One thousand copies. A plain white sleeve with no title on the front and no track listing on the back, a band member's signature scrawled across it in pen, and a price of £3.50 at the gig or by post. Recorded in seven days at the Old Smithy studio in Worcester in March 1980 and released on 3 October that year by Happy Face, a label owned by the producer Muff Murfin, the record left the pressing plant looking like a test disc nobody had bothered to label. The quartet from the Black Country that sent its debut into the world in that condition was Diamond Head, and its manager, Reg Fellows, owned the cardboard factory that turned out the blank jackets for next to nothing.
Collectors have since gutted house clearances, emptied lofts down to the joists and stripped whole racks of charity shop records bare hunting for those white sleeves, because heavy metal vinyl of that kind carries something no reissue can manufacture, which is proof that it was there at the start. A second run of a thousand followed, this time with the songs listed. It is the first thousand the faithful want.
Buying one is a matter of evidence, and the evidence is read the way a bank clerk of 1970 read a cheque. He laid it on the counter beside the specimen signature card kept in the drawer since the account was opened, followed every loop and every crossed letter with the tip of a pencil, and knew that one stroke out of place turned a sum of money into waste paper and turned him into the man who had paid it out. The pen marks on a white Diamond Head sleeve get exactly that scrutiny. So does everything else on the record.
What makes heavy metal vinyl worth chasing
Three things decide the price: which pressing, what condition, and what came with it. Pressing means the first run in the country of origin, cut from the original lacquers before anyone remastered, remixed or trimmed a second off the running time. Condition is graded on the scale the American collectors' magazine Goldmine made standard, from Mint through Near Mint and Very Good Plus down to Poor, with the sleeve graded apart from the disc. What came with it means the poster, the insert, the lyric sheet and the sticker on the shrink wrap. A copy missing its poster is a different record.
The major labels made collectables without meaning to. The Philips imprint that signed a Birmingham quartet in 1969 and pressed its first records onto a black and white spiral label that turns hypnotically on the platter was Vertigo, and a first British pressing of Black Sabbath, catalogue number VO 6, released on 13 February 1970, is the cornerstone of the whole hobby. Its label carries a large Vertigo swirl above the spindle hole and the words A Philips Record Product beneath it, and every swirl copy misprints Ozzy Osbourne's name as Ossie Osborne, its pedigree read off the label before anyone looks at the disc. Later runs lost the swirl. The swirl is what collectors pay for.
The dead wax does the talking
Between the last groove and the label runs a band of smooth vinyl the trade calls the dead wax, and into it the cutting engineer scratched a catalogue number, a side letter and a stamper code before the lacquer ever went to the plating room. It works like the maker's label a bespoke tailor sews inside the breast pocket of a coat, a strip of woven silk nobody sees in the street, carrying the customer's name, the date of the order and the cutter's number. It is the only part of the garment a careful buyer checks before he pays, because the cloth can be copied by anyone and the label cannot.
Low numbers matter. A matrix ending in A1 and B1 marks the first lacquers cut for each side, and a hand etching in the run-out can date a copy to the month it was pressed. The mastering engineer whose jokes turned up in the run-outs of hundreds of British records in the seventies and eighties went by the name George Peckham, and he scratched the words A Porky Prime Cut into the wax of the discs he mastered, among them records by Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. A matrix number is attested fact where a seller's description is only a claim. Nobody reads the run-out for pleasure. Everybody reads it before paying.
The cloth can be copied by anyone and the label cannot.
Private pressings from bands nobody had signed
The deepest shelf of all was left by the American underground, where between 1980 and 1981 a handful of bands too strange, too slow or too far from Los Angeles for any label simply paid a pressing plant themselves and sold the results at their own shows. The Wichita trio that put out Invasion in 1980 on Roadster, a label of its own, answered to Manilla Road, and its echoing, unfinished debut, pressed in a run of 2,000 copies, sold mostly at gigs across Kansas before the band found the epic sound it is remembered for.
