Roots: NWOBHM, Motörhead, Venom, Hardcore and the Tape Traders (1979–1982)

Nobody invented thrash metal. That is the first thing to understand about it, and the hardest, because every genre history wants a father and a birthday and this one has neither. What it has instead is a parts list. Between 1979 and 1982 four or five separate things happened in Britain, none of them coordinated, none of them aimed at America, and a few hundred teenagers on the other side of an ocean picked the pieces up off the floor and bolted them together into something none of the original makers would have recognised or particularly wanted.

This is the story of the parts. It is a story about a bass player who could not play quietly, about a band from Newcastle who were laughed at by everyone who mattered and copied by everyone who came after, about a drum pattern named after a group from Stoke on Trent, and about the fact that for a crucial eighteen months the most important distribution network in heavy music was the Royal Mail and the United States Postal Service.

Lemmy sets the speed

Motorhead were not a metal band and never claimed to be. Lemmy Kilmister described what he did as rock and roll played very fast and very loud by people who were not going to live long, and he meant it as a description rather than a boast. But when Overkill came out in March 1979 it opened with something no rock record had opened with before: Phil Taylor playing continuous double kick drum under the entire song, then stopping dead, then starting again, twice, so the track appears to end and refuses to.

The double kick was not new in itself. Jazz drummers had two pedals decades earlier and Ian Paice had used the trick. What was new was using it as the floor of a song rather than as an event inside one. Once a drummer decides the kick drum can run continuously, the guitar player has to fill the space above it, and the space above a continuous kick can only be filled with continuous downstrokes. Everything about the thrash right hand is already implied in that first thirty seconds.

The second thing Motorhead supplied was the bass. Lemmy played a Rickenbacker through Marshall guitar amplifiers with the treble up, chording rather than walking, which meant the bass occupied the same frequency range as the guitar and fought it for room. The result was a band that sounded enormous with only three people in it, and that was the crucial lesson for a generation who could not afford four.

The third thing was the audience. Motorhead were the one band in Britain that both the metal kids and the punks would go and see, and they did not have to pretend to like each other in the room because there was nothing to argue about. The bill at a Motorhead show in 1980 settled a question that took American critics another eight years to work out.

Two hundred bands and no money

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was not a sound. It was an economic condition. Between roughly 1979 and 1982, several hundred British bands worked out that a seven inch single could be pressed in a run of five hundred for a couple of hundred pounds, that a local plant would take the job, and that Neal Kay at the Bandwagon in Kingsbury and the readers of Sounds would do the rest. Nobody needed a label. Most of them never got one.

What that produced was a body of riff writing made by people with no studio budget, no producer asking for a chorus, and no expectation of being on the radio. The songs are long, they change direction, they are built out of parts rather than around a hook, and they were recorded in a hurry. That last constraint is the important one: a band with four hours of studio time writes riffs it can already play.

Diamond Head are the case that matters most, and the case that hurts. Their 1980 debut Lightning to the Nations was released with no cover art at all, in a white sleeve the band signed by hand, on their own label, because nobody would put it out. It contains "Am I Evil?", "The Prince", "Sucking My Love" and "Helpless". A Californian teenager with a tape of it would build most of a career on that record, and Diamond Head themselves would spend the decade being mismanaged into obscurity while their songs were played to stadiums by other people.

Around them, everything else: Tygers of Pan Tang, whose Wild Cat gave Newcastle a second export; Angel Witch, who wrote one perfect song and could not follow it; Raven, who called what they did athletic rock and would shortly tour America with an unknown support band; Tank, whose Filth Hounds of Hades was produced by Motorhead's guitarist and sounds exactly as you would expect. And Iron Maiden, who were the only ones to actually escape, and who therefore stopped being useful to this story almost immediately.

Venom, or the value of not being able to play

Everything anybody says about Venom is true at the same time, which is why they are so hard to write about. They were not good musicians. The songs are simple. The Satanism was read out of paperbacks. The first album was assembled from what was supposed to be a demo session, in three days, because the band ran out of money and Neat Records decided to release the tapes as they were.

And Welcome to Hell, released in December 1981, is more responsible for what came next than any record made that year by anybody who could play properly.

The reason is permission. Every teenager in 1982 who wanted to make heavy music was measuring himself against Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, which is to say against professional musicians with real studios and a decade of practice behind them. Venom demolished that measurement in forty minutes. Here was a record that sounded like it had been made in a shed by three people who had learned their instruments the previous year, and it was frightening, and it was on sale in shops. If that counted, anything counted.

Then in 1982 they printed two words on a sleeve, and the second album was called Black Metal, and a Norwegian scene that would not exist for another nine years took its name off it. Venom themselves never played black metal in the sense the word later acquired. They named a thing that did not yet exist, from Newcastle, by accident, and it stuck to somebody else. There is no better summary of what this band was for.

What the punks had that the metal bands did not

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal supplied the riffs and Motorhead supplied the speed, but neither supplied the beat, and without the beat there is no thrash. That came from hardcore.

The skank beat, snare on every offbeat over a driving kick, does something no rock beat does: it removes the swing entirely and turns the pulse into a flat line, which converts a fast tempo from exciting into relentless. British hardcore got there through Discharge, four men from Stoke on Trent whose Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing in 1982 was stripped down so far that the pattern is now simply called the D beat and named after them. It is one of two or three occasions in the history of popular music where a rhythm carries a band's initial.

