Thrash on MTV: Headbangers Ball and "One"

For about four years a television programme broadcast on Saturday nights was the single most important promotional channel this genre had, and the bands who had spent the decade insisting they did not need television were on it every week.

What Headbangers Ball did, and what one video for a nine minute song about a mutilated soldier did, is most of the reason thrash reached arenas at all.

Before the television

Between 1982 and 1986 this music was distributed by fanzines, compilations, college radio, mail order and the post. That network was extraordinarily effective at reaching people who were already looking and completely useless at reaching anybody who was not.

The oddest early exception is that the bass line from "Peace Sells" was used on American television as a news music bumper for years, which put a Megadeth riff in front of millions of people who had no idea what it was.

Headbangers Ball

The programme began in 1987, ran on Saturday nights, and gave over several hours a week to hard rock and metal videos on a channel that otherwise had almost no interest in either.

What made it matter was not taste but volume. A band with a video suddenly had access to an audience of teenagers across an entire continent, in secondary cities where no fanzine circulated and no shop stocked the record. For a genre whose distribution had been the post office, that was a change of scale rather than a change of degree.

It also broadened what the audience heard. The show mixed thrash with hair metal, traditional metal and everything else, so a viewer who tuned in for one thing was exposed to the rest, which is exactly the accident that builds a mainstream.

The video

Metallica had refused to make videos for six years, on the grounds that the format belonged to bands who needed help. In 1988 they made one, for a nine minute song narrated from inside the body of a soldier who has lost his limbs and his senses, using footage licensed from a 1971 film.

It went into heavy rotation. A song that difficult, that long and that bleak reached an audience of millions who had never gone looking for anything like it, and the album reached number six in America.

Every band in the genre benefited from what followed, and within two years thrash was on arena package tours. Within three, the same channel had moved on to something else.

What it cost

The obvious objection was made at the time and it was not entirely wrong. A genre built on the principle that you do not need permission from anybody had become dependent on a programming decision made in an office in New York, and when that decision changed there was no fallback.

The subtler cost is that videos are expensive, which meant they were made by bands with major label budgets, which meant the gap between the top tier and everybody else widened sharply. A second rank band with a good album in 1989 was now competing with a band who had a film.

What replaced it

Nothing, for about fifteen years, which is a substantial part of why the 1990s were as bad as they were. The television window closed, the club circuit collapsed, the fanzine network had already been outgrown, and there was no channel left that reached anybody new.

What eventually replaced it was the internet, and specifically free access to the back catalogue. A teenager in 2006 could hear a 1986 record in ten seconds, which is a considerably better distribution system than a Saturday night programme, and it is the mechanism behind the entire revival.

What the audience wore while all of this was happening is its own subject: Thrash Fashion. The full account of the period is in The Golden Years.

The European version

Britain and Europe had their own routes and they mattered more in the long run, because they did not disappear in 1992.

Kerrang! and Metal Hammer carried the music in print at a scale no American magazine matched, and the British press had been taking metal seriously years before the American one noticed. Radio and television were thinner, but the festival circuit was substantial: Dynamo in the Netherlands, Monsters of Rock at Donington, and later Wacken, all putting American thrash bands in front of European crowds who knew every word.

That difference explains a great deal about the following decade. When the American channel changed format and the American clubs stopped booking, the European infrastructure kept going, and several of these bands spent the 1990s working continuously three thousand miles from an audience that assumed they had split up.

What the videos actually looked like

Cheap, mostly, and better for it. The standard thrash video of 1988 is the band playing in a warehouse, or a disused building, or a room with a strobe in it, cut fast, in high contrast, with very little narrative.

That template survived because it was honest about what the band was for. The attempts at something more ambitious have mostly aged badly, and the exception is the one that started it all, which worked precisely because the imagery came from a film rather than from a director trying to invent something in a week.

The thirty six year postscript

In 2022 a television programme used a song from 1986 in a scene, and the song entered the American singles chart for the first time in its life, thirty six years after release, and reached the top thirty.

That is the same mechanism as 1988 operating on a different platform, and it says something about how this music has always worked. The audience was never the problem. The channel was. Given a route to people who had not gone looking for it, a nine minute song about a mutilated soldier reached millions in 1988 and a 1986 album track reached the charts in 2022.

Which is a reasonable argument that thrash was never niche music. It was mainstream music with no way of getting to the mainstream, for most of its existence.

Sources and notes

Broadcast details refer to the American programme. Chart positions are Billboard 200 peaks for original American releases.