On 11 April 1980 CBS released a record of nine songs and thirty-six minutes, with a hand gripping a razor blade on the sleeve, and the heavy bands formed in the decade after it took it as their instruction sheet. The five men who had cut it that winter at Startling Studios, in a Georgian mansion at Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, with Tom Allom at the desk and a new drummer on his first record with them, were Judas Priest, and the judas priest british steel album is where their long, ornate seventies records were run aground and scraped clean.
In the age of sail a ship that had grown slow was careened. The crew ran her onto a beach at high water, hauled her over onto one side with tackle made fast to the masts, and went at the exposed hull with scrapers and hot pitch, tearing away the weed and the barnacles of a long voyage until bare timber showed, then floated her off on the next tide riding higher and answering the helm like a new vessel.
That is the record. Nothing was added. Everything that slowed the band down was torn off.
The Judas Priest British Steel album, rule by rule
The first rule is length. Sad Wings of Destiny had opened on a song of nearly eight minutes, and Stained Class in 1978 still gave "Beyond the Realms of Death" more than six; on British Steel only one track passes five minutes, "You Don't Have to Be Old to Be Wise", and it passes by four seconds. The rest end when they have said their piece.
| Track | Length | What it fixed in place |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid Fire | 4:08 | An opening riff at full speed, no introduction |
| Metal Gods | 4:00 | The mid-tempo march |
| Breaking the Law | 2:35 | The heavy metal single under three minutes |
| Grinder | 3:58 | The riff as the whole song |
| United | 3:35 | The chorus written for a crowd |
| You Don't Have to Be Old to Be Wise | 5:04 | The only track past five minutes |
| Living After Midnight | 3:31 | The radio single with the guitars left in |
| The Rage | 4:44 | The one experiment, kept short |
| Steeler | 4:30 | The fast closer |
The second rule is that the riff comes first and comes at once. The song that opens the British pressing, and that the American one pushed back to second place behind "Breaking the Law", is "Rapid Fire", and it goes into the water the way a hull goes off a side-launch berth in a narrow river, tipped off the blocks broadside, a wall of brown water thrown across the far bank and the moored boats opposite smashed against their jetties. There is no fade in and no count. Halford is shouting before the listener has sat down.
"Grinder" makes the same point at half the speed. K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton play one riff almost from start to finish, broken only for the solos, and the song lives or dies on whether that figure can carry four minutes on its own. It can. The twin leads that had wound around each other for whole minutes on the seventies records are cut down here to short, loud salvos, fired and finished.
The record closes the way it opens. "Steeler" runs at the pace of "Rapid Fire" and ends on a long, accelerating coda, the two guitars and the snare racing each other toward the run-out groove until the tape seems to snap under them. Plenty of speed metal records of 1983 and 1984 were built the same way, fast at both ends and short in the middle. The shape was already on the shelf.
A drummer who keeps time, a crowd that sings
The third rule is that the drummer keeps the time and nothing else. The drummer who had come in during 1979 from the blues rock trio Trapeze, and who played on every Priest studio album through Ram It Down in 1988, was Dave Holland. After the double kick drums Les Binks had driven through "Exciter", Holland's plain four to the bar sounded to some fans like a step down. It was a decision. Songs this short have no room for a drummer who decorates, and the steady beat under "Metal Gods" and "Breaking the Law" is what lets a hall of several thousand people march to them.
The fourth rule is that the chorus belongs to the audience. "Living After Midnight" went out as a single in March, weeks before the album, and "Breaking the Law" followed at the end of May, both of them songs a pub could learn by the second chorus. The third single, released on 15 August 1980 and written to be sung by a crowd with its arms round each other's shoulders, was "United". It stalled at number twenty-six, the one single off the record that missed the top twenty. Football terraces had been singing like that for a century. Heavy metal had not.
Listened to now, "United" is the track the record's critics reach for first. It is slow, square and sung in unison, a song with no riff to speak of and no solo worth keeping. It is also the one every later band that wrote a crowd song was answering, from the stadium choruses of the mid-eighties to the power metal anthems of the nineties, and it did that job in three and a half minutes.
Songs this short have no room for a drummer who decorates.
The case against British Steel
The complaint is an old one and it is fair as far as it goes. Set beside Stained Class, the record thins out the writing: fewer changes of tempo, fewer long instrumental passages, lyrics built from slogans rather than stories. Anyone who loved the band for the eight-minute epics had reason to feel short changed. The record shows the band reaching for the radio and getting there, with an album that reached number four in Britain and two singles, "Living After Midnight" and "Breaking the Law", that both peaked at number twelve.
The sharpest form of the charge falls on "Living After Midnight", a party song whose riff Tipton worked out in the small hours at Tittenhurst Park, loud enough to wake Halford in the room upstairs. Halford came down, and when Tipton asked him to put words to it on the spot, he sang "living after midnight, loving till the dawn" and gave the song its title in the same breath. It reached number twelve in Britain. It is also as tight a three and a half minutes as the band ever recorded, and nobody turned the guitars down to get it onto the radio.
Against that stands the record's one real experiment. The bassist whose line opens "The Rage", loping and half in a reggae rhythm before the guitars come crashing in over the top of it, is Ian Hill, and the song proves the band had not lost its appetite for strange ideas, only its patience with long ones. Hill has called it "something pretty rare for us, a bass start", put there because Downing or Tipton asked him to lay something off-beat under the guitars. What was cut was the padding, not the invention.
A long song asks the listener for patience. A short one asks the band for nerve, and in the spring of 1980 nobody in Britain had more of it than these five.
Declan Rourke, KaosMetal
The rules after 1980
Priest had been teaching two guitars, leather and volume to the movement that followed for three years already, and in 1980 the pupils were putting out records of their own. The young bands had shown up on 8 February 1980 on Metal for Muthas, the first NWOBHM compilation, a set of short, raw songs that made the same case for brevity from the other end of the business.
What British Steel gave the next decade was the model of a whole album built that way on a major label, with a producer who kept every instrument separate and dry, and it sold like one: silver in Britain and, in the end, platinum in the United States, where it had stopped at number thirty-four on the Billboard 200. The RIAA certified it platinum on 9 August 1989, nine years after release. The Brazilian singer who has said the record is essential, and that without it there might have been no Metallica, is Max Cavalera of Sepultura, speaking on the podcast Educate Ebony in August 2021. That lineage runs straight through thrash.
The record's place as the spearhead of the eighties is not seriously disputed anymore. AllMusic gave it five stars and credited it with starting heavy metal's glory days, and Rolling Stone put it third among the greatest metal albums of all time in 2017. Where it stands in the longer line, between the Sabbath riff and the thrash bands, is set out in KaosMetal's history of heavy metal.
The songs that came out of those sessions are still the garrison of every heavy metal festival bill. Short, loud and made to be shouted back. Forty-six years on, nobody has found a better set of orders.
