The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Nobody sat down to invent thrash metal. There was no meeting, no manifesto, no wise man in a leather jacket announcing that heavy metal was about to become faster, uglier and more honest. What there was, between roughly 1979 and 1982, was a set of parts lying around in England and a handful of teenagers, most of them a very long way from England, who noticed that the parts fitted together.
The parts have names. A speed that nobody had played before, and a man who played it on a Rickenbacker bass with the treble turned all the way up. A few hundred bands from the industrial north and the Midlands who wrote riffs faster than they could afford to record them. Three lads from Newcastle who could not play very well, knew it, and turned the fact into a religion. A drumbeat from the punk squats that sounded like a machine falling down the stairs. And, tying it all together, the post office: a network of kids who copied cassettes for each other, wrote letters in biro, and made sure that a demo recorded in a garage in Tyneside would be heard in a bedroom in Los Angeles within a month.
Everything the Bay Area did in 1983 was done with those parts. This chapter, the first of the whole saga, is about where they came from.
Lemmy sets the speed
Start with the speed, because the speed came first. In 1979 Motörhead released Overkill and Bomber, two albums in one year, and the title track of the first one opened with a double-bass drum pattern that Phil Taylor is supposed to have got by trying to play like a machine. Nobody in a rock band had put that many kick drums in a bar before and kept it up for five minutes. The song had two false endings. Motörhead did not fade out because fading out is what you do when you are tired.
The band's own position on the matter was famously that they were not heavy metal at all, that they were a rock and roll band, and Lemmy would repeat it in interviews until the end of his life. It made no difference. The audience that heard Overkill, Ace of Spades in 1980 and the live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith in 1981, which went to number one in Britain in its first week, was an audience of metal kids and punks in the same room, which in 1979 was not an easy room to fill. Motörhead were the one band both tribes could agree on. Denim and studs, bullet belts, the bass played as a rhythm guitar, the voice that sounded like a man gargling a gearbox: this was the template, and the template was speed without apology.
Lemmy's bass sound deserves its own sentence. He ran a Rickenbacker through Marshall stacks with the mids and the treble up and the bass down, so that what came out was not a bass line but a second, lower rhythm guitar. Every thrash band that ever mixed the bass into the guitars until you could not tell where one stopped and the other started was doing what Motörhead did by accident and Cliff Burton did on purpose.
Motörhead were the one band both tribes could agree on. The template was speed without apology.
Britain's second wave: fast, cheap and out of control
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal is a phrase coined by a Sounds editor, Alan Lewis, and put into print by the journalist Geoff Barton in May 1979, and like most phrases invented by journalists it covered too much. It was used for Iron Maiden and Saxon, who went on to fill arenas, and for several hundred bands who released one single on their own label, played the Bandwagon in Kingsbury and the Mayfair in Newcastle, and vanished. The thing to understand about the NWOBHM is that it was not a sound. It was a circumstance: punk had shown a generation of working-class kids that you could press your own record for the price of a second-hand car, and the kids who did it in 1979 and 1980 happened to have grown up on Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Judas Priest rather than on the Stooges.
So what they made was heavy metal with a punk budget and a punk attitude, and the practical consequence of a punk budget is speed. You cannot afford twelve-minute epics when you have two hours in a studio. You write short, you play fast, and you get it in one take. Judas Priest, who were older and had been at this since the early seventies, heard what was happening and tightened up: British Steel, in 1980, opens with "Rapid Fire", which is about as close as a band from the previous generation got to writing a thrash song before thrash existed.
The younger bands went further because they had nothing to lose. Raven, from Newcastle, called what they did "athletic rock" and played it like a fight. Tank, formed by Algy Ward after he left The Damned, released Filth Hounds of Hades in 1982, a record that sounds like Motörhead's little brother had stolen the van. Angel Witch wrote the riff that half of the early San Francisco bands would spend years trying to write. Jaguar and Blitzkrieg, from Bristol and Leicester respectively, wrote songs so fast and so tight that when Metallica covered "Blitzkrieg" three years later they barely had to change anything. Tygers of Pan Tang made a debut, Wild Cat, that sounds today like a demo tape for a genre that had not been named. None of these bands was a thrash band. All of them were quarries.
And then there was Diamond Head, from Stourbridge, in the Black Country, whose story is the story of the whole movement in miniature. In 1980 they pressed a thousand copies of an album with a plain white sleeve, no title and no band name on it, and sold it by mail order and at gigs. It is known now as Lightning to the Nations. It contains "Am I Evil?", "Helpless", "The Prince" and "Sucking My Love", four songs that a Danish teenager in California would later learn note for note, and it contains, in "Am I Evil?", the single most influential heavy metal riff written between Sabbath's "Symptom of the Universe" and the first Metallica album. Diamond Head themselves never got the money or the management to cash any of this in. The people who cashed it in were their fans.
