|
Who would have
thought it? The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal – a mouthful of a
term invented on a whim and a prayer by Sounds editor Alan
Lewis 25 years ago; a phrase much more awkward and cumbersome than
‘punk rock’, ‘nu-metal’ and even ‘alt.country’, fer Chrissakes – has
stood the test of time better than Joan Collins (and with nary a
strategic nip/tuck along the way).
Yep, the NWOBHM –
as we shall refer to it from here on in – has proved to be more
long-lasting than a gobstopper-sized hot-air balloon, more
influential than a battalion of Labour Party spin doctors, and more
formidable than a herd of rampaging rhinos.
How did it happen?
How did a motley
selection of juvenile British longhairs, cheap guitars in their
hands and tubes of Clearasil in their back pockets, somehow inspire
the formation of modern-day metal titans Metallica?
How come NWOBHM
originators Iron Maiden are still going strong in the 21st
century, their most recent album ‘Dance Of Death’ last year entering
the charts at No. 1 in five European countries including Italy and
the Czech Republic, and at No. 2 in the UK, Germany and, erm,
Switzerland and Slovenia?
How did Def
Leppard learn to thrive and survive, after having suffered the
traumas of their guitarist Steve Clarke dying from heroin addiction
and their drummer Rick Allen losing an arm in a road accident?
Why, as if one
Saxon wasn’t enough in the NWOBHM’s early days, are there now two of
them?
To sidestep into
reggae-dom for a second (and to paraphrase Johnny Nash), there
always are more questions than answers. In any case, it’s not really
my intention to provide a full NWOBHM history lesson here; rather,
I’d prefer to offer you up a finger-clicking series of snapshots of
what rock life was like two-and-a-half-decades ago. And if, when the
prints come back from Boots, they look a little blurred and frayed
around the edges, I hope you’ll forgive me. Because the truth is,
even to this day, I remain ever so slightly confused. That’s because
at the tail end of the 70s, when it all started going off, I would
never have predicted that the legacy of the NWOBHM would have turned
out to be so significant, so far-reaching and so
all-Goddamn-powerful.
- 0 -
I mentioned punk
rock earlier, and that’s most definitely where we should begin.
Because without punk, there would likely – very likely – have
been no NWOBHM.
Let’s travel back
to late 1976 or thereabouts. Babylon is on fire and a new breed of
spiny-barneted, saliva-sputtering yob is causing the conflagration.
The pavement slabs
outside your house are slippery because they’re covered in dribble
from the friendly neighbourhood Mohawks. The ‘filthy’ f-word is
being uttered on early-evening television. The Queen, it is being
alleged, ‘ain’t no human being’, and no blood tests are being put
forward to prove otherwise. Dance floors throughout the nation are
being strengthened with titanium girders to due enforced
pogo-pounding.
There is, in
short, anarchy in the UK.
With their middle
fingers locked in permanent skyward positions, with the straps
attached to the legs of their tartan bondage pants restricting them
to small but very deliberate steps, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The
Damned, et al are sweeping the old guard away – and they’re
using broomsticks tipped with barbed wire.
Behemoth
supergroups such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer are being consigned to
the dumpster. The carcasses of Led Zeppelin and Yes are being pecked
at by scavenging crows on the local council tip. Waste containers
marked ‘progressive rock albums, please deposit here’ are appearing
on street corners alongside glass- and newspaper-recycling units.
No doubt about it,
punk rock spat in the face of the establishment and upset the senile
Old Major living next door.
But how, you may
ask, did it provide the inspiration for the NWOBHM?
Well, it was the
straightforward idea that it was possible for someone – anyone
– to pick up a guitar, sit behind some drums, grab a mic, record
some Godawful racket and release it without record-company
mega-bucks backing. This mad concept struck a simple but strident
chord with thousands of disaffected young UK rockers.
- 0 -
Prior to punk,
British rock had disappeared up its own arse. With no hint of Justin
Hawkins-style irony, bands were wearing shocking pink catsuits
designed by Zandra Rhodes and writing 12-album box sets about
whoever put up those giant-sized head-sculptures on Easter Island.
People were buying
records purely because they had crazy-mushroom sleeve artwork by
Roger Dean (Welsh rockers Budgie being a surprise beneficiary here).
