The lovely people over at MetalNerd recognised a fellow metal nerd in me and kindly posted about my books on their website.
I’m giving them a huge heavy metal thank you!
http://www.metalnerd.net/featured-artist-author-sarah-tipper/
Author: sarahtipper
Are bookplates still a thing?
I bought a secondhand book today and it had this cool bookplate in it. It looks like the sort of bookplate Dio would have liked. I wonder if there are any bookplates with skulls on? Or pandas?
Cleo Howard’s Diary Entry 1999 13th June
Cleo firmly believes that Lemmy should have been in the Queen’s birthday honours list…
Sunday 13th June
The Queen has honoured some people because it’s her birthday. She gives medals to people who’ve done useful stuff. She’s picked Trevor McDonald for reading the news and George MacDonald Fraser who writes about horrible Flashman. She has missed Lemmy out again. Barry and I had an argument but we made up. He was grumpy when I got round his house and didn’t seem very pleased to see me. I said he was acting like he’d gone off me. He said he wasn’t. We both sulked. He fell asleep for a bit and I watched his Monty Python video. He apologised when he woke up. He said he was really hungover because he was on a stag do last night.
Caitlin Moran’s How to Build A Girl is a wonderful read.
I love tales of teenage angst and this was one of the best. I can completely see why this book is a bestseller, it is wonderful and it deserves to be. It follows Johanna Morrigan as she comes of age in the early nineties and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde, indie rock journalist, and then reinvents herself again as a less cynical individual. I love this book because I love music, even though my own preferred genre of heavy metal receives a couple of criticisms from the protagonist;
“He has greasy black hair and is wearing a Sepultura t-shirt – which I can tell, merely from the logo, is an internationally recognised sign that he kills and eats women”
Johanna’s family are poor in money but rich in integrity. The book tackles issues of class and sexual double standards with humour and portrays the bleakness and narrowing of experience that is caused by poverty. It’s a warm book with a satisfying ending.
I think Cleo Howard and Dolly Wilde/Johanna Morrigan have a lot in common. They would like each other. They would josh each other good naturedly about taste in music but both would recognise the passion for it that they share.
Cleo Howard’s Diary Entry 1999 12th June
In this entry Cleo is very much out of her comfort zone of the Green Man rock pub. I think “I nearly spat out my hooch” is a very 1990s sentence…
Saturday 12th June
Tonight was awful. Instead of going to the Green Man we went to a foam party at RG1s. I almost wish I hadn’t got in. The bouncers said, (loud enough for us and other people to hear) “The Addams Family”, after me, Jenni and Ian walked in. I will never get the image of Ella dancing to Mark Morrison’s “Horny” with a guy she had only just met out of my mind. She was rubbing her arse on his crotch area and when she stopped he had a well obvious stiffy. I nearly spat out my Hooch. Ella is still drinking horrible bloody Marys. She said a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. I said tomato should have the decency to taste like a fruit if it’s going to hang around in drinks.
Lex and Mopey came. Lex said Goths like dry ice, but not foam. Ian pretended to be Father Christmas. He asked if I wanted to sit on his knee and tell him what I wanted for Christmas. Sally isn’t out tonight. She has to go for a family meal so she escaped the horrors of RG1s. Mopey is back from uni for the weekend and will soon be back for the summer. He asked Ella if she’s still the main repository for the feckless cum shedders of Berkshire. She asked him if he’s enjoyed getting turned down by a whole new set of women that are too good for him in York. You’d think Mopey could be nice just for one night, it is Ella’s birthday. Then again, she did make us go to RG1s.
We saw horrible Carina Norman who used to be our school bully but none of us spoke to her. When I was queueing for the loo she was there with a girl I don’t know. Carina said “Hi Cleo, have you come to check out some men who actually wash and shave? You must be bored of that fleapit the Green Man by now. I heard it was going to be closed down”. I said “Hi Carina, I’m here for a friend’s birthday, because I’m a good friend, next week I’ll be back in the Green Man with all the lovely hairy bikers”. Then Carina said “Who was that boy band you like? Was it Slayer? I don’t think the DJ will have them so I shouldn’t bother asking”. Then I was about to say something really cutting and clever but there was a free loo so I had a quick wee and ran back to Jenni and Ian. Calling Slayer a boy band is fighting talk but I’m a lover not a fighter.
