The first furnace
The oldest foundry in the building, heavy metal, runs on valve amplifiers pushed until they break up, on a riff that holds the song up the way a steel beam holds a roof and on a singer who neither growls nor shrieks but sings, clean, high and at full power, and every later genre still pours from the moulds it cast. The drums land on the beat like a pile driver. The tempo sits at a march. When it breaks into a run it does so on the gallop, one eighth note and two sixteenths, the figure that turns a bass line into hoofbeats on cobblestone.
The blues went into the furnace first. Led Zeppelin and Free still built their riffs on the shuffle, only louder, and the heavy metal bands that followed tore the swing out of the riff, straightened the rhythm and handed the melody to two guitars at once. Built around K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, who joined in 1974, the West Midlands quintet called Judas Priest burned most of the remaining blues out of its sound on Sad Wings of Destiny in 1976, and the twin lead it worked out became the signature of the style, two blades drawn from one forge and swung in step. Nothing swings here. Everything marches.
The voice is the second weapon. Where the blues singer confided, the singer here climbs, holds the note and hurls it over the guitars like a spear over a castle wall, and the lyrics climb with him, into war, myth, history and the occult. Ronnie James Dio on Rising and Bruce Dickinson on Iron Maiden's records from 1982 set that register for everyone who followed. Nobody whispers.
The production runs between two poles. At one end stand the major label heavy metal albums cut with a producer at the desk, Tom Allom on British Steel, Martin Birch on every Iron Maiden album from 1981 until his retirement in 1992. At the other end the young British bands of 1979 and 1980 pressed raw singles and albums on independent labels, sometimes a thousand copies at a time in a plain sleeve. Both count. The riff is the same steel at either end.
Heavy metal on every front
The first trap is the name. Heavy metal is the umbrella over thrash, death, black, doom and power, and also the narrow style of riff, gallop and clean voice that fans call trad metal. In the narrow sense the benchmark is Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Saxon, not Slayer. In May 1979 Geoff Barton reviewed an Iron Maiden, Samson and Angel Witch bill at Neal Kay's Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse for the weekly paper Sounds. Branded by the words editor Alan Lewis set over that review, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the young British wave that followed drove the style faster and rawer as the NWOBHM.
Outside Britain the roots grew crooked. The German five in Accept hardened the style towards speed, the Danes of Mercyful Fate dressed it in the occult and King Diamond's falsetto, and in the United States Riot, Omen, Jag Panzer and Manilla Road hammered out a riff driven version with little use for keyboards that later took the name US power metal. That is a different animal from the lighter European power metal that followed Helloween's Keeper of the Seven Keys in 1987. The line never broke. Since the 2000s the new wave of traditional heavy metal, Enforcer from Sweden among them, has played the old rules straight.
Every crossing has a reason. Hard rock shares the amplifiers, which is why AC/DC and Deep Purple keep turning up on metal lists, and why Motörhead, whose records a generation of thrash players took apart bolt by bolt, insisted it played rock and roll. Glam kept the guitars, bolted on pop hooks and power ballads and swapped denim and leather for spandex, and Def Leppard, raised in the British wave, drove Pyromania to number two on the American album chart in 1983. Thrash metal smashed the march to pieces and let the voice turn harsh. Doom metal built a cathedral out of Black Sabbath's slowest songs.
Where to start
Eight records, eight tools off the same workbench, and between them the whole trade.
- Black Sabbath Paranoid Vertigo, 1970
A UK number one carrying "War Pigs", "Iron Man" and the title track, and the plainest proof that a riff can bear the whole weight of a song.
- Rainbow Rising Oyster, 1976
Ritchie Blackmore's guitar and Ronnie James Dio's voice hauling "Stargazer" through more than eight minutes of myth and orchestra that power metal has been rebuilding ever since.
- Judas Priest British Steel CBS, 1980
Short songs, "Breaking the Law" and "Living After Midnight" among them, the style stripped to the chassis and driven to number four in the UK.
- Motörhead Ace of Spades Bronze, 1980
The biggest album by the trio that refused the word metal, and the lesson in what speed and volume do when nobody stops to tidy them.
- Iron Maiden The Number of the Beast EMI, 1982
Bruce Dickinson's first album with the band, their first UK number one, and "Run to the Hills" charging downhill on the gallop.
- Accept Restless and Wild Brain, 1982
Opened by "Fast as a Shark" and its double kick drums, months before either Metallica or Slayer had a debut album in the shops.
- Mercyful Fate Melissa Roadrunner, 1983
Riffs straight out of the British wave, King Diamond's falsetto telling occult stories over them, and a record often filed with the first wave of black metal.
- Manilla Road Crystal Logic Roadster, 1983
Every song written by Mark Shelton and cut in Kansas, the album on which the band threw the space rock overboard and committed to epic heavy metal.
