On 19 May 1979 a London music weekly printed Geoff Barton's review of a single night at the Music Machine in Camden, where three young bands had shared one bill, and above it the paper's editor, Alan Lewis, had set a phrase that none of the musicians on that stage had asked for: the new wave of British heavy metal. The bands wanted gigs. They got a movement.
The weekly that had cheered in 1977 while punk kicked the stage out from under every long-haired act in the country was Sounds, and by the spring of 1979 it had changed sides without a word of apology, filling its pages with dispatches from a pub disco in Kingsbury, a club circuit in South Yorkshire and a recording studio in Wallsend. Teenagers who had worn out their first Judas Priest and Motörhead records were writing faster songs of their own. Lewis had named them before most of them owned a record.
What those bands inherited, a riff with the swing already stripped out of it, is traced to its source in where heavy metal came from. What they did with it between 1979 and about 1983 was quicker and cheaper than anything their elders had managed, and it ran on things the older bands had never needed: a weekly paper willing to review a demo, a disc jockey with a chart of his own, and a pressing plant that took cash.
How a headline named the new wave of British heavy metal
Punk had already shown that a single could be recorded, pressed and sold without a record company, and the long-haired fans of UFO, Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest, who had spent two years reading in the music press that they were dinosaurs, took the lesson without ever admitting whose lesson it was. They kept the hair. They borrowed the speed.
The staff writer who turned the phrase into a weekly beat was Geoff Barton, raised on the heavy rock of the seventies, and through 1979 and 1980 he reviewed demos, singles and support slots with such appetite that Sounds became the only national paper in which a band from Stourbridge or Barnsley could expect to read its own name. Readers cut the phrase down to NWOBHM within months. Nobody could pronounce it and everybody understood it.
The other loudspeaker belonged to the BBC. Tommy Vance had taken over a late rock programme on Radio 1 in 1978, and The Friday Rock Show recorded studio sessions with bands that had one single to their name or none at all, putting them out to every county at once, so that a group rehearsing above a garage in the Black Country could reach the Highlands before it reached the next town.
Readers cut the phrase down to NWOBHM within months. Nobody could pronounce it and everybody understood it.
The Soundhouse and its cardboard guitars
The back room of the Prince of Wales pub at Kingsbury Circle had been a rock disco since the middle of the decade, and the disc jockey who turned it into the Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse was Neal Kay, a man who played hard rock at a volume that shook the glasses off the shelves behind the bar. He ran, by 1979, the nearest thing the scene had to a headquarters, a room he had been running as a metal night since 1975.
On a full night the room worked like a recruiting depot. The regulars stood in rows and played along on guitars cut from cardboard and plywood, a militia drilling with wooden rifles for a war nobody had declared, while Kay called the requests from the decks like a quartermaster reading out the day's issue, and now and then a band in the corner plugged in and made the drill real.
Kay kept a chart of the most requested records at the Soundhouse, and Sounds printed it, which meant that a demo tape handed across the decks in Kingsbury on a Friday could be read about in Plymouth the following week. No shop sold those tapes. The chart listed them anyway.
Climbing that chart through 1979, with no contract and no pressing behind it, came a demo cut over the last two days of 1978 at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge by Iron Maiden, and while the major labels were still making up their minds the band put three of its songs, "Iron Maiden", "Invasion" and "Prowler", onto a seven-inch of its own in November 1979 and sold five thousand copies by mail order. They called it The Soundhouse Tapes. The title was a thank-you note to a pub.
EMI signed the band that December and asked Kay to assemble a sampler of the wave, and Metal for Muthas, released in February 1980, set two Iron Maiden songs beside Praying Mantis, Samson, Angel Witch and a pair of bands called Toad the Wet Sprocket and Ethel the Frog, proof enough that the wave did its thinking with its guitars. It sold. EMI put the bands on the road behind it.
Seven inches, cash on delivery
The major labels moved at the speed of a quarterly budget meeting. The wave could not wait for them, because a run of a thousand seven-inch singles could be recorded and pressed for well under two hundred pounds, on the evidence of the sums Def Leppard themselves quoted for their own first EP, and sold at the gig, by post or over the counter of a local shop that knew the drummer. Dozens of labels opened on that arithmetic. A handful lasted.
