The four names at the top of every list of british heavy metal bands are the right four, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead and Iron Maiden, and they are the least interesting thing on it. The music they are remembered for was not made by four bands. It was made by forty, most of whom never sold a record outside a county.
On a film the star gets the close-up and the name above the title, and much of what the audience believes it heard him do was made afterwards in a small room by a Foley artist. A stick of celery is snapped in two for a breaking finger, a cabbage is punched for a blow to the jaw, and a pair of boots is marched across a tray of gravel for a man leaving town. Nobody in the cinema hears the celery. Everybody hears the bone.
British heavy metal was made the same way, and most of the hands in the small room never had their names on a T shirt. The famous four and their great neighbours have their verdicts elsewhere, among the bands that matter. The work in the small room went unthanked, and every band in it did one thing to the sound that nobody else did.
Before anyone called it metal
The London quintet that cut its whole debut in a single eleven hour session at Spot Studios in Mayfair late in 1970 was Leaf Hound. Peter French sang and Mick Halls played lead, and Growers of Mushroom, released by Decca in 1971, took the blues riff of the day and ground the swing off it until the riff stood on its own, which is the first sound on the track, the one everything else is laid over. Almost nobody bought it.
A year earlier and a county to the north, the Northampton four who put an electric violin through the same distortion as the guitar and let the two instruments fight for the top of the mix called themselves High Tide. Sea Shanties, released by Liberty in October 1969, has Tony Hill's guitar and Simon House's violin tearing at each other, and the density of it, the whole band loud at once, is something British metal kept.
Vincent Crane played his Hammond in Atomic Rooster the way a guitarist plays a riff, low, distorted and repeated, and Death Walks Behind You, released by B&C in September 1970 and taken to number 12 on the album chart in 1971, is the proof that a British band could make a keyboard sound as heavy as any guitar in the room.
The second guitar arrived with Wishbone Ash, whose harmony leads have their own history, and the thing to hear on "The King Will Come", from Argus, released by MCA in April 1972, is what the harmony was carrying. Kings, prophets and a battle still to come, sung over two guitars moving in parallel: the whole subject matter of the next decade's British metal, a decade early and at half the volume. Iron Maiden learned the grammar and the vocabulary from the same record.
British heavy metal bands that ran ahead of the wave
The fastest bands of the lot were the ones the charts never touched. The Scottish band whose first record, "Heavy Metal Mania", came out on Phoenix in 1980 with a riff that goes straight for the throat and never lets go went by the name Holocaust, and John Mortimer, who led it, said the name was meant as a nuclear bomb going off in the listener's head. It sounds like one. It sold like a secret.
"Heavy Metal Mania" is the idea in its crudest form, a single riff, a shouted title and a tempo the old guard would have called reckless, with no solo worth the name and no need for one. The song is the argument.
The London trio that took Motörhead's engine and fitted a punk's contempt for rehearsal to it went out as Tank, with Algy Ward, who had come over from the Damned, singing and playing bass, and what it did to the sound was take away the last traces of boogie that Lemmy's band still carried. Tank played rock and roll with the roll cut off. What was left was a charge.
The Bristol four whose single "Axe Crazy" appeared in 1982 and whose album Power Games followed on Neat in 1983 were Jaguar, and they ran at a pace few British bands had held for a whole side. Power Games goes out like the first leg of a relay run flat out from the gun, the baton held out ahead on every bend, a race that the Californian bands of 1983 would finish. Jaguar never saw the tape. Somebody else broke it.
The Newcastle band that Tony Dolan started with Paul Spillett at the end of the seventies and that recorded Future Warriors for Neat in 1985 was Atomkraft, and by then the speed was being handed across the water in both directions: Atomkraft took from Venom and from the new American speed, and shared stages with Slayer and Exodus. Thrash took it from there.
After the wave, the sound carried elsewhere
The Tamworth four whom Rick Rubin signed to Def American and produced on Live Fast, Die Fast in 1989 answered to the name Wolfsbane, a band whose whole contribution was nerve, a singer shouting over a hard rock band that refused to take itself seriously in a decade when every other British band had started to. Blaze Bayley carried that nerve into Iron Maiden in 1994, in place of Bruce Dickinson.
