'It gives us peace' Heavy metal offers relief from reality in Bougainville

'Courtesy of the patriarchs' path shown by ancient ancestral domain ... retain or never," bellows singer Hyginus Tagira to an appreciative crowd of metalheads at a festival in Kokopau, a bustling township in Bougainville.

- Gordon Peake

Tagira is the frontman of Conscience - pronounced "con science" - a four-piece metal band.

He's swaddled in a leather cape that must have raised his temperature to dizzying levels in the fearsome heat. Hundreds of Bougainvilleans are there, most wearing lurid heavy metal T-shirts.

Conscience is one of dozens of metal groups in the autonomous region of Bougainville, located on the far eastern fringes of Papua New Guinea and still haunted by the ghosts of a conflict that, while it officially ended more than 20 years ago, still reverberates. The civil war that began in the late 1980s was the most violent conflict in the Pacific since the second world war.

"We love this music," says Sylvester Hatsiere, a former fighter turned cocoa planter. "It gets right into the blood and means, for a while, that we forget about the bad things in our lives." The genre attracts fans young and old, with live metal music in Bougainville most weekends.