Venom: the noise that became a doctrine
If the NWOBHM was a quarry, Venom were a landslide. Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon, from Newcastle, released Welcome to Hell in December 1981 on Neat Records, the label that also had Raven and Blitzkrieg, and the record sounded like it had been made in a bin. This was partly true: the album was assembled from what were meant to be demo sessions, and nobody bothered to make it sound better because nobody thought it would matter.
It mattered more than anything else released that year. Venom took the speed of Motörhead, the budget of the NWOBHM and a stage Satanism that owed more to Black Sabbath's album covers and Alice Cooper's theatre than to anything in the Bible, and pushed all three past the point where a sensible person would have stopped. Across the water in Denmark, Mercyful Fate were forming at the same moment and would make the same devil sing in tune two years later. The lyrics were about the devil in a way that was cartoonish and completely serious at the same time. The songs were faster than anyone else's and played worse than anyone else's, and the combination turned out to be the point: Venom were the proof that you did not need to be able to play like Priest to be heavier than Priest. You needed conviction and a lot of gain.
Their second album, in 1982, was called Black Metal, and it gave a name to a genre that did not exist yet and would not, properly, for another ten years. But the more immediate effect was on the kids in California, Germany and Brazil who heard Welcome to Hell in 1982 and understood, in a way the band probably did not, that this was permission. Venom were not the first thrash band. They were the first band to make thrash sound inevitable.
Anyone looking for evidence should consider the tribute paid to them by the two bands who would define the American version of this music. Metallica's first European dates, in February 1984, were as Venom's support on the Seven Dates of Hell tour, and a year later Slayer went out across America under Venom on the Combat Tour, and both behaved, by every account, like people meeting their god. Or consider that in 1984 a handful of teenagers in Belo Horizonte, translating the lyrics of Motörhead's "Dancing on Your Grave" with a dictionary, found the Portuguese word for grave and called their band Sepultura.
The punks bring the beat
Metal supplied the riffs and the speed. The rhythm underneath thrash, the thing that makes it feel different from fast heavy metal, came from somewhere else. In 1982 Discharge, from Stoke-on-Trent, released Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, an album of one-minute songs built on a drum pattern that would later be named after them: the D-beat, a lopsided gallop in which the kick and snare seem to be racing each other and the crash cymbal is hit on every beat until it gives up. Combine that beat with a downpicked metal riff and you have the thrash rhythm exactly. There is no other ingredient.
Discharge were not alone. GBH, from Birmingham, and The Exploited, from Edinburgh, were playing hardcore punk at speeds that the metal bands would not reach for another year, and the American hardcore scene that grew up at the same time, Black Flag in Los Angeles, the Misfits in New Jersey, Bad Brains in Washington, gave the future thrash bands a second lesson: you could tour the country in a van, sleep on floors, sell records out of the boot and build an audience without a single radio play. In 1982 that was not obvious to a metal band. By 1985 it was the only way a thrash band worked.
It is worth saying, because it is often forgotten, that the two camps hated each other. Punks thought metal fans were long-haired dinosaurs with too many notes; metal fans thought punks could not play and dressed like they had lost a fight with a stapler. The first generation of thrash musicians were the ones who went to both kinds of show and kept quiet about it. The word "crossover" was invented later to describe what they were doing. At the time it was simply the habit of a certain kind of teenager who did not see why he had to choose.
Metal supplied the riffs and the speed. The rhythm underneath thrash came from a squat in Stoke-on-Trent.
Europe catches up early
Britain had no monopoly. In Germany, Accept, who had been a fairly ordinary hard rock band through the seventies, recorded "Fast as a Shark" for their 1982 album Restless and Wild: a song that opens with a scratchy old German folk record and then goes into a double-bass gallop that is, by any reasonable definition, the first thrash metal song released by a band with a proper record deal. Accept did not follow it up, which is why they are a footnote in this history and not a chapter. But the kids in the Ruhr who heard it, the ones who were already forming Kreator and Sodom that same year, and the three down on the Swiss border who would become Destruction, did not forget.
In Canada, Anvil released Metal on Metal in 1982 and, a year later, Forged in Fire, records that were faster and heavier than almost anything coming out of the United States at the time and that every early American thrash musician seems to have owned. Exciter, from Ottawa, recorded a demo in 1982 that already had most of the genre in it and would become Heavy Metal Maniac the following year. Canada's contribution to thrash is a chapter of its own later in this history, but the timeline matters: by the end of 1982, the ingredients were available on three continents, and nobody had yet mixed them properly.
