The most recommended heavy metal books

If a person ever personified being a metal god, it was Lemmy. The leader for the legendary Motorhead didn’t care about how he appeared to people. Lemmy wanted to kick ass on stage and leave a legacy marked by booze and smokes. This book shines the light on how Lemmy rose to become one of the most influential vocalists and bass players in metal. If you like an irreverent look at the price of fame, this book is for you.

Before a Friday night drink, turn on some heavy metal (or hard rock) and decide if you want to, “Become a cop or die.”

 This indie sci-fi graphic novel has style with thought-provoking themes that will make you wonder about our lives in the near future. 

The monochromatic color palette is not only stylistically cool but it frames emotion perfectly well. I loved the raw indie art by Ziritt, feels like a classic tattoo artist took his inks and drew inside comic panels. He frames a lot of statuesque and memorable moments with his violent, dystopian characters.

As an indie artist and writer, it’s awesome to see another indie story. Indie at its core is unfiltered, which is what makes it great. It isn’t watered down to hit the right tone to sell a lot of copies. It’s the creator’s voice being heard.

I suggest that you read this one… show more.

The previous four books on my list have been pretty dark. “Heavy,” I guess, is relative. I find a lot of humor in them and, ultimately, that’s why I either have re-read them or plan to. This one isn’t as heavy on the violence as the previous ones. Often cited as a good example of dry British humor, written by a former bus driver, it’s the story of two fence-builders who travel the English and Scottish countryside in a caravan erecting fences. However, it seems like every time they’re on a job, they end up accidentally murdering someone. Rather than getting bogged down by things like remorse or guilt, they are much more interested in covering it up and saving their backs. One of them is obsessed with heavy metal and his hair. It’s a very weird and satisfying book.

This was the true story of Rockstar Anthony Kideas and his struggle with an abusive childhood and then a drug addiction. I related to how he felt as a child and how low he felt during his addiction to drugs. Many of his childhood issues and abuses he faced gave me the strength to write about the abuse I had faced.

Adrian Smith is one of the lead guitar players in Iron Maiden. Adrian has a passion beyond the stage and his career; he loves fishing. When I first picked up the book, I wasn’t sure how the book would be at keeping me engaged and interested. I’m not a fisherman, and I don’t relish going outside much. The book begins with him recounting how he started his love of fishing near his childhood home when he was younger. The book then uses his touring and recording schedules to recount his fishing trips and most extraordinary catches spanning the globe. Each catch is part of a tapestry woven through his life on the road. In the end, I found myself in awe of how much Adrian loves to fish and how seriously he takes it as a hobby.

Chuck Eddy cartwheels onto the page like a stoned Bart Simpson with the complete works of Lester Bangs in his back pocket.

He sees “metal” as a broad church: not a genre but a mindset, an intent, an intensity level. As such, pop, rap, jazz, funk, experimental, blues, and contemporary classical albums rub shoulders with the rock, punk, and actual heavy metal you’d expect on such a list.

It’s a hilariously opinionated read, occasionally even perverse. He’s wrong on every page, but I’m with him that the 1974 Alice Cooper Greatest Hits album may be the single greatest slab of electric music ever pressed to wax. 

I saved the best for last. Rob Halford has lived the life of the Metal God for decades. In his autobiography, Halford doesn’t shy away from anything. The title is truthful; the pages are his confession for a life lived on the edge. Halford begins with his childhood and how he grew to love singing. He has one of the widest vocal ranges in metal, and his influence over the past fifty years with Judas Priest or his solo works is undeniable. Where this autobiography stands out is Halford speaking about how he hid his homosexuality from everyone. The pain he explains is genuinely heartbreaking, and I found myself surprised by how moving his words are. Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t a sad book because Halford has fun telling his story to the world.

By the book’s end, when he comes clean to the public about his life in… show more.

I often use selections from Whose Middle Ages? in my medieval history courses, but this collection of short, insightful essays is a great resource for anyone interested in understanding what leading scholars think about invocations of the medieval past in contemporary culture. Touching on a wide range of topics, from Viking imagery in heavy metal music and Celtic crosses on white supremacist websites to controversies over Sharia law and papal heresy in the popular press, this volume serves as an ideal introduction to the use and abuse of the Middle Ages.   

If you don’t know Poppoff, you should. He’s a genial Canuck Youtuber who also happens to be the world’s most prolific music reviewer.

An inveterate headbanger with an unquenchable thirst for loudness. In this—the book for which he’ll surely be remembered—Poppoff turns his eye on the whole prehistory of heavy metal, breaking the music down into component parts, and tracing those components backwards through time.

From psychedelia to early rock n roll, blues, jazz, classical music, all the way back to the Vikings, the Ancient Greeks, and the Battle of Jericho in 1250 BC. If there’s a better researched, more thorough, or more sweeping book about loud music on the planet Earth, I ain’t aware of it.  

Nearly twenty years ago, I wondered why nobody had written about being a rock fan in the nineteen-eighties, and then I came across Seb Hunter’s Hell Bent for Leather.

Hunter’s story was very similar to mine (we’re of a similar age and based in the UK), but whereas I still love the music and look back on my ultimately futile rock star aspirations with a certain sense of pride and warmth, Hunter is dismissive of his more successful attempt, and embarrassed by his allegiance to the spandex and six strings.

So why recommend this book, I hear you say? One word – passion. His stories and opinions, though I may not agree with all of them, clearly come from the heart and cut through his often cynical but incisive narrative.