In 1980 four young men from Stourbridge released an album with no cover art, in a plain white sleeve they signed by hand, on a label they had invented, because nobody would put it out. It contains a seven minute song built on a riff that a Californian teenager would hear on a cassette, learn note for note, and use to build one of the largest careers in the history of heavy music.
Diamond Head got almost nothing for it. That is the story, and it is the single clearest illustration of how this genre was actually made.
The record in the white sleeve
Lightning to the Nations is seven songs and about forty minutes, and four of them are permanent: "Lightning to the Nations", "The Prince", "Sucking My Love" and "Am I Evil?". The band were in their late teens and early twenties. The record was pressed in a run small enough that original copies are now collectors' items, and the band handed them out at shows.
What makes it matter is the writing. Brian Tatler was constructing songs out of sequences of distinct riffs rather than around choruses, changing direction mid song, and using tempo shifts as structural events. That is the arrangement grammar of thrash metal, three years early, played at a slower speed by a band who had never heard of hardcore punk.
What "Am I Evil?" actually does
The song opens with a slow, heavy, deliberately theatrical passage lifted in spirit from a piece of Holst, and then drops into a mid tempo riff that is essentially a machine for generating menace. Then it changes again. Then again. Seven and a half minutes, and it never repeats a section for the sake of length.
Play it next to anything on the first Metallica album and the debt is not subtle. The relationship between the guitars, the way a riff is stated and then immediately varied, the willingness to let a song run: it is all there, waiting for somebody to play it twice as fast.
The teenager with the tape
Lars Ulrich was a Danish teenager living in California who collected British records with an obsessiveness that is difficult to convey. He wrote to bands. He travelled to England and, in one now legendary episode, effectively installed himself in the Diamond Head circle for a stretch of a summer.
When Metallica formed, the set was substantially made of these songs. "Am I Evil?" and "The Prince" were played live for decades and recorded officially more than once, and Metallica have paid Diamond Head royalties, taken them on tour and put their name in front of stadium audiences for forty years. The credit has been given, repeatedly and in public. What was never recovered was the career.
Why Diamond Head did not make it
Not for want of songs, and this is the part worth understanding, because it happened to dozens of bands in the same period.
They were managed by a family member with no industry experience. They turned down or mishandled the deals that were available. They followed a debut of extraordinary material with albums that chased what the market appeared to want, and by 1985 they had split up. Every one of those failures is administrative rather than musical.
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal produced several hundred bands operating on exactly this model: no money, no management, a self pressed single, and a total absence of anybody who knew how a contract worked. A handful escaped. The rest wrote the vocabulary that other people used.
| Song | Year | Covered by | Where it reached |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Am I Evil?" | 1980 | Metallica | B side, then Garage Inc., then stadiums |
| "The Prince" | 1980 | Metallica | B side and the covers collection |
| "Helpless" | 1980 | Metallica | The $5.98 EP |
| "It's Electric" | 1980 | Metallica | Garage Inc. |
| "Sucking My Love" | 1980 | Widely, live | The deep cut that never left the underground |
What happened next
Diamond Head reformed, more than once, and have been making records again for years with a different singer and Brian Tatler still writing. The later albums are decent and nobody pretends they are the point.
The point is that a band with no money, no manager and no artwork made a record in 1980 that supplied the grammar for a genre that would sell tens of millions of albums, and that the people who wrote it spent the decade in obscurity while the songs were played to arenas. That is not a scandal. It is simply how music works when the writing and the distribution are held by different people.
It is also why any honest account of this genre spends as long on Stourbridge as on the Bay Area. The full version of that account is in the wider story, and the other half of the British inheritance, the half that supplied nerve rather than riffs, is Venom's "Welcome to Hell".
What Brian Tatler was actually doing
It is worth being technical for a moment, because the influence is usually described as vague inspiration and it is nothing of the kind.
Tatler wrote in blocks. A song states a figure, varies it immediately, moves to a second unrelated figure, and then arrives somewhere the opening did not predict. There is very little repetition for its own sake, and the changes are the events rather than the chorus being the event.
He also used tempo as structure rather than as decoration. A section slows to half speed, sits there long enough to become oppressive, and then the original pulse returns and lands twice as hard as it did the first time. That device, the half time drop, is the single most reliable trick in the thrash arsenal, and it is all over a record made in 1980 by a band who had never heard hardcore punk.
Add a guitar tone that is heavy without being processed, two guitars playing separate parts rather than doubling each other, and a rhythm section that follows the riff instead of the vocal, and the description is indistinguishable from a description of a thrash record made five years later at twice the speed.
The rest of the New Wave
Diamond Head are the clearest case and they were not alone, and any list of the bands who supplied this vocabulary runs to dozens.
Angel Witch wrote one perfect song and could not follow it. Tygers of Pan Tang gave Newcastle a second export. Raven called what they did athletic rock and toured America with an unknown support band who went on to slightly more. Blitzkrieg, Sweet Savage, Holocaust: every one of them had at least one song that an American band would later record.
What united them was the economics. A run of five hundred singles cost a couple of hundred pounds, a local plant would take the job, and nobody needed a label. That produced a body of writing made by people with no budget, no producer asking for a chorus and no expectation of radio, which is exactly the condition under which somebody writes seven minutes of riffs and stops worrying about whether it has a hook.
Sources and notes
The 1980 pressing of Lightning to the Nations was issued without cover art on the band's own Happy Face label. Cover version details refer to official Metallica releases. Accounts of the band's management history follow their own published statements.
