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Credit: Shout! Studios
Penelope Spheeris’s classic movie The Decline Of Western Civilisation, Part II: The Metal Years can currently be watched on YouTube for free.
The film, which chronicles the mid-late 80s Los Angeles heavy metal scene and includes contributions from Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Kiss, Aerosmith, plus a cast of hopefuls and hangers-on, has been made available by its distributor, Shout! Studios.
The film features several scenes that have become iconic, from W.A.S.P.’s Chris Holmes giving a drunken interview while floating in a pool as his long-suffering mother watches on, to Ozzy Osbourne reflecting on sobriety while making breakfast.
“I found guys like Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P. fascinating,” Spheeris told Classic Rock. “I wasn’t sure, at the end of Chris’s interview, that I even had an interview, but, you know, it wasn’t me that gave him the vodka.”
“There were certain things we had to manipulate,” she added. “The sequence with Ozzy, that’s not really his house. And we faked the spilling of the orange juice. But Ozzy’s one of the funniest people alive. You just point a camera at him and off he goes.”
The Decline Of Western Civilisation, Part II: The Metal Years also includes live performances from Megadeth, Faster Pussycat, Lizzy Borden, London, Odin and Seduce.
Spheeris’s first Decline movie documented LA’s embryonic, early-80s punk scene and featured live performances by X, Black Flag, Germs, Circle Jerks, Fear and more. The third part of the trilogy, released in 1998, explored the traumatic lives of so-called “gutter-punks” as they battled skinhead gangs and the LAPD.