Heavy Metal
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This metal music trivia quiz has 110 free questions with answers and covers the whole genre from its 1968 birth to Babymetal: Black Sabbath's name and Tony Iommi's fingers, Deep Purple's casino fire, Led Zeppelin's lead balloon, the NWOBHM and Eddie, Judas Priest on a Harley and in court, Ozzy and the bat, Dio's horns, the Jethro Tull Grammy, thrash's Big Four, death and black metal's darkest chapters, Pantera, nu metal, Rammstein, Ghost, Lordi at Eurovision, plus the umlauts, Spinal Tap, Kerrang! and the PMRC hearings. The first questions are easy enough for anyone who owns a black T-shirt; the last ones will test people who can name the first church Varg burned. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation after you answer. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Led Zeppelin song builds from a quiet acoustic opening to a hard-rock finale over eight minutes?
Stairway to Heaven
Stairway to Heaven was never sold as a single: the band's manager turned down the label's pleas, so fans who wanted the song had to buy the whole fourth album.
Q 02The first use of 'heavy metal' in a song lyric, describing a motorcycle, comes from which 1968 track?
Born to Be Wild
Born to Be Wild has Steppenwolf singing of 'heavy metal thunder', the roar of a bike rather than a style of music; a year later Easy Rider made the song the bikers' anthem.
Q 03Which Beat writer used 'the Heavy Metal Kid' as a character name in his 1961 novel The Soft Machine?
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs called the character Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid, and later explained that heavy metal seemed to him 'the ultimate expression of addiction'.
Q 04Black Sabbath's heavy, down-tuned sound is partly credited to which accident of Tony Iommi's?
Losing two fingertips
Losing two fingertips to a factory machine on his last shift, at 17, drove Iommi to mould new tips from a melted washing-up bottle and find another way of making a bigger sound.
Q 05Black Sabbath took their name from a 1963 horror film starring whom?
Boris Karloff
Boris Karloff's film was showing at a cinema across the road from their rehearsal room; noticing that people paid to be scared, the band wrote a song with its title and set out to make scary music.
Q 06Before settling on Black Sabbath, the Birmingham band went by which name?
Earth
Earth kept being confused with another band of the same name, so in 1969 the group renamed itself after one of its own songs.
Q 07Which Black Sabbath album followed their debut later in 1970 and helped codify heavy metal?
Paranoid
Paranoid took its title from a three-minute filler the band wrote at the last moment to pad out the album, which then became a top-five UK single.
Q 08Led Zeppelin's name reportedly came from a 'lead balloon' joke cracked by the rhythm section of which band?
The Who
The Who's Keith Moon and John Entwistle are credited with the quip about a planned supergroup; manager Peter Grant cut the 'a' so nobody would say 'leed'.
Q 09The Montreux Casino fire in 'Smoke on the Water' started during whose concert?
Frank Zappa and the Mothers
Frank Zappa and the Mothers lost all their gear when a fan fired a flare gun into the ceiling, and the smoke drifting over Lake Geneva gave the song its title.
Q 10Which band did the 1975 Guinness Book name 'the globe's loudest' for a 1972 London concert?
Deep Purple
Deep Purple hit 117 decibels that night, and Guinness later dropped the loudest-band category altogether rather than encourage hearing damage.
Q 11Which band's whistled power ballad 'Wind of Change' became an anthem for the end of the Cold War?
Scorpions
Scorpions wrote it after playing the 1989 Moscow Music Peace Festival, where singer Klaus Meine was moved by the huge Russian crowds cheering them on.
Q 12Which band topped the UK album chart with the 1981 live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith?
Motörhead
Motörhead recorded it nowhere near Hammersmith: the tapes came from shows in Leeds and Newcastle, and it stayed the band's only number one album.
Q 13Iron Maiden's mascot, who appears on every album cover, is called what?
Eddie
Eddie began as a mask in the band's stage backdrop; the name moved to the figure in Derek Riggs's painting that became the debut album cover.
Q 21Thrash metal's 'Big Four' are Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and which band?
Megadeth
Megadeth took its name from a senator's pamphlet warning that 'the arsenal of megadeath can't be rid', megadeath being a unit of one million deaths in nuclear war.
