On 17 May 1976 Oyster, a Purple Records subsidiary distributed by Polydor, released Rising, the second album by Rainbow, and its second side held two songs of more than eight minutes each. Recorded that February at Musicland, the studio under the Arabella Hotel in Munich, with Martin Birch producing and Cozy Powell kicking the door off "Stargazer" with a drum figure that marches instead of swinging, the record put a wizard, a stone tower and an enslaved army inside a hard rock song and handed the whole libretto to one voice.
The small man from upstate New York who carried that libretto, a veteran of nearly two decades in rock and roll bar bands and in the group Elf, was Ronnie James Dio. Across the same side of vinyl Ritchie Blackmore tore the blues scale off his solos like old wallpaper and put a Middle Eastern mode and a string section in its place. Nobody called it power metal. The phrase did not exist yet.
So what is power metal, if its first stones were laid nine years before anyone knew what they were building? It is the lyre of Orpheus restrung with piano wire and wound until the frame cracks at the joints: the oldest business in music, a singer who means to sing the gates of the underworld open, now played at twice the tempo, pitched higher, set in brighter keys, and built around a chorus that bends the whole room toward it.
The story from that Munich basement to festival headliners on five continents belongs to the history of power metal. The origins are narrower. They run from the classical figures Blackmore smuggled into Deep Purple in the early seventies to the moment, in 1984 and 1985, when a handful of German teenagers gathered every inherited part into one sound.
What is power metal, heard bar by bar
Start with the drums, because they set the terms for everything else. The power metal drummer plays two bass drums, or one with a double pedal, in a continuous stream of sixteenth notes, while the snare lands on the second and fourth beats of a bar that runs somewhere between 160 and 200 beats a minute. The effect is paradoxical. The tempo is fast, but because the harmony above it changes slowly, often once a bar or once every two bars, the music sounds less frantic than airborne.
Then the voice, which is the genre's centre of gravity. You hear a clean tenor, schooled on opera as much as on rock, living at the top of its range and staying there, with wide vibrato on the held notes and almost no rasp. Growling is the one thing forbidden outright. The inheritance runs through Dio, Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson, and the high notes themselves belong to a larger tradition of metal singing that the genre borrowed rather than invented.
The harmony is where power metal parts company with nearly everything else on the heavy shelf. Thrash and death metal live in the low, chromatic, deliberately ugly corners of the minor scale. Power metal reaches instead for major keys, for the harmonic minor with its raised seventh and its baroque pull toward the tonic, and for chord sequences that walk around the circle of fifths the way a baroque sequence does. The guitars harmonise in thirds and sixths, the lead lines are melodies rather than noise, and the last chorus is often lifted a semitone or a whole tone higher so that the song climbs one final step at the end.
Power metal is the lyre of Orpheus restrung with piano wire and wound until the frame cracks at the joints.
The architecture follows. A power metal song is organised around its chorus the way an opera aria is organised around its high note: verse and bridge exist to build pressure, the chorus releases it, and the guitar solo usually arrives as a written composition rather than an improvisation. The subjects follow too. Fantasy, mythology, chivalry, history, the fight against tyranny and the promise of a better world, sung in the voice of a crowd rather than the private voice of the blues.
Take all of that together and the definition of what is power metal fits in a sentence. It is heavy metal played at speed metal's tempo, sung by a tenor, harmonised in bright keys, built on the chorus and pointed at the sky. Every one of those elements existed before 1985. None of them, before 1985, lived in the same band.
Energy is Eternal Delight.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Blackmore's concertos and a singer of wizards
The neoclassical line starts with one guitarist, the forebear every later shredder names first. Ritchie Blackmore had taken classical guitar lessons as a boy, and by the time Deep Purple recorded Machine Head in Montreux in December 1971 he was building his solos on sequences of broken chords borrowed from the baroque; the solo in "Highway Star" is the textbook case, and Blackmore himself has pointed to Bach behind it, naming the chord run under it a Bach progression in a 1973 interview. Jon Lord's Hammond organ answered him in the same idiom. Here the solo stopped being a jam and became a written cadenza.
When Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1975 and built Rainbow around Dio and the rest of the band Elf, he took that idiom with him and added the one thing Purple never had, a singer who wanted to tell stories about magic. The results sound like a Bach two-part invention with its left hand sawn off the page and its right hand fed through a Marshall stack, a single line of counterpoint left standing to carry the melody against a rhythm section that no longer accompanies it but drives it.
Dio's voice is the second half of the inheritance. It sounds like the bourdon, the largest bell in a cathedral tower, hauled by hand until the belfry sheds its plaster, a chest-voice weight carried high into the tenor range that let every vowel carry to the back of an arena without once sounding strained. The singers of the next generation would pitch higher. Almost all of them would learn their phrasing, their held vowels and their heroic diction from him.
