The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper
The greatest heavy metal songs were never chosen by critics. The crowd took them. A festival field that knows a chorus behaves like a colony of Japanese honeybees closing on a hornet that has blundered into the hive, hundreds of bodies packing into a ball round the intruder and shivering their flight muscles until the heat at the centre climbs past anything the hornet can survive, so that the song on the stage is not so much sung back as smothered, wrapped and cooked by forty thousand throats. No band plays its way out of that ball.
Pressed by Vertigo in September 1970 to open a second album, rebuilt from an older live piece the band had called "Walpurgis" and turned against the politicians who start wars and the young men sent to fight them, the oldest song still trapped inside that ball is "War Pigs", and the Aston quartet that cut it in a matter of days was Black Sabbath. It has not been let go since.
Two tests decide the order, and neither is new. A song has to do something no heavy metal song had done before it, and it has to survive the crowd for decades. One great riff on an uneven record still qualifies, which is why several of the songs that follow sit on records that never came near the albums list. Twelve pass. Hundreds do not.
The greatest heavy metal songs, from the top down
| Rank | Song | Band | Year | What it did first |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Hallowed Be Thy Name" | Iron Maiden | 1982 | The whole genre inside one track |
| 2 | "War Pigs" | Black Sabbath | 1970 | A protest song played as a march |
| 3 | "The Number of the Beast" | Iron Maiden | 1982 | Scripture read over a stadium riff |
| 4 | "Stargazer" | Rainbow | 1976 | Orchestra, myth and eight minutes |
| 5 | "Ace of Spades" | Motörhead | 1980 | Speed with nothing tidied away |
| 6 | "Freewheel Burning" | Judas Priest | 1984 | Verses sung at the rate of the drums |
| 7 | "Iron Man" | Black Sabbath | 1970 | A riff crowds sing without words |
| 8 | "The Last in Line" | Dio | 1984 | The quiet opening that turns into a charge |
| 9 | "Wheels of Steel" | Saxon | 1980 | A chorus written for a field |
| 10 | "Fast as a Shark" | Accept | 1982 | The starting pistol of speed metal |
| 11 | "Mr. Crowley" | Ozzy Osbourne | 1980 | A classical guitar solo inside a single |
| 12 | "Evil" | Mercyful Fate | 1983 | A horror story told in verses |
The Iron Maiden closer at the top has had its full hearing and keeps its seat. Every place under it is open to argument, and the arguments are about what each song did, never about who sold more.
Sermons, orchestras and a scream
What puts "War Pigs" second is the space inside it. Ozzy Osbourne sings a line, the band strikes a single chord and stops dead, and Bill Ward, raised on the big band drummers he heard as a small boy, fills the silence with rolls and cymbal work, so that the verses land like a sentence read out in court, one clause at a time. Then Tony Iommi's riff comes back and flattens the courtroom. Every protest song in the genre since has borrowed that pause.
Released as a single on 26 April 1982, a month after the album that carries its name, and opened by the actor Barry Clayton reading from the Book of Revelation in a voice built for a haunted house, the song that taught a stadium to recite scripture is "The Number of the Beast". It reached number 18 in Britain. Steve Harris wrote it, by his own account, after a nightmare that followed a late viewing of Damien: Omen II, and the scream Bruce Dickinson lets loose after the spoken verse tears the roof off the whole introduction.
The Blackmore band that booked an orchestra for a song about a wizard and his slaves was Rainbow, and "Stargazer", on Rising in 1976, runs past eight minutes on Cozy Powell's drums, Ritchie Blackmore's Eastern scale and Ronnie James Dio's voice, with players from the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra sounding the fanfare for the final climb up the tower. Rainer Pietsch conducted them. Epic heavy metal has been rebuilding it ever since. Nobody has built it better.
The song on the stage is not so much sung back as smothered, wrapped and cooked by forty thousand throats.
Speed, served raw
Recorded with Vic Maile at Jackson's Studios in Rickmansworth, released by Bronze in October 1980 and carried to number fifteen in Britain, the single a whole generation of thrash players learned before they learned to tune was "Ace of Spades", and the trio that made it handled the song the way a raku potter handles a pot, and the name over the amps was Motörhead. The piece is dragged out of the kiln with long tongs while it still glows orange, dropped into a bin of sawdust that bursts into flame, and shut in until the glaze crazes into a thousand cracks. Nobody pretends the cracks are a mistake.
Judas Priest went the other way, toward precision. The opener of Defenders of the Faith, released in January 1984 and built on a barrage of double kick drums, is "Freewheel Burning", and on it Rob Halford packs his verses tighter than any singer in the genre had dared. The words come off him the way honey comes out of a comb in a spinning extractor, whirled in a steel drum until the force rips the honey from every cell and slings it against the walls. Accept's "Fast as a Shark" had opened the road to speed metal two years earlier. Priest paved it.
Choruses built for a field
A chorus is only great once people who have never met the band are shouting it. The Yorkshire five whose second album, Wheels of Steel, reached number five in Britain in the spring of 1980 went by the name Saxon, and its title track is a chorus that halls still shout back at Biff Byford more than four decades later. No song of the British wave was built more plainly for the open air.
The singer who had left Black Sabbath in 1982 and put his own name on the band that followed released "The Last in Line" as a single in June 1984, and the band was Dio, the man Ronnie James Dio. The album of the same name followed in July. It opens on Vivian Campbell's quiet guitar and a voice held low, then the rhythm section crashes through the door of the song and the second half runs at full stride. Few songs make the waiting pay so well. The faithful wait for it every time.
Two more close the twelve. "Mr. Crowley", on Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Ozz in 1980, put a pair of Randy Rhoads solos built on classical scales into a song millions of people who never touched a guitar know by heart. "Evil", from Mercyful Fate's Melissa in 1983, told a horror story in verses and let King Diamond's falsetto play every character in it. Both still fill rooms.
What the crowd keeps
The near misses hurt. "Breaking the Law" is the better single and the thinner song, over before it has said more than its title. "The Trooper" gallops as hard as anything on the twelve and asks the crowd for less than "The Number of the Beast" does. "Holy Diver" lost its place to a later Dio song that builds higher, and "Crazy Train" to the Ozzy song with the stronger solos. The sharpest omission of all is Rainbow's "Kill the King", left out only because "Stargazer" already carries the band. Every one of them would head another shelf.
Not every song that lasts was written for war, scripture or speed. The slower ones, written for someone rather than against something, are gathered in the heavy metal love songs, and several of them hold a room just as hard. The twelve were built to be shouted, and on any honest reading the shouting is the proof.
Critics rank records. Crowds rank songs. The crowd has been right for fifty years.
