Issue 164: Heavy Metal And Watchmaking Don't Mix
When Ozzy Osbourne died, I found myself thinking about his Cartier
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that is confused. No-one, to my knowledge, has said or done anything stupid in weeks - maybe months! Do they not realise the drought I am experiencing, as a weekly newsletter writer? Must I once again come up with something of my own? So it would seem. Please write in if you know differently but our industry appears to be enjoying a rare streak of uncontroversial behaviour. So this week, my thoughts turned to a world in which controversial behaviour isn’t just common, it’s practically required. Judging by the size of the comments section elsewhere, I’d do a lot better writing about Rolex CPO, but I just can’t bore myself with it. So instead you get an essay on heavy metal, rebellion and luxury. Enjoy!
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Heavy, not precious metal
When Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness, the Godfather Of Heavy Metal, decapitator of bats and unreliable pilot of quad bikes, passed away at the age of 76 this week, I found my love of rock and metal rudely distracted by my irrepressible instinct for wrist-spotting. A recent image of Ozzy posted to Instagram quite clearly showed him wearing a gold Cartier Ballon Bleu, and I found the juxtaposition so jarring that it stopped any sense of mourning in its tracks1.
This, I immediately declared, was no kind of watch for a heavy rocker. The man should have been wearing something far more in-keeping; I suggest perhaps the 2020 Audemars Piguet Royal Oak in platinum with an onyx dial and diamond hour markers. It’s literally heavy metal2, with suitably dark and glam elements. Others suggested a Vantablack Streamliner, which I think works nicely, or a Richard Mille RM52 Skull Tourbillon. There are plenty of possibilities and they’re all cooler than a Ballon Bleu. But hey, the man’s got plenty of money, and plenty of watches - it must have just felt like a Cartier day. I know he had other pieces - a Franck Muller, a Roger Dubuis and so on.
That would have been that, except later on while I was in the car, as BBC6Music rolled out an Ozzy tribute - I think I’ve heard Paranoid more times in the last 48 hours than in the last ten years - I returned to the subject in my head. I’m a real rock and metal geek, you see, and I’ve always found the intersection of these two areas, watches and rock music, seriously awkward.
There are some reasons why watches and heavy metal might appeal to the same people, I suppose. It’s quite a geeky genre of music, and often a slightly insular one (when you pick up a guitar at a house party, people much prefer it when you can play a bit of Oasis or The Beatles, and sing a bit, rather than that one 30-second snippet of Joe Satriani that you’ve got memorised - although I did once have some success with an impromptu acoustic version of Iron Maiden’s Two Minutes To Midnight). If you play an instrument, especially guitar, there’s a fascination with acquiring gear that you can fiddle around with and nerd out over. Of course there are actual rock and metal legends who’ve crossed over into the watchmaking world, like Anthrax guitarist Dan Spitz, who quit the band in 1995 and is now a WOSTEP-trained watchmaker with his own line of artisan watches. (People also often bring up Eric Singer, the drummer with Kiss, who has what I’ll politely call ‘scattergun’ taste as a collector). I’ve also noticed on multiple occasions that the assembly technicians in a number of watch brand workshops are total metalheads.
I’ll tell you what else is a good fit - the tribalism. Watch collecting might seem like a niche from the outside but we all know it’s a morass of overlapping, inter-connected sub-communities and competing fans of rival brands. Omega vs Rolex? I’ll raise you Iron Maiden vs Metallica. Do you prefer the finishing style of Geneva, or Glashutte? How about West Coast glam metal vs East Coast hard rock? Dufour, Smith, or Journe? It’s Malmsteen, Vai and Van Halen. Since we came in with Ozzy Osbourne, let’s stick with him: the sturdy, distorted, slabs of early Sabbath are the tool watches of the post-war era; the pinch harmonics, synths and shredding of No More Tears or Bark At The Moon are the fiddly complications and over-the-top designs of the 1980s.