Journeymen
guitarists such as Jan Akkerman (Focus) had suddenly metamorphosed
into virtuoso musicians, their faces grimacing in creative torment
as their guitars creaked like rusty door hinges…
You might think
I’m exaggerating. But here’s a true story. I vividly remember
attending a show by Peter Bardens’ Camel at London’s Royal Albert
Hall, some time during this tortuous pre-Pistols era. As I took to
my seat I couldn’t help but notice that the person in front of me
was gazing at the pages of the Camel’s tour programme with
Pope-style reverence. After several oohs and ahhs of amazement, he
turned to a full-page photo of Bardens on stage in glowering
agonised-axeman guise. The fan then remarked to his friend in
wonderment: “Wow, you can just tell by the expression on Peter’s
face that he’s playing ‘The Flight Of The Snow Goose’ can’t you?!”
Ha! Punk killed
all this off, and good riddance to bad rubbish. Time to start
afresh.
Like I said, it
was punk’s ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude that kick-started the NWOBHM.
Traditionally, rock music had been all about learning your craft,
paying your dues, spending year in a studio perfecting your material
and eventually releasing a first album, then a second, then a third,
by which time your hardcore following had grown to, oh, at least a
couple of dozen people…
It was a laborious
process that required a benevolent, bankrolling record company – and
a lot of blind faith. Some rock groups, such as Deep Purple, Uriah
Heep, UFO and Judas Priest, would make it against the odds. Hundreds
of others would not. And yet, until Johnny Rotten came along and
said something like, “Fuck off and form a band”, no one had thought
of doing it any other way. Or, in Sid Vicious’s case, my way.
- 0 -
By the time the
70s turned into the 80s, punk rock had already imploded – but its
influence remained all-pervasive. Like HG Wells’s pale-skinned
underground Time Machine dwellers, the Morlocks, hard’n’heavy
bands made up of gauche young longhairs began to emerge, blinking,
from out of protective bunkers and shadowy alleyways, safe in the
knowledge that there were only a handful of people remaining who
were likely gob at them. From London’s East End – Leytonstone or
thereabouts – came Iron Maiden. From Sheffield pounced Def Leppard.
From Stourbridge arrived Diamond Head. And from deepest Cheshire
stumbled Silverwing…
Armed with
independent outlooks, total self-belief and unbridled enthusiasm,
this fresh new breed of British rock band began to break through
using the same route to stardom as the punks: sod the big labels who
don’t understand us, let’s make our own records and sell them off
our own backs. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll use the backs of
lorries instead.
Although, at the
time, it was uncool for fans and music critics alike to be into both
punk and metal, subconsciously there was an influence. The
link was in attitude and youthful exuberance maybe more than the
music.
Of course, it’s
very easy to theorise about the origin of such-and-such a musical
genre. But I recently spoke to Cronos (aka Conrad Lant; he
likes to be known by his real name these days) of Venom – possibly
the most important NWOBHM band of them all, about which more
to follow later – and he heartily backed my punk-influence
conjecture.
“My serious
‘hardcore life changing experience’ was The Sex Pistols; the punk
era in the 70s was exactly what everyone needed,” Cronos/Conrad
insisted. “People like me needed to rebel, we needed to stick a
middle finger up to the establishment and say, ‘Fuck you, we have
our own ideas, we have a new set of rules’. I even told people that
Johnny Rotten was my dad, even though he would only have been about
six when I was born.”
But equally, and
possibly as a backlash to punk, 25 years ago there was also a
burgeoning national pride in Britain for all forms of rock music. In
short, the timing was right. And in May 1979 the NWOBHM was born.
It’s true to say
that the NWOBHM changed the face of rock music. Looking back, it was
a unique era, a fascinating period of musical evolution and the
starting point for many of today’s stars – even if I, for one,
didn’t quite realise it at the time.
Today, many people
might still view the NWOBHM as a minor lesson, chapter and verse, in
the rock history books. Nothing more than just a curio. And I admit
that I certainly had an ambivalent attitude toward the ‘movement’
(sorry to be so pompous, but there really is no other word for it)
at the very beginning…
- 0 -
So who was the
catalyst? Who set the snowball tumbling down the mountainside? Who
cranked up the faders into the red zone and caused this avalanche of
fresh new British rock’n’roll? Was it Iron Maiden leader Steve
Harris, in cohorts with super-astute manager Rod Smallwood? Was it
Radio One’s Tommy Vance, the only national radio DJ with credentials
that were remotely rock-related? Was it David Wood, head honcho of
Wallsend’s Neat Records, the North East indie label that released so
many fine early NWOBHM singles and albums?