Pressed as catalogue number NEAT 03 in 1979, one of the earliest singles on the label David Wood ran out of his Impulse Studios in Wallsend was "Don't Touch Me There" by Tygers of Pan Tang, from Whitley Bay down the coast, and within a year MCA had bought up the band's contract and put Wild Cat into the Top 20 of the album chart at number 18. Neat had found its method within its first handful of singles.
The method was plain. Record cheaply, press short, sell the first run, and either hand the band on to a major when London telephoned or keep it when nobody did. For four years the North East behaved like a back-street mint striking coin without a licence, every short run of black vinyl a forgery the London majors had never authorised, and so much of it circulated that the treasury itself gave in, accepted the counterfeit at face value and hired the mint's best engravers.
Raven, Fist, White Spirit, Blitzkrieg and Venom all came through Wood's door between 1980 and 1982, and the last of them, three Newcastle men recording at Impulse, pressed the crudest records the label ever issued and turned out to be the name the rest of the world would remember. Neat had become the vanguard of a regional industry. Nobody in London had watched it form.
The Wolverhampton company that gave itself the bluntest name in the trade was Heavy Metal Records, set up in 1980 by Paul Birch, and in 1982 it issued Death Penalty by Witchfinder General, a band from Stourbridge playing slow, Sabbath-weighted riffs under a sleeve that got the record talked about well before anyone had heard it. Four decades on, doom bands still treat it as scripture.
Further north and east, Darryl Johnston's Ebony Records worked out of the Hull area from 1982, recording its bands fast and cheaply in a studio of its own, and it found Grim Reaper, whose See You in Hell, first pressed on Ebony in 1983, was picked up by RCA for an American release the following year. It reached number 73 on the Billboard 200, a bridgehead no label in the East Riding had any business expecting.
Fanzines, tape and a supplement that outgrew its paper
The one-off supplement that Sounds slipped into its pages on 6 June 1981, edited by Barton and meant to appear exactly once, was Kerrang!, and within a year it stood as a magazine in its own right, giving the faithful what a weekly's back pages never could: colour posters, long interviews and a letters page on which readers argued about riffs as if the future of the country depended on the answer.
Below the gloss, the wave printed itself. Photocopied fanzines, folded by hand and stapled twice down the fold, carried interviews with bands that had one single out and addresses for bands that had none, and the cassette did the rest: a Neat single dubbed onto a C90 in Newcastle could be in Eindhoven or Hamburg within the season, copied again at every stop, the hiss chewing a little more off the cymbals each time. Nobody minded the hiss.
The Dutch monthly Aardschok, founded in 1980, became the wave's first outpost on the continent, printing British demo reviews for readers who had never been to Britain, and in 1983 Bernard Doe started Metal Forces, which carried the underground's news on into the years when the fastest British records had been overtaken by faster ones from elsewhere.
Top of the Pops, and the climb to number one
The first crack in the singles chart came on television. Booked onto Top of the Pops in February 1980 with "Running Free", a single that went on to reach number 34, Iron Maiden refused the programme's standing rule that acts mime to the record, threw the backing tape out of the studio's playback and played the song live, which the band's manager, Rod Smallwood, remembered afterward as the first time the show had allowed a band to play live since the Who. The rule had not been written for bands like this one.
The Barnsley five who had spent the late seventies grinding round the northern clubs as Son of a Bitch had changed their name to Saxon by the time Carrere, a French label with a London office, released Wheels of Steel in April 1980, and the album went to number five while "747 (Strangers in the Night)" took them into the singles Top 20 and onto the same programme. Barnsley was on television.
By the autumn of 1981 the band could afford to write about its own audience, and "Denim and Leather", the title track of the album Carrere put out that September, is an anthem aimed back at the crowd, hammered out at a marching tempo with the uniform of the wave in its title and the fans themselves as its subject, written by men who had stood in the same halls. The album reached number nine.
The youngest band of the wave, with a drummer who had joined at fifteen, answered to the name Def Leppard, and it signed to Vertigo, released On Through the Night in March 1980 and took it to number 15, then walked onto the Reading Festival stage that August into a barrage of bottles and cans. Sounds itself had run a story accusing the band, on the strength of the single "Hello America" and its growing American following, of selling out. The wave had discovered that success could be held against a band.
The London four who had spent the previous year opening for Motörhead were Girlschool, and in the first months of 1981 they pushed the wave higher up the charts than anyone: St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the EP cut with Motörhead under the joint name Headgirl, went to number five in February, and Hit and Run, produced by Vic Maile and out on Bronze in April, matched it on the album chart.