Formed in Ventura, California, in late 1971 and turned away by label after label for the best part of a decade, the quartet that finally financed its own debut and issued it in 1981 on a label it had set up for the purpose, Liquid Flames, turned out to be Cirith Ungol. The cover of Frost and Fire crops Michael Whelan's 1977 painting Stormbringer, painted for a Michael Moorcock paperback and showing Elric of Melniboné with the black sword raised. The band paid the studio and manufacturing costs of the first 3,000 copies itself. The Liquid Flames copies are the ones people hunt.
The title track opens the album on a riff that marches rather than runs, with Tim Baker's voice pitched as a high, strangled cry that split listeners in 1981 and splits them still. Nothing on it was built to please a radio programmer. That is the value, and it is why a record once sold at the door for a few dollars is now among the scarcest American heavy metal vinyl of the decade. The painted jacket on records like this one, judged before the disc is even out of it, has a history of its own, told in the chapter it belongs to.
Los Angeles produced the case that crossed into the mainstream catalogue. The quartet that pressed 900 copies of its first album on 10 November 1981 on Leathür Records, a label invented for the occasion, with a running order and a mix that Elektra replaced when it took the band on, was Mötley Crüe. Roy Thomas Baker remixed the record for Elektra's 1982 pressing, which dropped "Stick to Your Guns" and the first verse of the title track, both still carried on the original Leathür Too Fast for Love. The major label sold millions. The kitchen table pressing sold the story.
| Record | Year | Label | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath | 1970 | Vertigo (UK) | Swirl label, catalogue VO 6 |
| Iron Maiden, The Soundhouse Tapes | 1979 | Rock Hard | 5,000 copies, sold by post |
| Def Leppard, The Def Leppard E.P. | 1979 | Bludgeon Riffola | First run of a thousand |
| Diamond Head, Lightning to the Nations | 1980 | Happy Face | White sleeve, signature, no track listing |
| Manilla Road, Invasion | 1980 | Roadster | Original private pressing |
| Cirith Ungol, Frost and Fire | 1981 | Liquid Flames | Self-released first edition |
| Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love | 1981 | Leathür | Original mix, "Stick to Your Guns" |
Weight, reissues and the long wait
Reissues of the revival years are sold on 180 gram vinyl, the weight printed on the sticker like the carat figure on a jeweller's certificate, and the buyer is invited to weigh the new disc across a brass balance against the thin, flexible original and believe the heavier pan wins. The balance measures everything except the thing that matters, which is how far from the master tape each disc was cut. Weight is not sound. It is only weight.
Lightning to the Nations shows the whole problem in one record. Metal Blade's first compact disc of it in 1992 used a remix made in 1986, and for years anyone who wanted the album as it sounded in 1980 needed a white sleeve, until the deluxe edition of 2011 was remastered from the original quarter inch masters. Those tapes sat unreturned for years at Woolfe Records until Metallica's Lars Ulrich sent someone from the band's German label to collect them, and they came home to guitarist Brian Tatler around 1990, Tatler has said. The reissue finally caught the first press on sound. It will never catch it on ink.
The song that made the white sleeve worth chasing far outside the Black Country is "The Prince", a riff Brian Tatler wrote to be played faster than seemed sensible in 1980. The Californian band that recorded it as a B-side in 1988, four years after cutting "Am I Evil?", was Metallica, and every young guitarist who heard those covers went looking for the originals. Most found a cassette copy. A few found the white sleeve, and the lineage of the riff ran straight back to a cardboard factory in the Midlands.
Which records deserve the shelf space in the first place, pressing aside, is settled in the earlier chapter, sixteen albums argued one by one.
The lettering stamped across all those jackets, the gothic capitals and the umlauts that meant nothing in English, comes out of one family of type, and the story of the heavy metal font starts five centuries before the first riff. A first pressing is not a better record. It is the same record, pressed the month its master tape was cut.
