Monthly Archives: December 2012

You could be forgiven for thinking that 2012 was a pretty poor year for heavy metal, particularly here in its British birthplace. London hosted the Olympics, with the filmmaker Danny Boyle directing the opening and closing ceremonies, designed to highlight the best of British culture and tradition. Of course the soundtrack was crucial, and Boyle carefully picked a selection of timeless British music and song, from hymns, to TV themes tunes and pop songs, and even some classic punk. The only obvious style conspicuous by its absence was heavy metal. But metal’s used to being regarded as beneath contempt by the media’s accepted arbiters of taste. For many metal fans, being perennially out-of-fashion has become a mark of pride.

Morbid culture vultures visiting the capital over the next few weeks will be spoilt for choice, with not one but two exhibitions dedicated to the only certain thing that awaits us all. The Wellcome Collection on Euston Road offers Death: A Self Portrait which is open until February 24th, while the Museum of London (near St Paul’s Cathedral) is hosting a special exhibition dedicated to Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men which runs until April 14th.

Perhaps all good magicians should be controversial. The English illusionist and sceptic Derren Brown, certainly is, specialising in boggling minds with clever psychological tricks that have a habit of telling us more about how our brains are wired than is strictly comfortable. His recent two part TV special, ‘Fear and Faith’, is a good example. In the first part, Derren claimed to have developed a miracle pill that could control fear, giving it to a selection of subjects, who all agreed that it worked. It was, of course a placebo – a sugar pill with no medical effects – and any results his subjects experienced was all purely in their minds.