Nine records, one for every year of the decade except the most crowded, and not one American platinum disc between them. The 80s heavy metal albums the sales ledger remembers went out under the hottest lamps the industry owned, the radio playlist, MTV rotation and an arena tour paid for in advance, and they have been counted often enough. These nine grew somewhere else.
In the forcing sheds of the West Riding, rhubarb crowns are left two winters in the open field to be battered by frost, then torn out of the frozen ground, carried indoors and packed into long sheds without a single window, where the stalks shoot up so fast in the dark that the pickers, working by candlelight so the light cannot toughen them, hear the buds split and creak along the rows. What comes out is sharper than anything grown in daylight. Nobody sold it by the lorry load.
The trio that went into a studio in Rickmansworth with Vic Maile in the summer of 1980 and came out with the record that carried Bronze into the British top five was Motörhead, and Ace of Spades, issued on 8 November 1980 and taken to number four in Britain, never troubled an American chart at all. Everybody knows the title track. The album lives further in.
80s heavy metal albums the ledger left out
"Love Me Like a Reptile" and "The Chase Is Better Than the Catch" run on Lemmy's bass the way a hard break runs through the pack on a snooker table, the cue ball hitting the triangle square and every red smashed off towards a different cushion, and "(We Are) The Road Crew" gives the men who carried the gear the only tribute of the decade that sounds as tired as they were. The speed trios of 1981 learned the whole second side by heart. America learned it years later, second hand.
Turned down by Capitol as commercially unacceptable, left in contractual limbo while fans picketed the offices of the label's parent company, and finally released by Elektra on 9 February 1981, Fire Down Under is the record a major label tried to bury alive, and the New York band it tried to bury was Riot. Guy Speranza sings "Swords and Tequila" and "Outlaw" over riffs from Mark Reale that make Capitol's verdict, too heavy, read like a compliment.
A label called it unsellable, the fans called the label's bluff, and the record is still here.
The four Americans who hired Orson Welles to narrate a song and handed their bassist a whole track to put Rossini through a bass amplifier were Manowar, and Battle Hymns, released by Liberty on 7 June 1982, is a band inventing a mythology before it had a single believer to preach it to. Welles reads over "Dark Avenger" like a judge passing sentence. "William's Tale" drags the William Tell overture through four strings and leaves it in splinters. The vanguard of the epic bands of 1983 heard every note.
Pressed first in 1983 on Ebony, a small label that recorded its bands fast and cheaply in a studio of its own, then picked up by RCA and carried to number 73 on the Billboard 200 in 1984, See You in Hell is the one record of the nine the light found by accident. The English quartet behind it, filmed for a title track video on a budget that would not have paid another band's catering, was Grim Reaper. Steve Grimmett sings high and clean over a mix as thin as a pay packet. The songs outran the sound. They still do.
| Year | Album | Band | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Ace of Spades | Motörhead | Bronze |
| 1981 | Fire Down Under | Riot | Elektra |
| 1982 | Battle Hymns | Manowar | Liberty |
| 1983 | See You in Hell | Grim Reaper | Ebony |
| 1985 | Metal Heart | Accept | RCA |
| 1986 | Crimson Glory | Crimson Glory | Par |
| 1987 | Under Jolly Roger | Running Wild | Noise |
| 1988 | No Exit | Fates Warning | Metal Blade |
| 1989 | Blessing in Disguise | Metal Church | Elektra |
The gap in the table is 1984, left empty on purpose. That year so many records grew in full sun that picking one from the shade would be a trick, not a verdict.
Masks, a flag and a market that never opened
The Solingen five who went looking for American radio and never got past the reception desk were Accept. Recorded at Dierks Studios in Stommeln between October and December 1984, with Dieter Dierks producing the band himself for the first time, and released on 4 March 1985, Metal Heart stalled at number 94 on the Billboard 200, and "Midnight Mover" went out as the opening salvo that March with a video built for a channel that barely played it. "Up to the Limit" and "Screaming for a Love-Bite" hold the second tier of the record. The market stayed shut. The riffs did not care.
The Florida quintet that hid all five faces behind silver masks was Crimson Glory, and its self-titled debut, released by Par Records in 1986 and licensed to Roadrunner, sets the twin guitars of Jon Drenning and Ben Jackson under a singer who called himself Midnight. "Valhalla" and "Dragon Lady" are built on harmonies that stay locked together at tempos where most twin guitar teams begin to drift apart. The masks hid the band. They never hid the playing.
The Hamburg band that threw its devils overboard in 1987 and ran a skull and crossbones up the mast instead was Running Wild, and Under Jolly Roger, released by Noise on 1 April 1987, is where Rolf Kasparek found the costume his band would wear for the rest of its life. The title track boards the listener at speed, grappling hooks first. Two decades later a whole subgenre of pirate metal claimed it as the first ship of the fleet. The Hamburg crew never asked for the honour.
The long side, the new singers and the last Elektra record
The Connecticut band that lost its first singer after Awaken the Guardian and replaced him with a young Texan from San Antonio was Fates Warning, and No Exit, released by Metal Blade on 23 March 1988 with Ray Alder singing, entered the Billboard 200 at number 111 and stayed thirteen weeks, the band's best showing to that date. "Silent Cries" and "Anarchy Divine" went onto Headbangers Ball, the metal hour of MTV. The real weight sits on the second side.
"The Ivory Gate of Dreams" runs just under twenty-two minutes in eight parts, and it is hauled across that side the way a pulling tractor hauls a weighted sled down a dirt track, the weight box creeping forward on its rails with every metre until the load on the hitch outgrows the engine, the nose of the tractor rears off the ground and black smoke pours from the stacks over the grandstand. The song gets heavier the further it goes. Most bands would have stopped at the second part.
The quintet that swapped its singer for Mike Howe and kept its founding guitarist on as the writer of seven of its songs after he had left the touring line-up was Metal Church, Kurdt Vanderhoof writing from outside the touring band, and Blessing in Disguise, released by Elektra on 7 February 1989, climbed to number 75 on the Billboard 200 two months later. "Fake Healer" goes after a faith healer, "Badlands" takes the best part of seven and a half minutes to cross its desert, and "Anthem to the Estranged" closes the record. It sounds like nobody had warned the band about 1990.
What the nine records have in common
Line the nine up and the decade looks different. Not one of them was built for a programme director, not one waited on a video to tell buyers what it meant, and not one needed a platinum disc to earn the reissues and remasters that have kept all nine in print forty years on. The platinum names of the decade belong to a different quarrel, and where the best records of the eighties rank against fifty years of the music is settled in the section that covers it.
Several of these bands also spent their B-sides and their spare studio hours on other people's songs, from Slade singles to Joan Baez, and that traffic in borrowed material has a shelf of its own among the heavy metal cover songs. None of it sold these nine. Nothing did.
On any honest reading the exponent of the whole principle is the Elektra record that Capitol refused in 1981. A label called it unsellable, the fans called the label's bluff, and the record is still here. The ledger is not.