Nope. None of the
above. Instead, step forward Neal Kay, DJ at the Bandwagon Heavy
Metal Soundhouse – a hard-rock discotheque jam-packed with speakers
capable of huge power and sound, and situated (believe it or not) in
a hall dolled up like a B-movie Wild West whiskey saloon, attached
to the side of the Prince Of Wales pub at the Kingsbury Circle,
London NW9.
When I was a
writer for Sounds music weekly, Kay used to phone me up on a
regular basis to try and get publicity for the Bandwagon. With his
hippy-hangover attitude, gift of the gab and talent for
self-promotion, Kay was extremely difficult – make that
impossible – to ignore. But even though big American acts such
as Aerosmith and Ted Nugent were consistently selling out major
venues such as London’s Hammersmith Odeon at this time, I couldn’t
really get my head around the concept of such a quintessentially
British rock club as the Bandwagon. To be honest, as I slunk
into my heavy metal cubicle in the Sounds office, the sounds
of the latest Lurkers 45 and Vibrators demo resounding in my ears, I
was stunned to discover that a place such as the Bandwagon even
existed.
Eventually Kay
enticed me up to visit to his home-from-home, and I summed up the
Bandwagon phenomenon – because phenomenon it most certainly was – in
an article headlined ‘Wednesday Night Fever’ in the August 19, 1978
edition of Sounds:
‘I expected some
sort of time-warp populated by scruffy longhairs, a place where
head-shaking, imaginary-guitar playing, peace-signing flashing and
above all blood and thunder reigned supreme,’ I wrote. ‘And that was
all true apart from the fact that the Bandwagon ain’t no
time-warp.’
Kay and his
scabby-maned cohorts were very much alive, kicking and fighting
back, and doing their level best to mount a rearguard action against
the onslaught of punk rock. So there was nothing for it. I decided
to dust down my bright-red-satin Uriah Heep ‘Wonderworld’ tour
jacket, bring my copy of Deep Purple’s ‘Machine Head’ down from the
attic, and join them in their battle.
“An awful lot of
bikers frequent the Bandwagon,” Kay told me at the time, “and
there’s no way that they’re even remotely sympathetic to the punk
cause. It annoys them that these people buy £70 leathers for the
sole purpose of ripping them up. It annoys me, too.”
Matters proceeded
apace. Nine months or so later, and Kay had outgrown the Bandwagon.
Spurred on by the ever-increasing popularity of heavy metal, he
decided to go out on a limb and group together three popular ’Wagon
live acts under one roof at a major London venue, with himself
DJ’ing the whole event.
The date was May
9, 1979 and the place was the Music Machine, a venue that would
later metamorphose into the Camden Palace. The three bands on the
bill were Angel Witch, Iron Maiden and Samson. And this was when, by
popular belief, the NWOBHM was born. Hell, it had to start
somewhere.
- 0 -
Certainly, the
double-page-spread review of the show in the May 19, 1979 edition of
Sounds marked the first use of the ‘New Wave Of British Heavy
Metal’ epithet.
The headline, ‘If
you want blood (and flashbombs and dry ice and confetti) you’ve got
it’ was accompanied by the line: ‘The New Wave Of British Heavy
Metal: first in an occasional series by Deaf Barton’. All of which
carried the unmistakably daft – sorry, deft –
creative-writing touch of the rag’s editorial boss, ‘Big’ Al Lewis.
But in truth, my
story of that night at the Music Machine fell way short of ecstatic.
The article began with a quote from the Kay-man himself, uttered
with heartfelt enthusiasm from the Music Machine’s DJ booth:
“Welcome to the heavy metal crusade! It’s peace tonight because
tonight is the night of heavy metal in London town!”
Next, The
Scorpions’ number ‘Speedy’s Coming’ rumbled from the PA with enough
force to send Mike Tyson tumbling like a Canadian Redwood down on to
the canvas. But, with a cynical music-critic hat still lodged firmly
above my eyebrows, I found it difficult to share the jock’s
enthusiasm.
In truth, the
Music Machine sounded hollow and echoey that long-ago Tuesday night.
One or two punks shuffled around on the dancefloor while a few more
scruffy longhairs warily occupied the gloomy sidelines and looked on
with suspicion. The battle lines were already being drawn.
Without the sound
barrier provided by numerous bodies, Kay’s pre-recorded megawatt
mayhem tore through the auditorium with an unstoppable, tidal-wave
ferocity, the sound seeking out and mercilessly penetrating every
last nook and cranny.