In June Motörhead's live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith went straight in at number one. Lemmy's band predated the wave by four years and fed it throughout, and the wave's audience settled the debt at the till.
| Date | Band | Record | UK peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 1980 | Iron Maiden | "Running Free" (single) | 34 |
| Mar 1980 | Def Leppard | On Through the Night | 15 |
| Apr 1980 | Saxon | Wheels of Steel | 5 |
| Apr 1980 | Iron Maiden | Iron Maiden | 4 |
| Aug 1980 | Tygers of Pan Tang | Wild Cat | 18 |
| Feb 1981 | Motörhead and Girlschool | St. Valentine's Day Massacre (EP) | 5 |
| Apr 1981 | Girlschool | Hit and Run | 5 |
| Oct 1981 | Saxon | Denim and Leather | 9 |
| Feb 1982 | Iron Maiden | "Run to the Hills" (single) | 7 |
| Apr 1982 | Iron Maiden | The Number of the Beast | 1 |
The summit came in the spring of 1982. With Bruce Dickinson, lured away from Samson the previous autumn, now at the microphone, Iron Maiden released "Run to the Hills" in February, the gallop driven by Steve Harris's bass and Clive Burr's drums at the pace of a charge, and it reached number seven and cleared the road for The Number of the Beast, which followed in March and went to number one. In under three years the band had gone from a pub disco's chart to the top of the national one.
In under three years the band had gone from a pub disco's chart to the top of the national one.
The ones who never got out
The chart run is the version that survives in heavy metal history, told through the handful of bands that reached the Top 20. The wave itself ran several hundred bands deep, and most of it never came near a chart.
Samson paid for Maiden's summit. The band's singer, billed at the time as Bruce Bruce, had given Head On its voice in 1980, taking it to number 34, and when he left for Iron Maiden the following year the band he left behind never came as close to the Top 30 again.
The London trio whose self-titled album on Bronze in 1980 is now counted among the finest the wave produced were Angel Witch, and within a year of its release changes of line-up had gutted the band so thoroughly that the next album waited until 1985. Praying Mantis, signed by Arista, made Time Tells No Lies in 1981 with a polish closer to American radio than to the Soundhouse, and it scraped to number 60 on the album chart before the label lost interest.
MCA, having done well from the Tygers, signed Diamond Head as well, and Borrowed Time reached number 24 in 1982 before Canterbury, the more ambitious record that followed in 1983, was hobbled by faulty early pressings and sank. The Tygers themselves lost John Sykes to Thin Lizzy in 1982.
Through 1980 and 1981 the majors went through the wave like a combine through standing wheat, cutting the tallest stalks for their own granaries and ploughing everything shorter back into the soil, and the soil was crowded: Vardis, Trespass, Jaguar, Witchfynde, Sweet Savage and dozens more pressed a single or two, played every club that would book them and vanished. By 1982 the rout showed in the release schedules. Most of the rest went back to their day jobs.
Where the energy went
By 1983 the phrase had stopped describing anything. The bands that survived were no longer new, the independents that had carried them kept losing their best acts to the majors, and the energy the new wave of British heavy metal had released went looking for other outlets, most of them abroad.
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
William Shakespeare, King John, Act V, Scene 7
And we shall shock them.
America took the Sheffield band. Rebuilt around the producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, Def Leppard made Pyromania in 1983 for an audience that watched MTV rather than read Sounds, and it sold six million copies in the United States within the year, kept off the top of the Billboard chart only by Michael Jackson, and the harmonised, hairsprayed hard rock that stormed the American arenas behind it gets its own reckoning in the glam and hair metal chapter.
The fastest records went the other way, on tape, and came back as different music. The speed of the Neat singles and the Soundhouse favourites fed young bands in the Ruhr, in Copenhagen and around San Francisco Bay, and the title of Venom's second album, Black Metal, in 1982, handed a whole later genre its name. The progeny outgrew the parent within five years.
At home the wave left an infrastructure that outlived it. Kerrang! kept publishing, Castle Donington, which had staged its first Monsters of Rock on 16 August 1980 with Saxon on the bill, became an annual muster, and Iron Maiden spent the rest of the decade carrying a sound built for a pub back room into arenas around the world.
The singles outlived their makers. Pressings of a few hundred copies sold at the door for under a pound in 1980 now change hands between collectors for sums that would once have paid for the whole run, and reissue labels have spent four decades bringing the wave back one forgotten band at a time. The music outlasted its name.
