Late in 1983 a record company paid for a chair, a prosthetics crew and a full day of studio time so that one singer could be turned into a wolf, and the four minutes of film that came out of that room went into rotation on a cable channel barely two years old. The man under the glued-down hair and the fitted teeth was Ozzy Osbourne. The song was Bark at the Moon, and nobody had built one quite like that before.
Two notes off a shepherd's whistle carry a mile across open hillside and turn four hundred animals through one gate, and not an animal among them has been told anything: the signal is short, it is pitched to cut through wind, and it never alters its shape from one hill to the next. The chorus of an eighties heavy metal song is cut to that same length for that same reason. It has to move a field of eight thousand people who cannot hear the words.
So the decade sanded the edges off the intro until it announced itself inside eight bars, stripped the jam out of the middle and handed the guitar solo a fixed slot with a fence around it. The record on the shelf mattered less every year and the loose song mattered more, because the loose song was what travelled: onto a seven inch, onto a cable channel, into the first four minutes of a set in a hall where nobody yet knew the band. 80's heavy metal songs are written for that stranger in row forty.
Jake E. Lee's riff on the title track climbs and falls inside one figure a beginner can learn in an afternoon, which is exactly its purpose, and the chorus lands on the two words of the title so that a crowd hearing it a second time already has its part. The pressing plants ran it out under two flags at once, CBS Associated in America and Epic in Britain, the same growling riff wearing a different label on each side of the ocean. That is a song engineered backwards from the last row. Everything that follows in the decade works the same way.
The fanfare, and the first eight bars
Records had been opening quietly for a decade. The Birmingham five who put an instrumental in front of the first real song, let it gather for a minute and a half and then dropped the tempo on nobody at all were Judas Priest, and the pairing of "The Hellion" with "Electric Eye" on Screaming for Vengeance in July 1982 taught the whole style what a fanfare is for. The second track never has to introduce itself. It arrives already at speed.
The four Americans in loincloths and studded leather who wrote their entire creed into the first thirty seconds of a song were Manowar, and "Blood of My Enemies", the opening track of Hail to England in 1984, spends nothing whatever on preamble: a war drum, a shout, and a riff already halfway up the hill. Nothing is held back for later. A band that opens with its best line has understood the decade better than a band saving one.
A saddler stitching a strap drives two needles through the same awl hole from opposite sides and pulls the threads against each other, so that a knife through one of them leaves the seam standing. The songs that lasted are stitched that way, riff and chorus running opposite directions through one hole, which is why they still hold when a covers band plays them badly in a pub on a wet Tuesday. Take a part out and nothing sags.
80's heavy metal songs written to be answered
The crowd had become an instrument and bands started writing parts for it. The Düsseldorf band fronted by a singer who was in her early twenties when the record was cut, and who has outlasted every man who played on it, was Warlock, and "All We Are", from Triumph and Agony in 1987, is four minutes built around a chorus of four words that a hall can hold after one pass. Doro Pesch has closed with it ever since. It works in any language.
A band that opens with its best line has understood the decade better than a band saving one.
Look at what those choruses refuse to do. They do not modulate, they do not syncopate and they rarely stray more than a fourth from where they started, because a chorus that needs a rehearsal is a chorus an arena will mumble, and by 1985 the arena was where both the money and the argument sat. Simplicity of that kind is not laziness. It is engineering, and it is far harder than it looks from a bedroom.
Speed, and the scream that rode on top of it
Underneath the anthems the tempo kept climbing. The Washington state band whose first album was cut for a small label on the strength of a demo the west coast had already copied to death was Metal Church, and "Beyond the Black" opens that 1984 debut on a double kick pattern and a guitar figure thrash took up wholesale inside two years. The singer arrives on top of it. He does not enter so much as break through.
That scream is the decade's other invention, and it is not the seventies falsetto. Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio sang high and sang clean; the younger men went up there and roughened the note on purpose, dragging it across the top of the mix so that the last salvo of a chorus would cut through two guitars, a bass and a drummer hitting harder than any seventies engineer would have permitted. What thrash then did was strip that voice of its melody altogether, which belongs to that part of the history rather than to the eighties.
| Year | Song | Band | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | "The Hellion" / "Electric Eye" | Judas Priest | An instrumental herald into a song already at speed |
| 1983 | "Bark at the Moon" | Ozzy Osbourne | The riff written to be watched as well as heard |
| 1983 | "Power and the Glory" | Saxon | The title track used as a statement of intent |
| 1984 | "Blood of My Enemies" | Manowar | The oath, sworn inside the first thirty seconds |
| 1984 | "Beyond the Black" | Metal Church | Double kick under a roughened scream |
| 1985 | "Crazy Nights" | Loudness | A chorus built to cross an ocean and a language |
| 1987 | "All We Are" | Warlock | Four words a hall learns in one pass |
| 1988 | "Welcome Home" | King Diamond | A ghost story told inside a single song |
The ones that told a story instead
Not everybody wanted a chorus a field could shout. The Danish singer in white and black face paint who narrated a grandmother, an axe and a wheelchair over a music box figure was King Diamond, and "Welcome Home", the opening track of Them on Roadrunner in 1988, does in five and a half minutes what most bands of the decade needed a whole side to attempt. Every voice in it is his. The video went out on late night television with the story left in.
Songs of that kind muster their effects slowly and never once sound like a single, which is why the decade kept them at the front of albums rather than on the radio, and why they have aged better than most of what got daytime play. A story told at length outlives the fashion that carried it. Most choruses of 1987 do not.
The same appetite came round every October, and the seasonal end of it, the ghosts, the graveyards and the records that get played once a year, has a shelf of its own in Halloween heavy metal songs. King Diamond is the hinge between the two. He built a career standing on it.
What the decade actually left
By common consent the eighties are heavy metal's loudest decade, and the reason is not that the bands were better than the seventies bands, because several of them plainly were not. It is that the song stopped being a track on a side and became a portable object four minutes long, a hook at the front, a fence round the solo and a chorus pitched for a crowd, and forty years of bands have built to that drawing since.
The pattern has a cost and it is worth naming. A form that good at travelling punishes whatever will not fit it, and a great deal of slow, strange and awkward music was left off records in those years for no better reason than that it could not be cut to four minutes with a shoutable middle. The best 80's heavy metal songs gave the style a standard. They also decided what nobody would hear.
