Has anybody been watching this series on Sky Arts (It screened on VH-1 Classic in the States)?

It's made by Sam Dunn, creator of the fantastic documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, and aims to chronicle the history of heavy metal from its influences and origins all the way up to the latest developments in the movement, taking in hair metal, shock rock, grunge, etc along the way. I caught the first episode, Pre-Metal, last night. There's some fascinating stuff in there with interviews covering the first instance of the distorted guitar sound (on "Rocket 88"), Dave Davies of The Kinks speaking about taking a razorblade to the speaker cone of his brand new amp ("I don't know why I did it, really") and resolving to play three-stringed power chords to get the desired guitar effect on "You Really Got Me" to Lemmy confessing that his vocal style was born of a conscious desire to sound like Howlin' Wolf. Given the topic of discussion - the origin of metal - Sabbath loom large and there's some nice penny-dropping moments where Geezer Butler and Bill Ward talk about the swing, jazz and blues influences in their sound. It continues tonight at 9, I think, but on Sky it's already up to episode 5.

Damn - sounds impressive. I'll be hoping for future Netflix streaming.

I'd heard the Dave Davies story a long time ago, but Lemmy wanting to sound like Howlin' Wolf - that was news to me.