On 30 October 1983 a band from Copenhagen released its first album, Melissa, on Roadrunner, a record company in the Netherlands, cut in a Danish studio, sung in English, and sold almost entirely to people who would never once see it play. Nothing about that arrangement was unusual in the north. It was the arrangement.
A safety match carries no fire of its own. The head holds potassium chlorate and sulphur and will not light on a wall, a boot or another match, and strike it on brick and it splinters, leaving a scratch and no flame, because the red phosphorus that makes the thing work at all is painted onto the side of the box. Scandinavian heavy metal was assembled on exactly that principle. The head was made at home. The striker was always somewhere else, in Hilversum or London or New York, and a band that could not reach it stayed unlit in a country that had no use for it.
The Copenhagen guitarist who spent two years writing songs in four and five parts, with the second guitar answering the first the whole way down, was Hank Shermann, and the twin lead that Mercyful Fate ran under King Diamond's falsetto owes more to the Judas Priest records of 1978 than to anything the north built afterwards. That is the part the last thirty years have buried. The decade before the extremes is the one nobody dug for.
What scandinavian heavy metal had that Britain did not
It had teaching. Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland had all built municipal music schools into the ordinary business of local government from the late forties onwards, so that a child could learn an instrument for a token fee and a teenager could read a score, which is why the twin guitar harmonies on the northern records of 1983 sit in tune and in thirds where a self-taught British band of the same year is guessing. Britain had pub back rooms and no lessons. The north had lessons and nowhere to play.
What it did not have was a market. Sweden counted about eight million people and Denmark, Norway and Finland barely five each, none of them carried a record company that wanted loud guitars, and a band that sold every copy it could physically press at home had still not earned back the cost of the studio, which is why the four countries spent the eighties inventing four different ways out of one shortage. How that sits among the rest of the heavy metal scenes is a longer account. The northern version is the starkest of them.
Sweden went first and answered by building the trade itself. The Stockholm brothers who stopped waiting for a label, put up a studio and pressed their own Viking epics on their own imprint were Ragne and Styrbjorn Wahlquist of Heavy Load. The Malmo band that laid classical runs over hard rock riffs on Shakin' Brains in 1983 was Silver Mountain, and Europe, out of Upplands Vasby, was still a heavy metal band on Wings of Tomorrow in 1984, before the keyboards took the room. Sweden had the most bands. It also had the most of them playing to nobody.
| Country | What was missing | What the bands did instead |
|---|---|---|
| Sweden | A label that would press metal | Built studios and imprints of their own |
| Denmark | Any domestic market at all | Signed abroad from the first album |
| Norway | A route to the audience that pays | Aimed at America and hired accordingly |
| Finland | Distance from everything south of it | Kept a home following and lost the rest |
Denmark sold abroad before it sold at home
Strip the face paint and the occult off the Danish quintet and what is underneath is a new wave of British heavy metal band with better hands. "Curse of the Pharaohs" rides a riff that could have come off a Tygers of Pan Tang single, Shermann and Michael Denner harmonise across it like men who had worn out their copies of Sin After Sin, and the long multi-part construction of the songs on Melissa and Don't Break the Oath comes from those English records rather than from anything darker. The theatre got the attention. The guitars did the work.
The Horsens band that went the other way, taking a major label deal and a producer with an American address and building a record for radio out of it, was Pretty Maids. Red Hot and Heavy, cut for CBS in 1984, was a hard, plain heavy metal album, and Future World three years later, produced for Epic until the band fired Eddie Kramer partway through and finished it themselves, sanded the edges off that sound for a crossover that never quite arrived, which is the exact bargain Denmark kept making. Beside them Witch Cross cut Fit for Fight in 1984, a record that sold in the hundreds at the time and now changes hands for more than most of the country's platinum ever will. Denmark produced very little and exported almost all of it, which is why a nation of five million has a heavier reputation abroad than at home.
Norway went out and hired an American
Norway had the smallest scene and the plainest solution. The Trondheim band that made one album in Norwegian, worked out that the language was a wall and replaced its singer with an American was TNT, and Tony Harnell arrived in 1984 with a range that could carry the choruses Ronni Le Tekro was writing under them. The guitar is why the records still get played. Le Tekro bends a note the way nobody else in the north did, playing a neck he scalloped out with his own hands, the kind of decision a player makes only once.
Released by Mercury on 13 April 1987 and carrying "10,000 Lovers (In One)", Tell No Tales is where the arrangement paid, melodic heavy metal built with the arena in mind and played by a band from a city of a hundred and thirty thousand people. The other Norwegian exponent of the style took the same route with an Icelandic voice instead, Artch putting Another Return out in 1988 behind Eirikur Hauksson. Norway's answer worked and cost it something. Nothing on those records sounds like Norway.
Norway's answer worked and cost it something. Nothing on those records sounds like Norway.
Finland kept its audience and lost the rest
Finland was furthest from everything and behaved accordingly. The Helsinki band that put out one of the first Finnish heavy metal albums in 1980, three years before most of its neighbours had one, was Sarcofagus. The band that cut Fire in the Brain in 1983 and moved the whole operation to Stockholm that same year, to be nearer the business, was Oz, and the Kuopio band that stayed, played to Finns and built a following that has never gone away was Tarot. Two of those three left. One did not.
Spell of Iron, in 1986, is the clearest attested case in the north of a band deciding that the home crowd was enough, with Marco Hietala singing and playing bass over riffs harder than anything the Swedish charts would have touched that year. It never crossed a border in any quantity. It also never stopped selling in one country, and the bastion Finland built for itself in those years is why the place now carries more metal bands for its size than anywhere on earth.
Four countries, four answers, and one fanfare they all wrote for somebody else's hall. Every record above was aimed across a border before a note of it was recorded, which is the reverse of the case where a scene has rooms, crowds and wages of its own and still cannot get a record made, as in the New York heavy metal scene. The north had the players. It had to post them.
