When I was young, not yet a teenag­er, I inher­it­ed from my elder sis­ters a num­ber of vinyl LPs, among them David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars, Cat Stevens’ Teas­er and the Fire­cat, the Moody Blues’ In Search Of The Lost Chord, and an album that appar­ent­ly didn’t need much of a title: Led Zep­pelin II. Although I loved all of these records, it was the lat­ter album that informed my imme­di­ate direc­tion in music; riff­ing gui­tar, crash­ing drums, shriek­ing vocals: what was not to like?

Soon I would encounter Deep Pur­ple, Thin Lizzy, UFO, AC/DC and Black Sab­bath, and by my mid-teens, a (large­ly young male) cross-sec­tion of the coun­try would be in the grip of the so-called “New Wave of British Heavy Met­al”. Seem­ing­ly all of a sud­den, there was a super­abun­dance of bands com­pris­ing long-haired, leather‑, den­im- or lycra-clad rock­ers: Judas Priest, Sax­on, Iron Maid­en, Def Lep­pard, Angel­witch, Pray­ing Man­tis, the list went on and on. And oh, the gigs! I attend­ed many of those. You would find your sens­es assault­ed by very loud music, bright lights, dry ice, a seething crowd of head­bang­ing fans, the smell of sweat and patchouli oil – it was cer­tain­ly a thrilling expe­ri­ence. How­ev­er, the idio­syn­crasies of the genre, along with some of the bands’ increas­ing­ly the­atri­cal stage shows and themes, would make them ripe for satire.

Enter Christo­pher Guest, a British-Amer­i­can screen­writer, actor, and come­di­an who would become known for his series of com­e­dy films shot in mock-doc­u­men­tary (mock­u­men­tary) style, and begin­ning in 1984 with his hilar­i­ous take on the heavy met­al move­ment, This Is Spinal Tap. Direct­ed by Rob Rein­er, it stars Guest, Michael McK­ean, and Har­ry Shear­er as mem­bers of fic­tion­al British heavy met­al band, Spinal Tap, and we fol­low them on their Amer­i­can tour. The film sat­i­rizes the behav­iour and musi­cal pre­ten­sions of rock bands, and to those with an inside view of the British heavy rock scene, the result is a painful­ly accu­rate and utter­ly hilar­i­ous pas­tiche.

Let’s start with the band mem­bers’ names, all great choic­es: David St. Hub­bins (McK­ean) and Nigel Tufnel (Guest) on vocals and gui­tar, bassist Derek Smalls (Shear­er), key­boardist Viv Sav­age, and drum­mer Mick Shrimp­ton. Most of the film’s dia­logue was impro­vised and dozens of hours were filmed, and giv­en that the prin­ci­pal actors were Amer­i­can, the fideli­ty to the British­ness is out­stand­ing.

The film is packed with great scenes of on and off­stage antics and dra­ma, but to keep it down I have select­ed three clas­sics for your amuse­ment: the scene where­in Nigel Tufnel takes us on a back­stage tour of this gui­tars and amps (includ­ing the ones that “go up to eleven”); the scene where­in the band get lost try­ing to find the stage door; and the hilar­i­ous Stone­henge scene, in which the band, play­ing its set-piece epic, is flab­ber­gast­ed to see the expect­ed 18-foot-tall stage props of “Stone’enge” descend to the stage at the cru­cial moment in dimen­sions con­struct­ed erro­neous­ly and under­whelm­ing­ly in inch­es. Price­less.