But it was still
early, and there was at least half an hour before the first of the
three bands made an appearance. Time enough, surely, for a
sufficient number of fans to crowd in, shuffle up stage-front and
make a success out of Kay’s ambitious, heartfelt project.
So let’s take a
quick look at the bands’ performances on the night:
As show openers
Angel Witch lurched into their first number ‘Extermination Day’ I
was reminded of the first Black Sabbath album being played through a
cement mixer. The band, dressed in cheesecloth shirts and loon
pants, tossed their long hair, pouted, posed and punched their fists
into the air after each agonising guitar solo…
Delving deep
beneath the wall of noise, it slowly dawned on me that Angel Witch
operated at the ‘sword, sorcery and Satan’ end of the heavy metal
spectrum, with songs with titles such as ‘The Gorgon’, ‘The
Sorceress’, ‘Schizophrenic Mind’, ‘Devil’s Tower’ and ‘White Witch’.
In a perverse way, and even though they sounded desperately
old-fashioned – the encore was a version of Black Sabbath’s
‘Paranoid’, as if to ram the point home – I enjoyed Angel Witch. And
amazingly, they appeared to enjoy a much better reception than
second-on-the-bill Iron Maiden…
‘Prowler’, one of
the standout songs from Maiden’s first demo tape, had figured
strongly in the Sounds/Bandwagon heavy metal chart for some
time, and tonight was to be my first encounter with the band.
The Music Machine
now (thankfully) reasonably full, Maiden – resplendent in
tight-fitting leather outfits – looked poised and coolly confident,
and opening number ‘Wrathchild’ was a suitably demented rock anthem.
Unfortunately, though, it took up until the tail end of the set for
the band – just a four-piece at this time, and featuring Paul
Di’Anno on vocals instead of the more familiar Bruce Dickinson, or
indeed Blaze Bayley – to produce another song of equal calibre.
‘Sanctuary’, ‘Charlotte The Harlot’ and ‘Another Life’ ground into
each other horribly and the inevitable “It’s time to slow things
down a little” number, ‘Strange World’, found the crowd drifting
away until the band were only left with a handful of interested
onlookers. Astonishing in these stadium-stomping modern-day Maiden
days, but true, nevertheless.
However, things
really started moving again with the song ‘Iron Maiden’, a spiked
statement of titular intent, while the live version of ‘Prowler’ (or
“‘Prahla’, dedicated to all of ya dahn at the Soundaase” as it was
announced) scorched like a smokin’ frying pan to the forehead. But
on the evidence of this performance, would I have predicted the
levels of greatness that Maiden would go on to achieve? Not on your
Nelly, Eddie.
Samson took the
stage as a three-piece, the arrival of vocalist Bruce Dickinson
(yes, it’s that man again) being a short time into the future at
this point. Paul Samson (guitar/vocals), Chris Aylmer (bass) and
Thunderstick (drums, sporting a disturbing Cambridge rapist-style
mask) had already released two singles on the Lightning label
(‘Telephone’ and ‘Mr Rock ’N’ Roll’) but had recently moved to Lazer
Records, if memory serves me correctly. I guess that almost made
them the ‘elder statesmen’ of the evening.
At the time, I
recall criticising Samson for being too rambling and
bluesy-guitar-solo-oriented – but the band’s stage effects were
something else.
A glaring
thunderflash opened the set and proved to be an extravagant
foretaste of what was to come. Permanently shrouded in FX smog,
during Samson’s performance you got dry ice, flashbombs, dry ice,
showers of confetti, dry ice, fireworks, dry ice, clouds of
multi-coloured smoke and even some dry ice into the bargain.
So, while I felt
lukewarm about Samson’s music, the band were deserving of a gold
star for presentation alone.
I’d like to say
that the Music Machine show was legendary, but the truth is that the
NWOBHM began as less of a surface-fracturing explosion and more of a
subtle slow burn…
And Neal Kay’s
reaction to the Music Machine show? “I was a little worried at
first,” he told me the day after the gig, “the vibes were very heavy
at the beginning of the evening when the punks were occupying the
dancefloor. The metal freaks took a while to arrive in force. At the
end of the night everything was cool, though. Finally, the punks
were coming right up to me and asking me to play Van Halen, Black
Sabbath and even Jimi Hendrix tracks.
