Five hundred copies was a normal ambition and a thousand was a good year. The nwobhm singles pressed between 1979 and 1983 came out in runs a major label would have written off as a clerical error, cost less than a week of album studio time, and went out the door in a plain paper bag for cash, no invoice, no advance. They did what no album of those years could do. A band could be playing on a turntable in another country before London had learned to spell its name.
Every pressing run works the way a night in a darkroom works. One negative goes into the enlarger, the safelight holds its red hole open in the dark, and the first sheets come up out of the tray black and wet and exact, until somewhere past the hundredth print the bath has gone the colour of weak tea and the blacks arrive grey and thin. What is left gets tipped down the sink. Nobody keeps the grey ones.
The studio owner who turned a tape room in Wallsend into the wave's own pressing office was David Wood, and the sums he worked to were the sums every label of this kind worked to: an evening of studio time, a lacquer cut, a plating bill, a thousand impressions and a box in the back of a car. A run that size chews a stamper flat, and the plant throws the wreck of it into a bin of scrap nickel. How the wave rose around that arithmetic is that part of the history. The arithmetic is what decided who got heard.
What a NWOBHM single cost, and what it bought
The cost was the whole argument. Two or three hours in a small studio bought a backing track, an overdub and a rough mix, a lacquer cut and a set of stampers ate most of what was left, and a plain paper sleeve with a rubber-stamped title cost almost nothing at all. Sell six hundred at gigs and the run had paid for itself. Sell the rest by post and there was a second single in it.
What the money bought was time nobody had to ask permission for. An album needed a label, an advance, a producer and a place in a release schedule, and the schedule belonged to men in offices who thought in quarters, while a single needed a weekend, a friend with a van and a plant that took cash. Bands that would have waited two years for a contract were on sale within a season of forming. The format fitted the music because both were built to be quick.
The custom pressing houses did the rest. The Cambridgeshire firm that would press anything a customer paid for, with no opinion at all about whether it sold, was SRT, and Ellie Jay ran the same trade out of London, so that a handful of teenagers with a tape and a deposit could hold their own catalogue number without ever meeting anybody from the record industry. The tonnage those two shifted has never been counted. Nobody in the trade signed any of it off.
The labels were one man, a studio and a telephone
Above those pressing houses sat the regional labels, and almost every one of them was a single person with a room and a telephone. They shared a method rather than a taste: record cheaply, press short, sell the first run at the door and in the local shops, and either hand the band on to a major when London finally rang or keep it when nobody did. The good ones learned the trade inside half a dozen releases. The rest folded owing the plant.
The Tyneside trio that gave Wood's label its first salvo outside the North East was Raven, and "Don't Need Your Money", cut at Impulse under producer Steve Thompson and issued as NEAT 06 in 1980, is the whole method in three minutes: a rhythm section played at the edge of falling over, a voice shrieking above it and a mix nobody stayed late to smooth. The roughness was the budget. It turned into the sound, and then into the selling point.
The Wolverhampton company that gave itself the least imaginative name in the trade was Heavy Metal Records, and the Bristol four it put out in 1981 as HEAVY 10 with "Back Street Woman" were Jaguar, a band playing faster than its own hands could reliably manage and better for it, the drums shoving the riff along a half step ahead of comfort. Speed was not yet a genre. On that seven-inch it is already a decision.
Further north and east the trade had its own accent. Darryl Johnston's Ebony Records worked out of the Hull area from 1982, recording its bands fast in a studio of its own and pressing them faster, and the results come out muddy in a way collectors now defend as a house sound rather than a fault. Its catalogue reads like a muster roll of bands that never got a second chance. Several of them had earned one.
| Label | Base | Ran by | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neat | Wallsend, Tyne and Wear | David Wood | Recorded at its own Impulse Studios: Raven, Venom, Blitzkrieg, Satan |
| Heavy Metal Records | Wolverhampton | Paul Birch | Witchfinder General and Jaguar, plus a long compilation series |
| Ebony | Hull area | Darryl Johnston | Recorded and pressed in house; Grim Reaper reached America through RCA |
| Bronze | London | Gerry Bron | The established independent, with Angel Witch and Girlschool on its books |
| Rondelet | Mansfield, Nottinghamshire | Alan Campion | Witchfynde and a punk roster inside one catalogue |
The NWOBHM singles that outlived their bands
A seven-inch keeps a band at its best length. Two songs, no filler and no second side to pad, and the record is judged on the four minutes the group could actually play rather than on the forty it had to invent once a contract arrived. Dozens of bands of the wave never made an album worth defending. Some of them made one single that is beyond argument.
The London band built around Kevin Heybourne answered to Angel Witch, and Sweet Danger, issued by EMI in May 1980 backed with "Flight Nineteen", carries a riff that circles back on itself like something pacing a yard and a chorus sung flat and hard with no attempt at all to be liked. In June 1980 it scraped one week at number 75 and never came back, the only chart the band ever troubled. The line-up came apart inside a year. The single did not notice.
Dozens of bands of the wave never made an album worth defending. Some of them made one single that is beyond argument.
The pattern holds across the rest of the roster. Blitzkrieg is remembered for "Buried Alive" and not for the album it took four more years to finish, Sweet Savage for a seven-inch out of Belfast rather than for a full-length that waited until the nineties, and Hollow Ground, Paralex and Weapon survive as one side of one record each. None of them had a career. All of them have a song.
The trade was not shut to women, whatever the photographs of the period suggest. Girlschool pressed "Take It All Away" on City Records in December 1978, before much of the roster had a contract, and Rock Goddess came up through the same clubs and the same pressing plants a few years later; what that took and what it cost is set out in the women of the NWOBHM. A seven-inch asks nobody who is holding the guitar.
How a seven-inch left the country
A ringed bird is a small argument with distance. A numbered band weighing almost nothing is closed round a leg in a hedge one autumn, carrying an address in letters too small to read without a lens, and years later a stranger on another coast picks up something dead off a beach, reads the number and posts it in, and a line between two points is attested for the first time. Nobody followed the bird. The ring did the work alone.
The singles travelled the same way. A Neat seven-inch bought over a counter in Newcastle went into a rucksack to the continent, was dubbed onto a C90 in a bedroom and copied again at every stop, while the mail-order advertisements running every week in the pages of Sounds put the originals into towns no band of the wave would ever play. By 1982 those records were turning up in California and in the Ruhr. The men who made them were mostly at work on Monday morning.
What came back was other people's music. The young bands who bought the imports played faster, sang harsher and kept the cheapness as a principle rather than a limitation, and within five years the records made in imitation of the wave were outselling everything the wave itself had managed. That is the ordinary fate of a seed. It is also why the singles are still in print.
The reissue trade has been working the catalogue for forty years now, High Roller Records foremost among the labels still mining it one forgotten band at a time, and a record that sold ninety copies in 1981 can be bought new today with a booklet and a history attached. A thousand copies was never meant to be a monument. It has turned into one anyway.