The post office builds a scene
Which brings us to the tape traders, who are the real subject of this chapter and the reason any of it left Britain.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
In 1980 a record shop in a British provincial town would have stocked Maiden and Saxon and possibly the odd Neat single if the owner was keen. It would not have stocked Jaguar's first demo. A record shop in Los Angeles would not have stocked Diamond Head at all. So the music travelled the only way it could: someone bought the record, taped it, and posted the tape to someone else, with a letter, and that person taped it again. The fanzines, photocopied and stapled and sold by post for the price of a stamp, printed the addresses. I ran one of these from a bedroom in the Midlands and can confirm that the back page, the one with the pen-pal listings, was the only page anyone read.
Two of the people who read those pages changed everything. In San Francisco a young man named Ron Quintana ran a fanzine called Metal Mania and a radio show, and he was one of the main channels through which the Neat Records catalogue reached Northern California. In Los Angeles, Brian Slagel ran a fanzine called The New Heavy Metal Revue and worked in a record shop that imported from Britain, and in 1982 he decided to put out a compilation of unsigned local bands. He called it Metal Massacre, and it was the first release on a label he named Metal Blade, which would go on to sign Slayer, Metal Church and a good third of the genre.
The Danish teenager mentioned earlier was Lars Ulrich, a tennis prodigy who had moved to Los Angeles with his family, discovered Diamond Head through the British music press and a mail-order copy of the white-label album, and in the summer of 1981 flew to England to see them play at the Woolwich Odeon, introduced himself, and ended up spending several weeks sleeping on Brian Tatler's floor in Stourbridge and at singer Sean Harris's house. He came back to California with a suitcase of records, an accent nobody could place and a complete understanding of what the NWOBHM was, which is to say a thing you could do yourself. In October 1981 an advert he had placed in The Recycler was answered by a guitarist called James Hetfield. Slagel gave the new band a slot on Metal Massacre before they had played a show, and their song, "Hit the Lights", recorded so cheaply that the vinyl misspelled the band's name, was released in June 1982. A month later, on 6 July 1982, they recorded a seven-song demo in a small studio in Tustin and called it No Life 'til Leather.
That demo went into the post. Quintana reportedly played it. The tape traders copied it. By the autumn of 1982 Metallica were already better received in San Francisco than at home in Los Angeles, and their bass player, a long-haired kid from the East Bay called Cliff Burton, would only join if the band moved north. Across the bay, in Richmond, a band called Exodus had been playing since 1979 with a guitarist named Kirk Hammett, and were faster than anyone. In New York, a guitarist named Scott Ian had just put together a band called Anthrax, and across the river in New Jersey a band called Overkill had already borrowed their name from Motörhead.
What was ready by the end of 1982
Look at the pile of parts at the close of 1982 and it is all there. The speed and the bass sound, from Motörhead. The riffs and the do-it-yourself economics, from the NWOBHM, and one riff in particular, from Stourbridge. The nerve, from Venom. The drumbeat and the touring model, from hardcore. The proof that a signed band could do it, from Accept and Anvil. And the distribution network, from a few hundred kids with cassette decks and stamps, two of whom happened to start a fanzine and a record label at exactly the right moment in exactly the right city.
| The part | Where it came from | The record | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| The speed and the bass sound | Motörhead, London | Overkill, Bomber, Ace of Spades | 1979–1980 |
| The riffs and the do-it-yourself economics | NWOBHM, the north and the Midlands | Lightning to the Nations, Wild Cat, Filth Hounds of Hades | 1980–1982 |
| The nerve | Venom, Newcastle | Welcome to Hell, Black Metal | 1981–1982 |
| The beat and the touring model | Hardcore punk, Stoke and the US | Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing | 1982 |
| Proof a signed band could do it | Accept (Germany), Anvil (Canada) | Restless and Wild, Metal on Metal | 1982 |
| The distribution | Tape traders, fanzines, Metal Blade | Metal Massacre, No Life 'til Leather | 1982 |
What did not exist yet was the thing itself. No album released by the end of 1982 is a thrash album; the closest candidates, Welcome to Hell, Filth Hounds of Hades, Metal on Metal, Restless and Wild, are all something else with thrash showing through the cracks. The genre would be born in a rehearsal room in El Cerrito, California, in the first months of 1983, when four people who had absorbed every one of these parts through the post finally sat in the same room and played them at once.
That is El Cerrito and Ruthie's Inn. This one ends with a demo tape in a Jiffy bag, addressed in ballpoint, on its way to San Francisco.
