The domestic metal scene “creatively used” legal freedoms. This is one of the findings of the historian Peter Pichler, who wrote the first scientific history of the music style in Styria.
It was a thorn in the side of many people, which had also been happening in Styria since the early 1980s. As late as the early 1990s, an old Catholic pastor in a prayer group called for heavy metal records to be burned, says historian Peter Pichler. A video of the same clergyman is still circulating on the Internet today, in which he described the AC/DC concert in Zeltweg in 2015 as satanic.
Pichler could no longer speak to him, the man died last year. “I would have liked to have interviewed him for my research,” he says. Just like with 23 other eyewitnesses: Pichler recorded around 30 hours of conversations with fans, musicians and other members of the scene since the start of his vom Science Fund FWF funded project “Standard-related tonal knowledge in heavy metal”. In addition, there were analyzes of song lyrics, record covers, concert flyers and music journals. The aim was to fill a research gap: in the past three years, Pichler wrote the first scientific history of the heavy metal scene in Graz and Styria.