Britain invented most of the raw material this genre was built from, exported it to California on vinyl, and then produced almost no thrash bands anybody outside Britain can name. That is an odd outcome and it is not explained by a shortage of talent, because the records are there and several of them are very good.
It is explained by arriving five years late into a country that already had a metal identity to defend, with a music press that had championed the previous thing and could not see why anybody needed this one.
Onslaught, who got there first and paid for it
Onslaught formed in Bristol in 1982 as a hardcore punk band and turned into a metal one, which makes them the closest thing Britain has to a founding thrash group. Power From Hell in 1985 is genuinely primitive and genuinely early, and The Force in 1986 is the record on which they became formidable.
Then they did what several British bands did and it went badly. A major label picked them up, and In Search Of Sanity in 1989 arrived after protracted trouble, with a new singer brought in from a traditional metal band and a production that had smoothed the edges the band existed for. It is the standard cautionary tale of the era and Britain got it worse than most.
Sabbat, and the most valuable thing the country produced
Sabbat, from Nottingham, are the best British band in this article and the least like anybody else. Martin Walkyier wrote about paganism, English history and the Christianisation of Britain, in dense, allusive, deliberately archaic language, at a moment when the American bands were writing about missiles. History Of A Time To Come in 1988 and Dreamweaver in 1989 do not sound like anything from California.
Their guitarist was Andy Sneap, and this is where the story turns. Sneap became one of the most important producers in metal, and the list of bands whose records he has made since includes Machine Head, Testament, Exodus, Megadeth, Accept and Judas Priest. Britain's thrash scene did not produce a band that conquered the world. It produced the man who made a great many of the records that did.
Britain's thrash scene did not produce a band that conquered the world. It produced the man who made a great many of the records that did.
| Band | From | The record | What they were |
|---|---|---|---|
| Onslaught | Bristol | The Force (1986) | The earliest, and the major label casualty |
| Sabbat | Nottingham | History Of A Time To Come (1988) | Paganism, English history, and Andy Sneap |
| Xentrix | Preston | For Whose Advantage? (1990) | The best played, and the most Americanised |
| Acid Reign | Harrogate | The Fear (1989) | Funny on purpose, which cost them |
| Slammer | Leeds | The Work Of Idle Hands... (1989) | Late, capable, unlucky |
| Re-Animator | London | Deny Reality (1990) | The underground end |
| Cerebral Fix | Birmingham | Life Sucks... (1988) | Crossover, from grindcore's home city |
| Lawnmower Deth | Mansfield | Ooh Crikey It's... (1990) | A joke band, entirely on purpose |
Xentrix, and the sleeve that got them sued
Xentrix from Preston were the most technically accomplished British thrash band and the most audibly American, so much so that the comparison followed them into every review they received. Shattered Existence in 1989 and For Whose Advantage? in 1990 are properly good records by any standard applied from outside Britain.
They are also remembered for something else. In 1990 they released a cover of the theme from Ghostbusters, with sleeve artwork parodying the film's poster, and the studio's lawyers objected. The record had to be withdrawn and redesigned. For a serious band, having your best known moment be a legal dispute over a novelty single is a fate nobody deserves, and it is the closest thing British thrash has to a defining anecdote.
The humour problem
Britain could not stop being funny about it, and that cost the scene more than anything except timing. Acid Reign were a properly capable band whose singer treated a stage like a comedy club, and they were filed as a novelty act by people who had not listened to The Fear. Lawnmower Deth were a joke on purpose and are, correspondingly, the British thrash band most people can name.
That instinct is national and it is usually a strength. In this genre, at that moment, it was fatal. American thrash was engaged in a decade long argument about how seriously it deserved to be taken, and the country that had supplied its founding riffs turned up to that argument doing a routine.
Anthrax got away with exactly the same thing, which shows it can be done, and the difference is that Anthrax had Among The Living to put behind the jokes. Being funny is affordable once the records are undeniable, and Britain never got the records in front of enough people to buy itself the licence.
Why it did not work
Timing. The British albums are almost all from 1988, 1989 and 1990. American thrash peaked in 1986 and the industry started losing interest in 1991, so Britain's scene occupied the two year window between the peak and the collapse. There was no good moment inside it.
Geography. Bristol, Nottingham, Preston, Harrogate, Leeds, Mansfield: this is not a scene, it is a list of towns. Nothing in Britain corresponded to the East Bay, where a dozen bands lived twenty minutes apart and improved each other weekly. British bands met on tour, which is not the same thing and is far too late.
The press. The British music papers had built the New Wave of British Heavy Metal a decade earlier and took a proprietary view of what metal from these islands should sound like. British thrash was consistently reviewed as an imitation of American bands who were themselves imitating British bands, which is both true and a hopeless position to be written about from.
What Britain did instead
It went further out. The same country and roughly the same years produced Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower and Carcass in Birmingham and Liverpool, and Earache in Nottingham to release them, and grindcore and British death metal became internationally important in exactly the way British thrash did not.
That is the real answer to why the scene looks thin. The most extreme and most inventive young musicians in Britain in 1987 did not start thrash bands, because thrash was already four years old and belonged to somebody else, and they had the option of starting something that did not exist yet. Britain skipped the parent genre and went straight to the children.
Which is the same choice made, for different reasons, in half the countries in the chapter above. Where the scene was strongest outside the two big countries, and had the fewest resources to build it with, is The Polish Thrash Explosion.