Then there is "Kill the King", and it matters more for the genre than any of Rainbow's longer epics. Released in studio form on Long Live Rock 'n' Roll on 14 April 1978, it opens with a fast, clipped riff that Cozy Powell drives on double bass drums, a use of the second pedal so exact that later drummers have singled it out for its restraint, sets a regicide story on top, and gives Dio a melody that climbs rather than growls. Heard now, it is a power metal song seven years early. Its tempo, its subject and its vocal line would all turn up again in Hamburg, almost unchanged.
Dio left Rainbow in 1979, sang on Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell in 1980 and launched his own band with Holy Diver in 1983, a record whose imagery of rainbows, demons and sacred quests would supply half the pictures of European power metal. Whether Dio himself ever played the genre is an argument with two honest sides. Beyond dispute is that he wrote its libretto.
The NWOBHM and the high voice from Birmingham
The second source is British and it is loud. The Birmingham quintet that had spent the mid seventies stripping the blues out of heavy rock, and that cut in 1977 a song which sounds like a manifesto for a genre not yet born, was Judas Priest. "Exciter", the opening track of Stained Class, released by CBS in February 1978, runs on Les Binks's double bass drumming at a speed very few rock records had tried, and puts Rob Halford's voice above it at the top of his range for most of its five and a half minutes.
Halford's top register is the tool the genre took from him. It sounds like the clarino trumpet part of a Bach cantata, the high line written for players who wrecked their lips on it, blown night after night by one man who refuses to come down, held longer than any lip ought to survive. Power metal tenors would soften the scream into something rounder. They kept the altitude and they kept the endurance.
Around Priest a whole movement rose. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the name the weekly paper Sounds gave in May 1979 to a generation of young bands pressing their own singles, brought speed and punk directness back into metal and put twin lead guitars at the front of the mix. Its most ambitious exponent was Iron Maiden. Steve Harris's galloping bass figures, the harmonised leads of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, and from 1981 Bruce Dickinson's operatic tenor gave the NWOBHM the three things power metal would need most: melody at speed, a voice of real range, and songs long enough to tell a story.
Maiden's subjects mattered as much as their sound. The Number of the Beast in March 1982, Piece of Mind in 1983 and Powerslave in September 1984 filled their lyric sheets with battles, history, Coleridge's mariner and Frank Herbert's desert, and by 1984 a heavy metal band could run a song for thirteen minutes and fill a hall with it. Maiden are not power metal. Reviewers reached for Maiden's name almost every time they wrote about the German bands that followed. One of those guitarists, Kai Hansen, has said otherwise, naming Michael Schenker, Ritchie Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth, not Maiden, as the players who shaped him.
The chivalric subject arrived from the NWOBHM too, and the Barnsley band whose early records had been about motorbikes and denim is the proof: Saxon opened Crusader, released by Carrere on 30 January 1984, with a slow, stately title track about knights riding to the Holy Land, and in Sweden Heavy Load had been singing about Vikings and battle since the late seventies. The subjects of power metal were on the shelf. They still lacked the speed.
Priest supplied that too, with Screaming for Vengeance in 1982 and its opening pair "The Hellion" and "Electric Eye", a short instrumental fanfare leading straight into a fast, melodic song, a shape that the European bands of the late eighties would copy on album after album.
Then, in January 1984, Defenders of the Faith opened with "Freewheel Burning", its first single, a song built on a staccato rhythm guitar that ticks like an escapement, double bass drums throughout and Halford racing a lyric at a speed few singers could articulate. Hear it next to Walls of Jericho a year and a half later and the line of descent is plain. The later question of whether Painkiller in 1990 is itself a power metal record grows out of this song.
German soil: Scorpions, Accept and a classical conscience
The third source is German, and it explains why the genre crystallised where it did. Two bands from the old Federal Republic, Scorpions from Hanover and Accept from Solingen, spent the seventies and early eighties proving that a German band could play heavy music to international standards, and each passed down a different part of the craft.
Scorpions gave it the virtuoso. Uli Jon Roth, the band's lead guitarist from 1973 to 1978, played his Stratocaster the way a concert violinist would play a borrowed Stradivarius with orders to hand it back in pieces, and "The Sails of Charon", the opening track of Taken by Force in 1977, sets his classical runs over a riff in the harmonic minor that sounds, heard today, like a template for half the neoclassical lead guitar of the following decade. Klaus Meine's high, clean tenor was the other lesson. It proved a German singer could carry English melodies at altitude.
Accept gave it the discipline. Wolf Hoffmann's riffs were tight and rhythmic to the point of severity, Udo Dirkschneider's voice was a rasp rather than a tenor, and the band's gang choruses sounded like a men's choir drilled by a Kapellmeister who never smiled. That rasp did not pass down. The classical conscience did. On "Metal Heart", the title track of the 1985 album produced by Dieter Dierks, Hoffmann carried Beethoven's little bagatelle "Für Elise", the page every piano pupil has thumbed soft, out of the primer and set it inside the solo, rapped across the knuckles by a rhythm section as strict as a piano teacher's ruler.
