offing by sheer association. It was clearly meant to be.

Yet it wasn't until some 16 years later, when vinyl had all but been replaced by the shiny, iridescent wonders we now know as the Compact Disc, that I switched on, whacked up the volume and was finally able to connect with something that - through its aural assault of blistering blast beats, off-key devil scales and hellish vocals - was just as angry and dark and desperate as I felt.

And my connection didn't stop there. After becoming a fully-fledged fan from the moment I pressed play, they became the first real band I ever saw live. As a teenage girl, you can imagine my terror as grown, hulking men began hurling themselves off the balcony at the Brixton Academy into the whirling mosh pits below, as the guitars boomed, heavy and low, the drums pounded like a pneumatic drill and cries of 'Angel Of Death!' filled the sweat-drenched air. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't particularly clever, either. But I loved every minute of it. And I couldn't wait to relive it all over again.

A few years after that show, I decided I wanted to become a music journalist. Slayer had acted as a real gateway, opening up the possibilities of strange new genres and giving me an insatiable appetite for discovering new music.

I started by writing for my student paper. Then for online music blogs. I ran a rock club, put on my own shows, got involved in the local DIY scene, and eventually landed an internship at Terrorizer. After doing A CRACKING job (own trumpet = blown), I wound up writing for the metal music mag. My dreams came true when they asked me to interview Kerry King, Slayer's enigmatic, tattoo-headed guitarist.

I can't remember much from our meeting, other than him asking "who the f*ck" these kids Trivium were (they were main support for Slayer that day) and telling me just how many friends he had in the business. All I wanted to do, quite unprofessionally, was reach over, knuckle that famous noggin of his, and tell him just how much that record meant to me. How much it had defined my life thus far. I didn't, of course.

Since then, I've gone on to write for a bunch of people - including Revolver, Rock Sound, the Record Collector, a load of local and national papers, GQ.com, CNTraveller.com and Iron Fist, to name a few. I'm now the Entertainment Editor for GLAMOUR.com. I've travelled quite a way away from the alternative world I started out in, but I've never discriminated against a genre and stand by the belief that doing something out of the ordinary enriches your knowledge and experience in other things, rather than takes away from them.

Even so, I've never given up Slayer, and no matter where I've worked, I've continued to write about the band over the years.

The last time I had the pleasure of harping on about Reign In Blood was for a piece I wrote for TheQuietus.com, in which I quizzed frontman Tom Araya about guitarist Jeff Hanneman's ill health. In true, horror movie style, he'd managed to contract a flesh-eating disease caused by a spider bite he'd picked up, but was starting to play guitar again and they were hoping he'd recover enough to make it back on tour.

Tragically, last night, the band confirmed the news that Jeff Hanneman had died. He'd suffered a liver failure, leaving his wife and siblings behind him. He was just 49.

"It's hard to envision a world in which thrash pioneers Slayer do not exist," I wrote in the opening line.

That envisioning is now very much a reality. Never again will any of us see the original line-up of Slayer play live. Never will they make another record. Never will they hilariously call out Metallica's clangers or take a pop at Mr Mustaine (he just makes it too easy). None of this will ever happen again.

Yes, I am a massive cliché, I fully realise. But I genuinely owe my life to this band. So if you see a slightly gothy-looking girl in skinny jeans and a Slayer jacket this weekend, stop and give her a hug. She's going to need it. 

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