In America the same lesson arrived through Black Flag, Bad Brains and the Los Angeles and Washington scenes, and it came with a second gift that mattered as much as the beat: an operating model. Hardcore bands booked their own tours by telephone, slept on floors, sold their own records off the front of the stage and printed their own shirts. They had proved that a band with no label and no radio play could get across the United States and back. Every thrash band of the founding generation used that template, and most of them did not know whose it was.

The songs got shorter, too. A hardcore song stops when it has finished, and a generation raised on eight minute metal epics found that permission enormously liberating. Half of the first Metallica album is under four minutes. Nothing on Reign in Blood reaches five.

Europe got there first, and did not notice

Here is the fact that ruins every tidy account of the genre's birth. The first thrash metal song was recorded in Germany, in 1982, by a signed band on a proper label, and the band did not follow it up.

Accept were a professional hard rock group from Solingen with several albums behind them when they cut "Fast as a Shark" for Restless and Wild. It opens with thirty seconds of a Bavarian children's folk song on a scratchy record, which is then torn off the turntable, and what follows is downpicked, double kicked, well over two hundred beats per minute, with a shrieked vocal and a solo played at a speed nobody in metal was playing at. It is 1982. Nothing in America sounds remotely like it.

Accept then went back to writing hard rock, because they were a hard rock band who had made a joke about how fast a record could go and had accidentally answered a question nobody had asked yet. The song went into the ears of every German teenager who would form a band in the following three years, which is a large part of why the German scene arrived so quickly and so fully formed.

Canada supplied the other advance warning. Anvil's Metal on Metal, also 1982, was faster and dirtier than anything a signed North American band had put out, and both Lars Ulrich and Scott Ian have said in print that they took it apart bar by bar. Anvil got nothing for it except forty years of being cited by bands who outsold them a hundred to one.

What any of this cost

It is worth putting numbers on the period, because the poverty is not colour, it is the mechanism. A run of five hundred seven inch singles in 1980 came to somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds including the sleeves, which a band of five working teenagers could raise in a few months by not going out. A day in a provincial eight track studio was between fifty and a hundred pounds. A blank C90 cassette was under a pound, and second class postage to America was pennies.

Against that, a major label album budget in the same year ran to tens of thousands. The gap is the whole point. It meant the decision about what got recorded was taken by the people making the noise rather than by anybody who had to recoup, and it meant the records that resulted are documents of what a band actually sounded like in a room on a Tuesday rather than of what a producer thought would sell.

The equipment was equally unglamorous. A Marshall head bought second hand, a Japanese copy of an American guitar, a distortion pedal in front of an amplifier already at the limit. Nothing on any of these records was made with a piece of gear that a working teenager could not have got hold of, and that is precisely why a working teenager four thousand miles away could hear it and think: I could do that.

The post office was the record industry

None of the above would have combined if the parts had stayed where they were made. The mechanism that moved them was tape trading, and it is the single most underrated fact in the history of extreme music.

It worked like this. A band recorded a demo on whatever was available, ran off copies onto blank cassettes, and posted them to the addresses printed in the classified pages of fanzines and in the back of Kerrang! and Metal Forces. The recipient copied it, sent his copy to three other people, and mailed out a list of what he had. Nobody made money. The etiquette was rigid: you sent a blank tape and return postage, you did not sell what you had been given, and you wrote back.

What that network did was collapse geography. A Newcastle band's third generation demo could be in a bedroom in Chicago inside a fortnight, and by the fourth generation it sounded like a radiator, and nobody cared, because the information got through. The No Life til Leather demo, recorded in July 1982, moved on that network and did the work a label would have needed a tour budget to do.

Two more pieces of infrastructure completed it. Brian Slagel, who worked in a record shop in Woodland Hills and wrote a fanzine, put out a compilation called Metal Massacre in June 1982 and used it to press unsigned Los Angeles bands onto vinyl. And in March of the same year Rampage Radio went on air on KUSF in San Francisco at two in the morning, and it would play a demo tape sent in by a band nobody had heard of. Between a fanzine, a compilation, a graveyard radio slot and the post, an entire scene was distributed before a single record company noticed there was one.

What was on the table at the end of 1982

Lay it all out. A drum pattern from Stoke on Trent. A right hand technique implied by a London bass player's refusal to play quietly. Several hundred riffs written by unsigned British bands who would never see a royalty for them. A Newcastle record that had abolished the requirement to be any good. A German album track that had already done the whole thing in four minutes and then been forgotten by its own authors. A touring model borrowed from American punks. And a postal network that could move a cassette from a garage to another continent in a fortnight.

Every single component existed. None of them were in the same room, and none of the people holding them were trying to build anything. What was missing was a place where a group of teenagers had heard all of it at once, could not afford to be precious about any of it, and had somewhere to play on a Friday night.

That place turned out to be a converted cinema on San Pablo Avenue in the East Bay, and the story moves there next: The Bay Area, where the parts got assembled by people who had never met any of the makers and did not much care what the parts had originally been for.

Sources and notes

Release dates are taken from the original pressings rather than from later reissues. The Metal Massacre detail refers to the first pressing of June 1982. The No Life til Leather session is dated to July 1982. Chart and certification figures have been left out of this chapter deliberately, because for most of the bands named here there were none.