Accept had already pushed tempo past anything German metal had tried. "Fast as a Shark", the opening track of Restless and Wild in 1982, is claimed by thrash as an ancestor with good reason, and its double bass drums and speed fed power metal just as directly. The German roots are, in the end, a matter of pedigree: the first German heavy bands with an international audience had already joined speed to classical melody, and the next generation grew up with both on the same record.
| Year | Band | Record | What the genre took |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Rainbow | Rising | The fantasy epic and the neoclassical solo |
| 1977 | Scorpions | Taken by Force | Classical lead lines in the harmonic minor |
| 1978 | Judas Priest | Stained Class | Double bass speed and the top-register voice on "Exciter" |
| 1978 | Rainbow | Long Live Rock 'n' Roll | "Kill the King", fast and melodic |
| 1982 | Iron Maiden | The Number of the Beast | Dickinson's operatic tenor at speed |
| 1982 | Accept | Restless and Wild | Tempo and precision on "Fast as a Shark" |
| 1983 | Dio | Holy Diver | The imagery and the heroic diction |
| 1984 | Judas Priest | Defenders of the Faith | "Freewheel Burning" and its tempo |
| 1985 | Accept | Metal Heart | Beethoven quoted inside a heavy metal solo |
Speed metal and the stylus in the groove
The tempo came from speed metal, a term the early eighties used for heavy metal played faster than anything before it, and which later became the name of a genre in its own right. Motörhead had opened Overkill in March 1979 with Phil Taylor's double bass drumming, Priest had "Exciter", Accept had "Fast as a Shark", and a band from Ottawa named Exciter, after the Priest song, put out Heavy Metal Maniac on Shrapnel in 1983.
Speed metal treated heavy metal the way a vandal treats a gramophone, kicking the selector from 33 past 45 to 78 and leaning on the platter until the stylus gouges the groove. By Long Live the Loud in 1985 Exciter had become the standard North American example of the sound: clean in its melodies, fast in its drums, still recognisably heavy metal rather than something harsher.
Then the road forked. In California and in the Ruhr, bands took the same speed and turned it toward aggression, with shouted vocals, lower riffs and less melody, and Metallica's Kill 'Em All in 1983 stands at the head of that branch, which became thrash. The other branch kept the speed and pushed the melody further forward, the voice higher and the harmony brighter. Exactly the same tempo went two ways.
Exactly the same tempo went two ways, and only one of them kept the singer.
A name looking for a music
The words arrived before the style. Through the early eighties "power metal" floated around in American metal circles as loose praise for anything heavier and faster than the radio played; Metallica's own 1982 demo tape went round under the title Power Metal, taken from a business card that bassist Ron McGovney had printed for club promoters. Lars Ulrich hated the phrase on sight, by McGovney's own account, and the name stuck to the tape anyway. In America the phrase came to mean the heavier, darker school of Manilla Road and its peers, riff first and sparing with melody.
It took the German bands of the late eighties to attach the name to the tenor-led, chorus-built sound, and by the early nineties a European reader who saw power metal on a record sleeve expected a tenor, a double bass drum and a chorus, not a lower-tuned riff. The two meanings still sit side by side, and the argument over which one is correct has never been settled. It probably never will be.
Every part copied out by 1985
By the middle of the decade every part of the score had been copied out. The neoclassical solo came from Blackmore and Roth, the voice from Dio, Halford and Dickinson, the tempo from Priest, Motörhead and Accept, the story songs and the harmonised leads from the NWOBHM, the classical conscience from Scorpions and Accept. Nobody had yet set the parts on one row of music stands. The players who would do it were around twenty years old, and they were rehearsing in the north of Germany.
Noise Records, the small Berlin label Karl-Ulrich Walterbach had founded in 1983, was signing young German bands who had grown up on exactly those records. Grave Digger, from Gladbeck in the Ruhr, put out Heavy Metal Breakdown on Noise in 1984, and Running Wild released Gates to Purgatory the same year. Both were fast, both were melodic, and both still sounded like the NWOBHM and speed metal played by German hands.
In Hamburg, meanwhile, the quartet that guitarist Kai Hansen had led through a string of names since the late seventies, Gentry and Iron Fist among them, renamed itself Helloween in 1984, contributed two songs, "Oernst of Life" and "Metal Invaders", to the Noise compilation Death Metal that May, and was writing faster, brighter and more melodic material than anyone else on the label. Their self-titled EP and Walls of Jericho followed in 1985.
That is where the parts copied out across nine years and three countries were finally played as one score, and how that happened in one northern port city and on one Berlin label is the story of european power metal.