“Believe me,
Geoff,” Kay concluded, “heavy metal took the Music Machine last
night and won!”
- 0 -
Neal Kay, now 54, describes himself today as being “much
older and a hell of a lot wiser” than he was at the genesis of the
NWOBHM.
“I was very
insignificant actually,” he told me recently, “but the impact [of
the NWOBHM] is still there and being felt today, I’m delighted to
say.”
Kay – a man who
Garry Bushell once said would likely burn up on re-entry if he fell
off his towering platform boots – was a powerful force behind the
NWOBHM, despite his protestations to the opposite (and even if he
did mastermind some dodgy ‘Metal For Muthas’ NWOBHM compilation
albums).
“But I assumed a
self-crowned mantle that I never should have done,” he proclaimed
modestly. “I’ve almost been forced to re-evaluate myself. But
whoever that Neal Kay was, back at the height of the NWOBHM, I
suppose that was me inside. I was passionate, driven and full of
belief.”
Kay said he
pestered me back in the old Sounds days because, “I knew that
if I was to raise the Bandwagon’s profile, I needed the help of the
top echelon [Sounds]. I attacked it like a business and I was
so glad when you started to print a chart compiled by the Bandwagon
punters in your pages. If heavy rock music was to be given a chance,
it needed the focus of the press to help it along the way.”
So, what were
Kay’s most memorable Bandwagon moments?
“Seen from the
side of the stage, the whole place was on a high for five years,” he
said. “The venue seemed to attract the world’s craziest fans –
everyone was just a raving lunatic. This one place just seemed to
have the magic.”
Kay was at pains
to acknowledge the enduring legacy of the NWOBHM: “The movement had
a profound effect on the young of the time and it was done with such
integrity and intensity from a basic street level that it just
enveloped everybody… what you’ve got realise is that genuine rock
fans had been held back in this country for so long, they were just
waiting for something to happen, waiting to jump over into the
spotlight from their side of the fence.”
You might think
I’m overestimating Kay’s role in the tale of the NWOBHM. But the
following puts it into perspective:
“Cliff Burnstein
and Peter Mensch arrived outside my house in Colindale at the height
of the NWOBHM, shortly after Iron Maiden had been picked up by EMI,”
Kay recalled. “They said they were representing Phonogram. [The duo
would later go on to create the all-powerful US management company,
Q-Prime.] I thought, who the hell are these guys? They asked me,
‘Alright, we know it’s too late for us to sign Iron Maiden, but what
else have you got?’ Initially they were interested in Praying
Mantis, but they wanted them to bring in a new frontman and keyboard
player…”
So the Americans
began digging their fingernails into the NWOBHM’s skinny flesh at an
early stage. Shortly afterward, Burnstein and Mensch would leave
Kay’s doorstep to travel to Sheffield to oust Def Leppard’s early
manager, Frank Stewart-Brown, and become the driving force behind
Joe Elliott and Co’s success…
- 0 -
A post-Music
Machine interview with Samson threw up an intriguing dichotomy
behind the NWOBHM. The old-stager musicians thought it was a
half-arsed Sounds invention, while the newcomers were only
too willing to embrace it wholeheartedly.
“Reading about it
[the NWOBHM] makes me laugh, I must admit,” Paul Samson once told
me. “I mean, I’ve been around since 1974, I’ve played on the same
bill as bands like Bees Make Honey and Slack Alice – remember them?
Nah, there’s nothing really ‘new’ about me. Samson played 230 gigs
at the height of punk, in 1977, but did we get any mentions in the
press then? Did we fuck.”
Paul Samson’s
argument was a familiar one, and he continued along the lines of,
“there is no heavy metal revival because the music never went away”,
citing Saxon (who played the clubs in an around their home town of
Barnsley for years under the monicker Son Of A Bitch, and to zero
recognition) to back up his views. But while I had sympathy with
Samson’s comments at the time, he was unable to sway me from the
belief that the NWOBHM was a genuine movement of the times,
and that for every dues-paying guitarist like himself there were at
least two or three youngsters who’d sprung up from nowhere and were
giving the music a new impetus, and a new meaning.
I actually found
an unlikely supporter in Samson vocalist Bruce Dickinson (who by
this time had joined the band, initially calling himself Bruce Bruce
and sporting a droopy moustache straight out of present-day
‘118-118’ advertisements).
