Dead End Drive-In: Now Showing – Scott Ian – ‘Swearing Words in Glasgow’
Written by Gaz E
Sunday, 14 December 2014 03:00
Scott Ian – ‘Swearing Words in Glasgow’ DVD (Caroline International)
Originally fan-funded via a PledgeMusic campaign, Scott Ian’s ‘Swearing Words in Glasgow’ DVD now gets an official retail release via Caroline International, arriving on a Region Free disc that you’ll need to devote at least a few hours of your time to in order to get every morsel of information – both main and bonus features – flickering across your eyes.
Filmed at The Arches in Glasgow as part of Scott Ian’s 2013 ‘Speaking Words’ tour of the UK and Ireland, the DVD eschews the temptation to tart up what is essentially just one guy with a microphone stood in front of a screen and simply does the basics well – point a set of cameras at the famed guitarist from Anthrax and watch him talk.
And talk he does, the main set featured here running for just over two and a quarter hours. As legendary a metal musician as Ian is, few, I’m sure, would have had him down as an expert speaker in this kind of realm – he’s hardly the flamboyant frontman type, and even though we’ve all seen him as a talking head on a music documentary or three he’s always put himself across as cool, calm and collected rather than outrageously outspoken. To see him put those qualities across over the course of a two hour-plus one man show and experience little, if any, dip in interest is worth the retail price alone.
The show opens and closes with suitably ludicrous Anthony Kiedis tales that bookend laugh out loud stories from Scott’s 30+ year career in music – all of them hugely interesting, the majority of them hilariously funny.
Backed with projected artwork that makes the event look, at times, like some fucked-up comic book, the story about Scott’s first visit to London/Europe with a ‘Spreading The Disease’ era Anthrax that starts with a gig by The Sweet, gets more interesting via a chance meeting with Lemmy, and ends with a German doctor discovering that the ‘Thrax six-stringer has shit himself, as good a first act as could be expected.
It takes a while for the Glasgow crowd to fully come to life, no doubt, as Ian touches upon himself at the end of the performance, due to the fact that they don’t really know what to expect. It doesn’t take too long for them to get with the programme, however – largely down to the fact that Scott Ian hits almost every mark required of a spoken word performance, with only a few punchlines and quips going under appreciated. It’s hardly Ian’s fault, though – he truly impresses in this new guise.
One hundred-plus minutes fly by with tales of Dimebag Darrell, Sebastian Bach, Al Jourgensen, Steven Spielberg et al offering much hilarity. An audience Q&A follows with Scott telling it like it is about the likes of Jeff Hanneman, Gene Simmons, Ted Nugent, the casts of both Married With Children and Calendar Girls and, wonderfully, Blackie Lawless, confirming at least a couple of things that most of us already know about the W.A.S.P. frontman. There’s still time after that for Scott to draw a raffle for a Jackson guitar, thank everyone for taking a chance on this unknown spoken word quantity, and leave fans with some funny advice regarding meeting their rock ‘n’ roll heroes.
While the show itself is great – and I found myself both lost in the performance and laughing out loud at most of the stories – there are a couple of flaws regarding the production that have to be noted. There are times when people walk past the camera situated at the rear of the venue which makes it feel as if you’re watching one of those cinema bootlegs from the ’90s – this could easily have been avoided at the editing stage. Also, none of the audience members who ask questions during the Q&A come anywhere near a microphone so, unless Scott actually repeats the question, the DVD viewer has little idea what has actually been said. Minor complaints, granted, but a correcting of these issues in future would surely transform a very good DVD release into a great one.
That said, the extras on the disc aren’t too shabby: a couple of outtakes devoted to “shrooms” and “weed” run for fifteen and nineteen minutes each, and there’s also a six-minute edit of the entire show that simply features every swear word uttered by Ian – it’s silly, but well worth a viewing or two. A sequence that names and thanks every Pledger by way of a shout-out and a bit of guitar work rounds out the bonus features.
Scott’s wife, Pearl Aday, told her husband to approach a spoken word performance as if he were in a bar trading road stories with friends… and that’s exactly how it feels when watching this. Excellent stuff.
To pick up your copy of ‘Scott Ian: Swearing Words In Glasgow’ on DVD – CLICK HERE
