Three got out. Of the several hundred new wave of British heavy metal bands that cut a demo, pressed a single or plugged in at the back of a pub between 1979 and 1983, three built careers that crossed oceans and ran for decades, perhaps a dozen more saw the inside of the British album chart, and the rest drove home with their amplifiers in the back of a borrowed van. The ratio is the history.
The roster worked like the winding cage at a colliery in its last working week, a steel box dropped down the shaft on a cable, crammed with as many men as the gate would close on, and hauled up into daylight while everyone left on the pit floor listened to the engine labouring overhead and waited for a cage that had already been cut from its rope. Nobody chose the order. The winding engine did.
How the new wave of British heavy metal bands were counted
Who stood at the front of the queue was settled by people who never played a note on those records. The disc jockey who set the first running order, from the decks of the Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse in the back room of a pub at Kingsbury Circle, was Neal Kay, whose request chart went into print in Sounds, and Metal for Muthas, the sampler EMI released in February 1980, set the second. How a headline gathered a scatter of provincial groups into one new wave of british heavy metal is a story of its own.
The roll call that collectors still recite was drawn up eleven years after the fact. The man who compiled it, with Geoff Barton of Sounds beside him, was the Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and the double CD New Wave of British Heavy Metal '79 Revisited, issued by Caroline Records in 1990, hauled a generation of forgotten singles out of the loft and fixed the canon for the faithful who had never owned the originals. A roster drawn up by a disc jockey, a journalist and a Danish drummer. It held.
Three who made it out
The first band out, signed by EMI in December 1979 while most of the roster was still posting cassettes, was Iron Maiden, and between the self-titled debut of April 1980, number four in Britain, and The Number of the Beast at number one two years later, it climbed faster than any band of the wave and never came back down. Its exit is the one every other band measured itself against.
The Sheffield quintet that paid for its own first EP in January 1979, on a label it named Bludgeon Riffola, took the other road out, west across the Atlantic. Def Leppard made Pyromania with the producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange in 1983, took it to number two on the Billboard 200, and followed it in 1987 with Hysteria, which topped the British album chart the week it came out and then, the best part of a year later, did the same on the Billboard 200. The wave's own paper had called them sellouts in 1980. The sales figures answered.
The Barnsley five who had started out under the name Son of a Bitch answered to Saxon by the time the French label Carrere signed them. Theirs is the quietest escape of the three: no American conquest, no platinum wall, just Wheels of Steel at number five in April 1980 and a run of studio albums that has never stopped, with Biff Byford still at the microphone on Hell, Fire and Damnation, the band's twenty-fourth studio album, in 2024. Endurance counts as a way out too.
A roster drawn up by a disc jockey, a journalist and a Danish drummer. It held.
The chart, and the long drop after it
Below the three sat a tier that reached the Top 40 and then slid back down it. Girlschool took Hit and Run to number five in April 1981 and never again came so near the top; Tygers of Pan Tang put Wild Cat in at number eighteen in 1980 and then watched John Sykes leave for Thin Lizzy in 1982; Samson reached number thirty-four with Head On and lost its singer to Iron Maiden the following year. A top five album was no ticket. It was a visit.
The Stourbridge four that MCA bought after the Tygers had done well for the label, and whose second album for it was undone by faulty early pressings, were Diamond Head. Their revenge arrived by a route no record company had planned: Metallica recorded four of their songs between 1984 and 1998, turning a band that had peaked at number twenty-four with Borrowed Time in 1982 into songwriters heard in more stadiums than it ever played. On any honest reading, the royalties did what the chart would not.
| Band | Base | Debut album | The exit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iron Maiden | London | Iron Maiden (EMI, 1980) | Arenas on every continent |
| Def Leppard | Sheffield | On Through the Night (Vertigo, 1980) | American radio |
| Saxon | Barnsley | Saxon (Carrere, 1979) | Forty years without a stop |
| Girlschool | London | Demolition (Bronze, 1980) | A top five album, then the clubs |
| Samson | London | Survivors (Laser, 1979) | Lost its singer to Iron Maiden |
| Diamond Head | Stourbridge | Lightning to the Nations (Happy Face, 1980) | Metallica's set list |
| Venom | Newcastle | Welcome to Hell (Neat, 1981) | Named black metal |
| Witchfinder General | Stourbridge | Death Penalty (Heavy Metal Records, 1982) | Doom's scripture |
| Raven | Newcastle | Rock Until You Drop (Neat, 1981) | America, on Megaforce |
The side doors
Some bands never went near the chart and got out anyway, through doors the majors did not know existed. The Newcastle trio that recorded its debut at Impulse Studios in Wallsend and left the sound as raw as a knuckle skinned on a brick wall went by the name Venom, and the title of its second album, Black Metal in 1982, gave a whole later genre its name. Witchfinder General, from Stourbridge, left through the slowest exit of all, Death Penalty on Heavy Metal Records in 1982, a record whose riffs doom has been drawing on for four decades.
The Tyneside trio built around the brothers John and Mark Gallagher, whose Rock Until You Drop came out on Neat in 1981, were Raven, and in 1983 they signed to Megaforce in New Jersey and crossed America on the Kill 'Em All for One tour, with a young Metallica, on its first national run, opening for them. Newcastle to New Jersey, without a hit single.
Others came back decades later, carried out again like a regiment's colours lifted down from a museum wall, shot through and faded to the thread, and marched onto a parade ground in front of a crowd that knew the battles only from books. Satan (reunited in 2011 around the Court in the Act line-up), Praying Mantis (reformed in 1990) and Tygers of Pan Tang (reformed from 1999) all came back into studios and onto festival bills, and Angel Witch's Kevin Heybourne kept rebuilding the band through the same years, playing to audiences younger than their original records. Late is still out.
Players who left alone
The roster also worked as a transfer market. The bigger bands went through the smaller ones like a press gang through a harbour tavern, dragging the best hands out from behind the tables and leaving the chairs overturned, and the crews they raided rarely sailed again. The Belfast guitarist who left Sweet Savage to play on Ronnie James Dio's Holy Diver in 1983, and joined Def Leppard in 1992, was Vivian Campbell; the guitarist Def Leppard had already taken from the London band Girl in 1982 was Phil Collen. The wave's best players rarely stayed where they were found.
John Sykes went from the Tygers to Thin Lizzy and then to Whitesnake, whose 1987 album he co-wrote, while Dickinson swapped the stage name Bruce Bruce for his own and a place in the vanguard of the biggest band the movement produced. The pattern is the same every time: the player got out and the band that trained him paid for the ticket. That is how rosters work.
What those bands left on vinyl, sorted by what still stands after four decades of reissues, is set out in the best NWOBHM albums, where several records by bands that never charted rank above records by bands that did. The chart was a poor judge. The years have been a better one.
The movement's place in the longer line, from the Birmingham riffs of 1970 to the young bands playing the old rules straight today, runs through the KaosMetal heavy metal overview. Of the several hundred names, three built empires, a dozen touched the chart, a handful opened side doors into genres that did not yet exist, and the rest pressed a thousand singles and went back to work on Monday. Every one of them counted.