Ian walked me home. We went on the swings in the park. Then we sat on the grass and blew dandelion clocks. You can tell the time by the number of goes it takes for all the seeds to be blown off. Or you can make a wish. We made wishes. We can’t say what they are or they won’t come true.
Cleo Howard’s 1998 Diary Entries 11th and 12th June
Cleo Howard was in the midst of her GCSE exams in June 1998. She still finds time to buy new trainers though…
Thursday 11th June
It was Maths exam without calculator this morning and German writing exam this afternoon. On my way to the Maths exam I saw a single magpie. Nanny Howard always salutes these and says “Good morning Mr Magpie and how’s your lovely wife?” It’s bad luck not to greet a solo magpie she says. I sort of saluted by pretending to brush my hair out of my face and I said the good morning thing in my head. I need all the luck I can get to pass Maths. I answered all of the questions but some of my answers were guesses rather than actual worked out answers. I put an answer in for everything. There is no point in leaving anything blank.
I got some new trainers after school today. They are black and glittery Airwalk ones. Mum went mental because I put them on the table. She said you should never put shoes on the table. I said, yeah, I’d prefer pizza (we hardly ever have pizza, Terry buys Ian and Gav Dominos pizza all the time, I’d be happy with supermarket pizza, but Mum says she can’t see what the fuss is about and she pronounces it pitza). Mum said putting shoes on the table brings bad luck. I pointed out they were clean and in their box. She’s getting stranger. It’s like living in the dark ages with all this superstition.
Friday 12th June
The front page of the Reading Chronicle didn’t read “Shoes On Table Revealed As Cause Of All World’s Ills” or “Man Who Used To Keep Shoes On Table But Now Doesn’t Wins Lottery!”
We have only got Science and Maths left to revise for. I went to Miss Selfridge with Jenni today. I got a psychedelic paisley print halter neck dress. It’s purple, blue and green and stretchy and you can’t wear a bra with it! I tried it on and showed Barry. He said I looked gorgeous! I remembered that I haven’t finished paying Mum back for my Ozzfest ticket yet.
Cleo Howard’s Diary Entry 12th June 1997
This is what Cleo wrote in her diary on this day in 1997:
Thursday 12th June
Biology was good today. Baggers (sorry, Dear Diary, I mean Mr Bagnell) brought in some cow lungs still attached to the trachea and blew them up with a bellows. It was so much better than the dull stuff with plants we did last term. Jenni stood right at the front today and Baggers let her have a go with the bellows. Baggers asked how a smoker’s lungs would be different and all the smokers in the class stuffed their fag packets further down in their pockets and shuffled their feet and looked at the floor. Since I’m no longer a smoker I didn’t feel uncomfortable.
When Baggers was handing the lungs to the lab assistant to be taken away Carina Norman said “You’d better hide them well in the rubbish, Jenni will be looking for them to suck the blood out”.
Ian and I gave her loads of cut eye but as usual Jenni didn’t need any help and said “I’ve heard you’ve sucked much worse” and everyone started laughing at Carina (except Janine).
I watched my Alice Cooper videos: Welcome To My Nightmare and The Nightmare Returns. My nightmare is that I’m not allowed to go and see Alice Cooper.
You might be a metalhead…
I read this charming book recently and I can confirm that both I and Heavy Metal Panda are indeed metalheads.
At 81 pages long this is shorter than most books, however, we metalheads know from listening to Napalm Death that things can be fast and wonderful. It has some great cartoons. I like the one that reads “If Highway to Hell was your wedding song” (then you might be a metalhead). My wedding songs were AC/DC’s “Up To My Neck In You”, Keel’s cover of “Because the Night” and The Ramones “Baby I love you”, so close enough!
There were a couple of things I needed to look up, since I’m a British reader. These were Yoo Hoo (a chocolate beverage) and Quinceañera (a party for fifteen-year-old girls traditional in some parts of Latin America). I nodded my head and uh-huh-ed along with this book as I’m sure other metalheads will.
You can buy this book from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0996882642
For those who prefer a smaller bookseller it is available here http://www.volossal.com/YouMightBeAMetalhead.html
Viennetta was one of the great puddings of Cleo Howard’s teenage years.
A reader of the Cleo Howard diaries reported the side effect that it made them want to eat Viennetta. I mention Viennetta in all of Cleo’s diaries. Mmm…Viennetta.
I love my Danzig T-shirt.
One of the fun things about recording The Very Metal Diary Of Cleo Howard was deciding which T-shirt to wear. This Danzig T-shirt is a classic.
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