Q 22Which Slayer song about Auschwitz helped lead Columbia to refuse to distribute Reign in Blood in 1986?
Angel of Death
Angel of Death describes Josef Mengele's experiments on prisoners; when Columbia balked, producer Rick Rubin took the album to Geffen, which put it out instead.
Q 23Which hip-hop group name-checked Anthrax on 'Bring the Noise' and later re-recorded it with them?
Public Enemy
Q 14Which Iron Maiden member flew the band's customised Boeing airliner on world tours as a licensed airline pilot?
Bruce Dickinson
Bruce Dickinson worked between tours as a Boeing 757 captain for the British charter airline Astraeus until it collapsed in 2011.
Q 15Judas Priest singer Rob Halford famously rode what onto the stage?
A Harley-Davidson
A Harley-Davidson became his entrance for 'Hell Bent for Leather' in the late 1970s, part of the theatrical leather-and-studs look the band had just adopted.
Q 16Judas Priest stood trial in 1990 over an alleged subliminal 'do it' in which cover song?
Better by You, Better than Me
'Better by You, Better than Me' was a Spooky Tooth cover added late to Stained Class; the judge dismissed the case, finding nothing had been planted on purpose.
Q 17Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat onstage in January 1982 in which city?
Des Moines
Des Moines got the story when a fan threw the bat on stage: Ozzy took it for a toy, bit down, and ended up having a course of rabies shots.
Q 18Which singer popularised metal's 'devil horns', saying his grandmother used the gesture to ward off the evil eye?
Ronnie James Dio
Ronnie James Dio never trained as a singer: he credited the power of his voice to the breath control he learned playing the trumpet as a boy.
Q 19Before replacing Ozzy in Black Sabbath in 1979, Ronnie James Dio fronted which Ritchie Blackmore band?
Rainbow
Rainbow lost Dio when Ritchie Blackmore steered the band towards a more commercial sound, a split that left him free to take the Black Sabbath job.
Q 20Which act controversially won the first hard rock/metal Grammy in 1989 over ...And Justice for All?
Jethro Tull
Jethro Tull won for Crest of a Knave, though hardly anyone counted the flute-led band as hard rock or metal, which made the first award an instant joke.
Public Enemy and Anthrax followed the 1991 remake with a joint tour, ending each night on stage together and showing that rap and metal crowds could share a bill.
Q 24Death metal's name is credited partly to a 1984 demo and 1985 song by which Bay Area band?
Possessed
Possessed called the demo Death Metal, and the tag outlived the line-up: guitarist Larry LaLonde later swapped the scene for the oddball rock trio Primus.
Q 25In which country did early-1990s black metal musicians burn down churches, including a 12th-century wooden one?
Norway
Norway's Fantoft stave church, built around 1150, was the first to burn, in June 1992; a rebuilt replica now stands on the site near Bergen.
Q 26Which Mayhem member was murdered in 1993 by Burzum's Varg Vikernes?
Euronymous
Euronymous ran the record shop Helvete, the hub of the scene; Vikernes was convicted in 1994 and given the maximum sentence of 21 years.
Q 27Mayhem's vocalist Per Ohlin pioneered black metal's face paint because he wanted to look like what?
An actual corpse
An actual corpse was the aim: bandmates say Ohlin, who performed as Dead, buried his stage clothes before shows so they would start to rot.
Q 28Which Texas metal guitarist was shot dead on stage in Columbus, Ohio, in December 2004?
Dimebag Darrell
Dimebag Darrell was playing with his new band Damageplan when a disturbed fan opened fire; three other people died before a police officer shot the gunman.
Q 29Pantera's 1990 album Cowboys from Hell is credited with popularising which subgenre?
Groove metal
Groove metal was a clean break: Pantera began as a glam metal band and dropped that style after four independent albums to make this major-label debut.
Q 30Which nu metal band's 2000 debut Hybrid Theory produced the hits 'In the End' and 'Crawling'?
Linkin Park
Linkin Park had been calling itself Hybrid Theory until a clash with a group named Hybrid forced a change, so the old name went on the album instead.