Biff Byford has never dressed this up. The first album, he told Louder years later, had sold about twelve thousand copies, mainly to people who had followed the band under its previous name, and to be honest it wasn't very good. Carrere had noticed. One more like that and the deal was gone.
So Saxon went into Ramport Studios in London in February 1980 with Pete Hinton producing and Will Reid Dick engineering, and came out with nine songs and thirty nine minutes that did what the debut had not: sounded like a record rather than a rehearsal with the tape running. It came out on 3 April 1980. It reached number five in the UK, stayed on the chart for twenty nine weeks, and went gold. Byford sang, Graham Oliver and Paul Quinn played guitar, Steve Dawson played bass, Pete Gill drummed. Nobody in that room was famous in March. By the summer they were on the bill at Donington.
The thing everybody agrees on, and I mean everybody, from AllMusic through Sputnikmusic to the Metal Archives crowd who agree on nothing, is Byford. He is the reason this works. He does not shriek, he does not do the operatic thing that was already becoming compulsory elsewhere in 1980, he just sings the song in a big northern voice with enough restraint left over that when he does push, you notice. There is a lesson in that which about four hundred bands over the following decade declined to learn.
"Motorcycle Man" opens the record and more or less opens the genre, ninety seconds in and you have the whole NWOBHM template: the twin guitars, the gallop, the chorus you can shout at a bus stop. "747 (Strangers in the Night)" is the best song on it and the one that went top fifteen as a single, carrying a melody Saxon never quite bettered. "See the Light Shining" is the one the connoisseurs pick, and they have a point. And the title track is a lovely bit of evidence about how this band actually worked: the main riff is repeated almost the whole way through, no development, no clever middle eight, and it does not matter in the slightest, because the riff is good and the singer sells it.
Now the awkward parts, because a record this old gets graded too kindly by people who were there. "Stand Up and Be Counted" is the one that has aged worst and AllMusic said so long before I did. The rhythm section, as one Sputnikmusic reviewer put it bluntly, does not stand out in any way at all, and once you have heard that you cannot unhear it: Dawson and Gill hold the thing together and never once threaten to do anything else. And the production is thin by any modern measure, everything pushed into the red, the guitars sometimes drifting out of tune with each other.
The roughness is not a flaw the band would have fixed with more money. It is the sound of a group playing slightly beyond what they could reliably do.
I would not have it cleaned up. The version of this album where the drums are properly recorded and the guitars are in perfect agreement is a worse album, and we have forty years of remasters proving the point on other people's records. What is here is a band in a hurry with one shot left, playing songs about motorbikes and aeroplanes with total conviction and no irony whatsoever, which is harder to do than it sounds and impossible to fake later.
Where it sits against Strong Arm of the Law and Denim and Leather is a question the band's own audience has been arguing about since roughly 1982 and will not settle now. Louder puts this one a whisker ahead. AllMusic treats the three as one body of work and refuses to rank them. My own view is that the next album is tighter and this one is braver, and bravery is worth more at the start of a run than polish is.
Forty six years on, these songs are still in the set every night, which is exactly the trap this kind of record sets: it becomes the thing a band is allowed to be forever. That is not the album's fault. On its own terms, in its own spring, it is one of the two or three records that made a British scene into a genre, and it still moves.