In December 1985 the German edition of Metal Hammer gave the country's own bands a column to themselves and called it German Metal Attack. Eighteen months later the same column was running under a different name.
The Hamburg four whose singer also played lead guitar, and whose first full album was cut in a Berlin studio with Harris Johns and put out by Noise on 18 November 1985, were Helloween, and every shop, every mail-order list and every review of that season racked Walls of Jericho under speed metal, because in 1985 that was the only word the country had for anything played fast.
Five years on, a word was prised off that sleeve and another screwed on in its place. The vinyl underneath took no notice.
The move from speed metal to power metal gets told as a change in the music, and half of it is that. The other half is a change in the filing, and the two halves refuse to line up. Some records were rebuilt from the voice outward. Others did not alter a bar and were reshelved anyway.
A score can be carried to a different shelf without one note in it shifting. An opera refused its licence in one city had its king demoted to a governor and its capital moved across an ocean, the painted flats of the northern court hacked off their frames and burned in the yard behind the theatre while a harbour went up in their place, and the orchestra played on from parts it had already rehearsed, same key, same bar lines, same conspirators. The work was licensed. Nothing in it had changed except where it was allowed to stand.
Where every part of the style came from, and in whose hands those parts were assembled, is what power metal is. The narrower question is who moved the word, when, and what the records were doing while it moved.
What 1985 called these records
Speed metal in that year was not a style. It was a container. It held everything with a fast right hand and a German address, the bands who would end up in thrash and the bands who would end up singing about dragons alike, and one academic study of the West German scene states the problem without ceremony: the word was used for power metal and thrash metal together, for want of a distinction.
The paperwork of the period does not argue. Noise had the fast Germans on one roster, the fanzines had one adjective for them, and the chroniclers writing in English had two, speed and thrash, used interchangeably.
America filed no better. The band out of Colorado Springs whose lead vocalist worked under the name the Tyrant was Jag Panzer, and Ample Destruction, nine songs pressed by Iron Works on 13 August 1984 and barely distributed, went into the same racks as records that now sit three genres away from it.
The Californian band whose singer spent most of his working range above the stave, and whose debut the American label Combat released in June 1985, was Agent Steel, and "Agents of Steel", three minutes long and the first song proper on Skeptics Apocalypse, is the clearest surviving photograph of what the word covered. A shriek at the top. A gallop underneath. No hook a hall could hold.
What changed on the road from speed metal to power metal
The voice moved first and it moved furthest. On the German records of 1985 the man at the microphone was usually the guitarist, shouting at the top of a range that had no top, and the lines were written to sit inside whatever he could reach. By 1987 the job went to singers hired for it alone, living a fourth higher and staying there.
A company that had been getting a part through the evening by handing it to a house baritone, the top of every line pencilled down an octave in all the copies, threw the lot out on the afternoon a tenor walked in who could take the notes as engraved, and the transposed sheets were ripped out of the band parts and kicked under the stands. The music had not improved. It had stopped being negotiated.
The tempo moved second, and it moved down. The second bass drum arrived out of speed metal and out of the thrash groups using the same rehearsal rooms, and what it did once bolted on is the reverse of what its reputation promises. It made slowness possible. An unbroken floor of sixteenth notes holds the pressure up while the chords above change once a bar or slower, which is how a chorus gets room to be sung back by people who cannot sing.
The harmony moved last and decided everything. The 1985 records run on minor riffing, the flat second and the tritone doing the work, the shared vocabulary of every fast band on the continent. What turns up by 1990 is the bright cadence at the end of the chorus, aimed at and landed on. That habit sorts the catalogue better than tempo ever has.
Some records were rebuilt from the voice outward. Others did not alter a bar and were reshelved anyway.
The Ruhr three-piece whose bass player took the microphone as well, and who had spent 1986 and 1987 on two albums of hard, fast, minor-key riffing, was Rage, and Perfect Man, recorded at Sky-Trak in Berlin across February and March 1988 with Armin Sabol producing and two thirds of the line-up new, is where that catalogue turns over in a single record.
"Wasteland" opens the album at three and a half minutes and does almost nothing the band's first two records did: reviewers looking back on it hear a Rage sawing the thrash speed off Reign of Fear and setting into the gap a chorus a room could sing back. "Don't Fear the Winter", lifted off the same album as a single, is where that turn lands hardest, one account of it naming the escalating scream into the chorus as the line nobody who owns the record forgets. Nothing on Reign of Fear had either shape.
The same turn is attested up and down the German catalogue, and it takes each band about three records. Running Wild went from horned imagery in 1984 to Under Jolly Roger in 1987 and choruses built for a field. Grave Digger ran out of road in 1987 and came back to a different word. Blind Guardian made two speed metal albums before Tales from the Twilight World in 1990, and the database the scene now files by calls it speed metal early, power metal later.
The records that never changed a note
"Harder Than Steel" was recorded in 1984 and nobody has touched it since. Four minutes and fifty-four seconds, a mid-paced riff, a lyric about endurance, and a singer going up where the German bands would go up three years later. In 1985 it was speed metal. It is power metal now. Between those two sentences nothing happened to the tape.
That is where the tidy version comes apart. A reclassification following the music would have left the American records where it found them. Instead the word crossed back, and bands playing the same thing since 1983 woke up inside a genre named after German albums they had never heard.
| Band | Country | Genre as listed |
|---|---|---|
| Helloween | Germany | Power/Speed Metal |
| Running Wild | Germany | Heavy/Power/Speed Metal |
| Rage | Germany | Heavy/Speed/Power Metal |
| Grave Digger | Germany | Speed Metal (early); Heavy/Power Metal (later) |
| Blind Guardian | Germany | Speed Metal (early); Power Metal (later) |
| Jag Panzer | United States | Heavy/Power Metal |
| Agent Steel | United States | Power/Speed/Thrash Metal |
Read the third column downwards and the fault line shows itself. Not one of the seven is allowed a single word, and the two given a sequence are given the same sequence, speed first and power after, which is by common consent the shape of the whole decade.
Who moved the word
Nobody in particular, which is why no culprit can be produced when the argument starts. The German press spent seven years failing to name a scene sitting in front of it. The column heading went British in 1987; Rock Hard put out two compilations called Teutonic Invasion, in 1987 and 1988; and Teutonic became ordinary usage only around 1992. None stuck.
What stuck came off a promoter's poster rather than out of a review. The package Noise sent around Germany in October 1993, carrying Gamma Ray, Rage, Conception and Helicon, was billed as the Melodic Metal Tour, and the double live record cut from those nights, issued in 1994, was called Power of Metal. One study of the scene dates the term's arrival in Germany to that tour and nothing earlier.
That is six years after the records everybody points at. A name is the last thing a genre is handed, and by the time it arrives the music has finished forming and started arguing with the label. The earliest exponents of the American version came off worst, left holding an abbreviation no other regional scene has needed.
Where the line now falls against thrash, against traditional heavy metal and against everything else the style keeps getting confused with is the boundary chapter. It sits where it does because the word moved, and the word moved later than anybody remembers.
So the five years between Walls of Jericho and Gamma Ray's Heading for Tomorrow in 1990 left two kinds of evidence, quoted ever since as one. There are records that changed: new singers, slower riffs, bright endings, choruses written for strangers. There are records that changed nothing and were relabelled by people tidying a shelf. An argument about pedigree that will not say which of the two it means is about nothing. The oldest of them has a voice attached, and the question is Dio power metal has been running since before either word settled.