“We played
Liverpool the other night,” Bruce related to me, “and to tell the
truth we didn’t expect to do that well. The two days prior to our
gig both AC/DC and Whitesnake had done shows in the city and we
didn’t hope for much of a crowd, we thought all the kids would’ve
spent their money on the name acts and wouldn’t have been able to
afford to come and see us. But as it happens we did better than we
anticipated, we drew about 350 people, which was respectable.”
Bruce continued:
“After our set a punter came up to us, started chatting, and I asked
him, ‘Did you go and see Whitesnake?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I didn’t
bother with them, AC/DC neither. These days the only decent bands
are people like you.
“‘Bands that are
part of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.’”
- 0 -
So that’s a taster
of the story behind the birth of the NWOBHM. Despite my reservations
(and ongoing obsession with megabuck American bands such as Kiss)
Sounds sensed that it was on to a good thing. The new British
rock scene began erupting and I found myself being dispatched to
cover a dizzying array of exciting (and occasionally, if truth be
told, not so exciting) new acts.
Meantime, the term
‘NWOBHM’ was spawning a whole host of lookalike acronyms. A little
under a year after the Music Machine show, the NENWOBHM (North East
New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) was born. This crazy term had its
origins in Wallsend, a matrix of heavy metal mayhem just down the
road from Newcastle-upon-Tyne (it says here), with bands such as
Fist, Raven, White Spirit and The Tygers Of Pan Tang making
astonishing inroads despite being on the obscure (and
aforementioned) Neat Records label. Neat owner David Wood started
the Impulse parent company in 1966, gradually building it up to a
16-track studio, providing recording facilities for soloists and
bands of all sizes, shades, dispositions and artistry. But what is
not commonly known is that Neat wasn’t Impulse’s first label. The
folk-based Rubber had been around for years previous, even notching
up a major seller with Mike Harding’s ‘Rochdale Cowboy’…
But Cronos/Conrad
of Venom, who were also signed to Neat, claimed that the label’s
success came about more by luck than judgment.
“The MD [David
Wood] had a nose for money and started to sniff around at the
increased interest in heavy music,” he revealed. “Before Venom took
off I was helping out at Impulse and the MD asked me to get one of
these new rock bands in the studio. He said I could work as A&R for
him. I chose The Tygers Of Pan Tang, a band I saw perform every week
in venue called Mingles, now called Idols.
“The MD had
recently started a new label called Neat that had only released two
singles, a band called Motorway, and the single died on its arse,
and a young girl called Joannie McKenzie; this also died on its
arse, The Tygers were Neat 03 [the single ‘Don’t Touch Me There’] –
the first rock act from the stables of Impulse, and the doors
suddenly burst open!”
The Neat story
probably deserves an entire Record Collector feature
by itself. What’s more, there’s a strong argument for claiming that
Venom were the most important band to come out the NWOBHM,
ahead of Def Leppard and Iron Maiden, even. That’s because unlike
the latter two more traditionalist acts, Venom – a trio made up of
Cronos on bass/vocals, Mantas on guitar and Abaddon on drums –
invented at least two, and probably many more, brand new musical
styles: Thrash Metal and Black Metal.
Says Cronos/Conrad
today: “I got pissed off when I saw a Heavy Metal chart in a music
magazine that had Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ in it [featuring Eddie
Van Halen on guitar], and that’s when I said that Venom were not
heavy metal, we were much more than that…”
Or, as one music
commentator put it at the time: ‘Home taping is killing music. And
so are Venom’.
Sounds
closed 1979 with a lengthy NWOBHM update, rounding things up neatly
in a state-of-the-nation story: Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, The Tygers
Of Pan Tang, Praying Mantis, Witchfynde, Diamond Head, Angel Witch
and Sledgehammer all featured prominently, and there were also
worthy mentions for the likes of Nuthin’ Fancy, Vardis, Ethel The
Frog, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Race Against Time, Zorro, Killdozer,
Dragonfly, Bastille, Hellenbach… the list just went on and on.
Today, you can log on to the website
www.nwobhm.com to see just how many
hundreds of bands crawled out of the woodwork in those long-ago
days, and how many are still around and releasing records in the Noughties.
- 0 -
In 1989, to
celebrate the 10th anniversary of the NWOBHM, Metallica
drummer Lars Ulrich and myself compiled an album featuring the best
of the genre through Phonogram.
