Upstairs at a large decaying pub in Sparkhill, three miles south of the centre of Birmingham, on a floor that had carried a reggae night earlier the same week, admission a pound and on the better nights a pound fifty, in front of two hundred people who had come on the bus. The Mermaid ran gigs through the whole of the 1980s, advertised on photocopied flyers that promised all ages and no hassle, and Napalm Death appeared there often enough to have been treated as the house band ever since. British death metal was assembled in that room and in six or seven others like it. It was not assembled in a studio.
The reason is arithmetic rather than sentiment. In 1987 the country had no distributor willing to carry the records, no promoter with a diary, no chart return shop that would have known what to do with them if they had arrived, and a music press that had spent five years insisting the argument ended with thrash. What Britain did have was an anarcho punk apparatus built over the previous decade: a circuit of pub back rooms and squatted halls, a postal network for cassettes that worked because postage was cheap, and a fanzine culture running entirely on unauthorised photocopying. Death metal here is what happened when that machinery was handed to musicians who had stopped writing choruses. The genre itself, from Tampa outward, is laid out in the introduction.
The descent runs through punk, not through metal
Nothing in the English line comes down from the arenas. Discharge formed in Stoke-on-Trent in 1977 and reduced a song to two chords and a drum pattern that a generation then treated as a template; Amebix took the same reduction and slowed it into something filthy; Antisect and Conflict carried the politics and the benefit gig economy that paid for the vans. Extreme Noise Terror formed in Ipswich in 1985 out of exactly that world. Napalm Death themselves had started in Meriden in 1981 as an anarcho punk band with a rotating cast and a set of principles, and the thing they are remembered for was the fourth or fifth idea they had, not the first.
What that world produced first was a record made twice. Scum was cut in two halves at Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham, side A in August 1986 and side B in May 1987, and between the two sessions everybody was replaced except the drummer. Nicholas Bullen, Justin Broadrick and Mick Harris made the first side. Lee Dorrian, Bill Steer, Jim Whitely and Harris made the second. Digby Pearson put close to the whole of his savings into the recording, the sleeve and the promotion, two thousand copies were pressed in June 1987, the album came out on 1 July, and after Radio 1 broadcast the band's Peel session on 22 September that year it sold something in the region of ten thousand copies inside a few weeks. Broadrick went on to Godflesh, Dorrian to Cathedral, Steer to Carcass. One album, three further careers, and nothing about it planned.
Radio 1 did the work a distributor could not
The single most useful piece of infrastructure the British scene had was a disc jockey with a late slot and no supervision. A Peel session paid a Musicians' Union fee, was recorded properly, and went out to a national audience at an hour when the alternative for these bands was five hundred cassettes and a stack of stamped envelopes. Extreme Noise Terror were broadcast on 2 December 1987, Bolt Thrower on 13 January 1988, Napalm Death on 20 April 1988, and the sessions kept coming for another three years. Earache eventually collected the whole of it across three discs in 2009 as Grind Madness at the BBC, which is the only reason a good deal of it is audible at all.
| Band | Home | First broadcast | Sessions recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extreme Noise Terror | Ipswich | 2 December 1987 | 1987, 1988, February 1990 |
| Bolt Thrower | Coventry | 13 January 1988 | Two in 1988, one in July 1990 |
| Napalm Death | Birmingham | 20 April 1988 | 1987, 1988, August 1990 |
Set against the rest of the continent, that is an enormous advantage and it is worth naming as one. The Dutch had a functioning label inside their own borders. The Germans had two companies with working accounts and a mail order list. The polish death metal bands had a state record industry that did not want them and no shop that could legally order the albums they were copying. British bands had a national broadcaster reading their post office box numbers out on air, which is a form of distribution no money could buy and no committee had approved.
Seven nights in November
The scene acquired a spine on 10 November 1989, when Earache put four bands into vans and ran them across the country for a week. Grindcrusher took Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, Carcass and Morbid Angel through seven shows in seven days, opening in Manchester on the 10th, passing through Edinburgh, Middlesbrough Town Hall, Rock City in Nottingham on the 14th and St George's Hall in Bradford on the 15th, and finishing in London on the 16th. It was the first tour any of the three British bands had done with a professional booking agent behind it. Bolt Thrower were paid a hundred pounds a night. Carcass, by Jeff Walker's account, were paid nothing at all.
It was the first time we had nightliners and stuff like that.
Shane Embury of Napalm Death, Decibel, 9 June 2016
The attendances tell the same story from the other side. Karl Willetts has said the bands considered themselves fortunate if two hundred people turned up to an ordinary show, and the Grindcrusher nights drew as many as a thousand, though Middlesbrough Town Hall was three quarters empty and looked it. A week of that was enough to prove there was a national audience rather than seven local ones, which is the fact the whole decade after it rests on.
Weight instead of speed
Recognised almost immediately as the heaviest thing the country produced, and formed in September 1986 by two men who met in a pub toilet during a hardcore show in Coventry, Bolt Thrower did the one thing nobody in Florida had thought worth doing, which was to take the tempo down and refuse to give it back. Gavin Ward and Barry Thomson started it, Jo Bench came in on bass in 1987 and stayed for the whole of the band's life, and the result was a guitar tone with the weight of moving earth behind it and a rhythm section that will not be hurried under any circumstances. Speed was the American measure. Coventry answered with tonnage.
Speed was the American measure. Coventry answered with tonnage, and thirty years later nobody has taken the record off them.
Benediction came out of Birmingham in 1989 and were funded from Donzdorf, a town of eleven thousand people in southern Germany where Nuclear Blast had set up two years earlier, which is a fair summary of how British bands were financed once the demos started travelling. Cancer went the opposite way. Formed in 1988 at the Tontine pub in Ironbridge by Carl Stokes, John Walker and Ian Buchanan, they flew to Morrisound in Tampa and had Scott Burns produce Death Shall Rise in 1991, with James Murphy playing lead guitar and Glen Benton singing backing vocals, then signed to a major and had Black Faith mixed at Britannia Row in 1995. The major dropped them and the band folded the following year. Both routes worked and neither was safe.
What is left of the room
The scene outlived its venues by a wide margin. Bolt Thrower lost the drummer Martin Kearns on 14 September 2015 at the age of 38, and disbanded on the first anniversary of his death, with Willetts stating publicly two days later that there would be no reunion tours and no compromise. Memoriam was assembled in early 2016 by Willetts and the Bolt Thrower drummer Andy Whale with Frank Healy and Scott Fairfax, and has released albums steadily since; Whale left in 2020 and Spike T. Smith took the drum stool. Benediction are still on Nuclear Blast thirty five years after their first album, with Dave Ingram back at the microphone and Ravage of Empires issued in April 2025. Cancer reformed in 2013 and now record for Peaceville.
The Mermaid closed as a music venue long before any of that, and in 2024 Historic England commissioned a short film, At the Mermaid, about a pub whose main contribution to the culture was an upstairs room and a lax attitude to noise complaints. The building went up for sale. The records are the durable part, and the roll call of who made them, from Coventry in 1986 to the bands recording now, belongs to the survey of english Death Metal Bands.