Slowness was the other export. Cathedral, formed in Coventry in 1989 around Lee Dorrian, who had left Napalm Death to play something as slow as it was possible to play, made Forest of Equilibrium for Earache in 1991, and it dragged the Sabbath riff back to a crawl that the whole doom revival of the decade set its watch by. The forebear lived down the road in Aston. Cathedral went and knocked on the door.
A band from Newcastle took the folk tunes of its own country and bolted them onto thrash. The two founders who started it in 1990, one out of Sabbat writing lyrics about the land and the other out of Satan writing riffs for it, were Martin Walkyier and Steve Ramsey, and Skyclad, whose The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth came out on Noise in 1991, is unarguably where folk metal starts.
The music they are remembered for was not made by four bands. It was made by forty.
The ones who came back, and the ones who never left
The East Midlands band that formed in 1982, lost its first album when Mausoleum Records collapsed before a note was recorded, broke up in 1987 and put out its debut twenty-nine years late is Hell. Dave Halliday, who sang and played guitar, died in 1987. Andy Sneap, whom Halliday had taught to play guitar, produced Human Remains for Nuclear Blast in 2011 and played on it, and "On Earth as It Is in Hell" turns the theatre of the early eighties up to a production budget the band never had in its first life, and the record reached number 46 in Germany.
The Lancaster quartet led by Colin Hendra that sings about faith over twin guitars cut to the pattern of 1973 is Wytch Hazel, whose III: Pentecost came out on Bad Omen in 2020. The London band that formed in 2013 and spent two albums on one science fiction story, Shadow of a Fallen Star, finished in March 2025, is Seven Sisters, the most direct heir of the wave now working.
And from Dudley, in the Black Country, comes the band that looked past the whole of metal to the English countryside for its subject: Dark Forest, whose Oak, Ash & Thorn, released by Cruz del Sur in 2020, takes its title from Kipling and its gallop from Iron Maiden, and sounds like a bluebell wood taken at the charge. On any honest reading it is the most English record British metal has made in a generation.
| Band | From | Start with | What it did to the sound |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leaf Hound | London | Growers of Mushroom (1971) | Ground the swing off the blues riff |
| High Tide | Northampton | Sea Shanties (1969) | Everything loud at once |
| Atomic Rooster | London | Death Walks Behind You (1970) | A keyboard as heavy as a guitar |
| Wishbone Ash | Torquay | Argus (1972) | Kings and battles over two guitars |
| Holocaust | Edinburgh | Heavy Metal Mania (1980) | One riff, no brakes |
| Tank | London | Filth Hounds of Hades (1982) | Motörhead with the boogie cut out |
| Jaguar | Bristol | Power Games (1983) | Speed held for a whole side |
| Atomkraft | Newcastle | Future Warriors (1985) | The handover to thrash |
| Wolfsbane | Tamworth | Live Fast, Die Fast (1989) | Nerve in a humourless decade |
| Cathedral | Coventry | Forest of Equilibrium (1991) | The Sabbath crawl, slower |
| Skyclad | Newcastle | The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth (1991) | Folk tunes on a thrash chassis |
| Hell | East Midlands | Human Remains (2011) | Eighties theatre, finally recorded |
| Wytch Hazel | Lancaster | III: Pentecost (2020) | Faith over 1973 twin leads |
| Dark Forest | Dudley | Oak, Ash & Thorn (2020) | The English countryside at a gallop |
The class of 1979 to 1983 in its own right, the Soundhouse, the seven-inch singles and the bands that reached the chart, is in the chapter above. The bands on either side of those four years, back into the late sixties and forward into this decade, were mostly the vanguard of something they never got to profit from.
What held the audience for all of them together through those years was not a record label or a radio station but a uniform, worn on the floor in front of all of them, and the story of that uniform is told in NWOBHM denim and leather.
The whole family, from Birmingham to Tokyo and São Paulo, is laid out in KaosMetal on heavy metal, where Britain is one bastion among many. It was the first. It is still the one the others measure themselves against.