Lars came up to
visit me (I was editing Kerrang! at the time) and a writer
for Sounds called Neil Perry at our offices. At that time we
worked at a place called Ludgate House on the south side of London’s
Blackfriars Bridge. The building had been specially constructed for
the Daily Express newspaper and we had some space there. The
Express had moved from Fleet Street which had plenty of pubs
and drinking dens, and (as I understand it) the paper’s often
drunken journalists would only agree to make the move to a less
salubrious part of town if the proprietors agreed to incorporate a
ground-floor bar into the building plans! So, incredibly, we had use
of a pub downstairs at Ludgate House called Poppins Bar where we
went to chat with Lars.
The idea of the
NWOBHM album came about after several crates of Mexican Sol beer. We
thought all these great (big and little) bands deserved more
recognition, even though the beginning of the NWOBHM was merely a
decade back down the line.
I’ll be honest and
say that Lars and the label guy at Phonogram, Dave Thorne, did most
of the legwork in tracking down the bands and master tapes for what
turned out to be a lavishly packaged double vinyl album. But I
certainly got all the press clippings et cetera together for the
sleeve, which took some considerable time.
The biggest
problem as far as track selection was concerned was with a band from
South Shields called Mythra and their track ‘Death And Destiny’ on
the forgotten Guardian label. I really wanted to include this number
but Lars wasn’t so keen – I later learned that ‘Death And Destiny’
was supposed to have influenced Metallica’s ‘Kill ’Em All’, so maybe
Lars didn’t want his roots showing too much! Anyway, Lars eventually
said OK to the track but we couldn’t get hold of the master tape.
Apparently it was owned by one of the band’s uncles who had financed
recording of the song; he’d never heard of Lars or Metallica and
wouldn’t let it out of his possession...
But despite (or
maybe because of) the absence of Mythra, the NWOBHM album wasn’t a
big seller for Phonogram; it would probably have been better off on
an indie label. As it was, the album’s relative lack of success
contributed (or so I believe) to Dave Thorne’s eventual departure
from Phonogram.
In actual fact, I
didn’t know too much about Lars’s outrageous NWOBHM fanship prior to
Metallica, although I did find out later he was in the audience at
an early Diamond Head show I attended in Portsmouth – he’d travelled
all the way from Denmark just to see the band. The support act for
the show was Silverwing who were terrible that night – which is
probably why Metallica are never likely to do a cover version
‘Flashbomb Fever’, a song I wrote for the band! A certain Jess Cox
had a little more luck, however…
- 0 -
Good and bad
things came out of the NWOBHM and the following two postscripts
might help put matters into perspective, here in 2004.
The first PS comes
from Cox, an early singer in The Tygers Of Pan Tang who went on to
form Lionheart, dubbed ‘the first NWOBHM supergroup’, with Iron
Maiden guitarist Dennis Stratton.
Following
Lionheart’s failure, Cox left the music industry completely and
“eventually became a journalist, of all things,” he jokes. “Anyway,
while I was working on Newcastle’s daily paper, The Journal,
I went to interview David Wood of Neat Records fame for a human
interest story and he asked me to do some press on his label’s
latest releases…”
That triggered
Cox’s return to the music industry. He began wheeling and dealing,
and through circuitous means managed to pick up the back catalogue
of Scottish NWOBHM stalwarts Holocaust “for a few grand”.
Then what
happened? Metallica covered Holocaust’s track ‘The Small Hours’ on
their ‘Garage Days Re-revisited’ EP, and also included it on their
‘Garage, Inc.’ album.
“This makes me a
good income,” says Cox. “I can pick and choose what I do now.”
Lucky sod!
The second
postscript is from that man Neal Kay again – and, if this article
has succeeded in making you feel even the smallest amount of
affection for the NWOBHM, then I strongly suggest that you keep a
pack of Kleenex handy.
“Last week [our
conversation took place on February 14] I heard that they’ve pulled
down the Bandwagon – they’ve actually demolished the old Heavy Metal
Soundhouse,” Kay complained. “That sad news just reached me today.
Some of our old fans went there for a beer for old times’ sake and
got confronted by a load of rubble. I believe they’re going to build
a supermarket on the site. But what can you do?
“That’s progress,
I suppose,” Kay concluded. “But we mourn with great sadness a place
of those times; those truly great times.”
In the old days I
would have berated Kay for his overbearing hippy sentimentality. But
even though it was Valentine’s Day evening, this was no time for
hearts and flowers.
Because although
the Soundhouse may be no more, the musical marvel it played a
massive part in creating still endures.
By Geoff Barton |
