This weekend I’ll mostly be listening to… the NWOBHM…

For this I blame EamonnCork. It was a comment of his a while back which got me thinking about the NWOBHM – and many of you will be able to unbundle that particular acronym as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, a sub-genre of rock which lurched into view around 1979-81. If the names Gillan, Iron Maiden, Saxon, Mama’s Boys, Vardis, Tank, Diamond Head, Preying Mantis, Motorhead, and a score of others mean nothing to you then perhaps stop now. But if not…read on. EamonnCork has added some extra text and advice which you’ll find in quotes – for which many thanks.

The roots of NWOBHM

Recently I was toying with the idea of putting up a post in this series about Gillan, that is Ian Gillan, late of Deep Purple (and… er, briefly Black Sabbath). And then it struck me that it was near impossible to go through his solo albums because what he, and groups like his, represented was something that was more a movement than an individual enterprise. And crucially they represented a period where singles rather than albums dominated and when in that respect metal briefly took over the mantle of punk bridging a gap as punk turned into post-punk and thence on to territories new. And what a time. I have a few old SOUNDS magazines from 1981 and 1982 and nearly every issue contains interviews and reviews of metal bands who were charting regularly.

So to look at Gillan in isolation from the NWOBHM would be to almost miss the point of the exercise. Part of the appeal was that this was a wave, a movement and therefore examining any single individual in isolation during that period is to detach them from everything else going on.

That said, the fact that an elder statesman, I exaggerate – but only slightly, like Gillan [then in his mid-30s] could join the fray – albeit away from the sludgey and torpid riff of “Smoke on the Water” Deep Purple had always had a speedy element to their output – was in its own way a telling indication of where metal and the NWOBHM were going.

These weren’t the big beasts of the 1970s, the Zeppelin’s and Yes’s whom punk had loathed (and who would later be redeemed, at least in the former case by critics – Yes, of course, took the fairly clever route into pop by way of one Trevor Horn to arrive at 90125, whose title made no sense to me in the early 1980s I should add). Whatever else one could say about Purple, or Sabbath who would also run a parallel course with the arrival of Ronnie James Dio as lead singer, they had remarkably little pretension. And importantly Gillan when solo was consciously or otherwise mining the rock’n’roll classics and putting them out as singles – many of which were successful.

In a way the NWOBHM was a natural progression from the stripped down rock that Bon Scott era AC/DC and Motorhead were already producing and both those were hardly much more than an added guitar solo away from punk itself [AC/DC were popular at punk clubs]. Both those bands, albeit with a brief hiatus for the former after Bon Scott died, continued to have hits during this period. Curiously though, AC/DC shifted to a slower style of music after their seminal Back in Black with new singer Brian Johnson.

There’s one other influence that’s worth thinking about. That is Van Halen. Their brand of stripped down, speeded up metal as typified on their first two or three albums – the first was recorded in a near live context with mistakes retained – can be heard across a raft of NWOBHM bands. “On Fire” from their solo album, if one removes Dave Lee Roth’s typically over the top vocals could comfortably sit on many NWOBHM albums.

Therefore it’s not difficult to see this tilt by all these bands and later the NWOBHM towards a faster harder form of metal as either a direct response by heavy rock to punk, a reworking of its tropes and a blending of them into the mix or a process of convergence that was already in train.

And there’s arguably an age aspect to this. The older rock and metal bands had been around quite some time. Some, like Zeppelin had – for all their aesthetic integrity – moved a long way from the small clubs and venues that they had started in. The gap between them and their audiences was too great, too obvious, particularly when set against the speedy noisy and exciting racket emerging from punk, something directly positioned in a sense that anyone – literally anyone – could pick up a guitar and play.

The NWOBHM was a wave and one that pulled in a range of bands in its wake, even those like Lizzy [listen to Thunder and Lightening, their last album and the influence of the NWOBHM is self-evident] and Mama’s Boy’s who were geographically distinct. But that didn’t matter because metal completists were [and perhaps still are] at least twice as dedicated as the most fervant collector of 4AD albums. And hence you’d find Gary Moore nestling up against Metallica in vinyl collections even if, on the face of it, their styles are utterly diverse – simply they both use amped up guitars and because metal is a broad and inclusive church and always happy to open the door for new worshipers while keeping a generally benign eye on apostates. Simple geography wasn’t going to matter even in the context of something with the word ‘British’ in its title.

Class, politics and gender

No, no. Don’t laugh. This is serious stuff. Well, somewhat serious. In class terms metal listenership was mixed, at least in Irish terms. In the mid 1980s I was in charge of a group in a youth club on the northside. Those participating could be divided broadly speaking into two groups, a group of twenty or so working class kids who were into reggae and nowt else – and two middle class boys who were into metal – but in school in Kilbarrack hardly five years earlier it was much much more widely listened to (albeit there was an age aspect to the profile, as people aged they transitioned into post-punk). And bands like Lizzy had a broad class demographic (and as an aside you might wonder how much of that transferred to the more radio friendly post-October incarnation of U2).

I also made a couple of phone calls today and the lads I spoke to had the same memory as I had of heavy metal i.e. that it had the most proletarian followers of all. We’re talking West of Ireland here and Dublin may be very different. But I, and they, remember that the hard core of metal fans were the lads who came from council estates or the guys from small farms out the country who tended to be in trouble with the law and ended up either emigrating, joining the army or working in garages. In fact it was almost a 100% working class thing, anyone destined for college tended to look down their nose at it though given that it was by far the most popular genre of music around in rural Ireland, everyone had some nodding acquaintance with it and nobody could resist the charms of AC/DC at a disco. Headbanging was popular given that we were (A) very shy with girls and afraid to ask them to dance and (B) aware that the proper dance to snyth pop was a great deal more sophisticated and camp than we were going to chance in a local hall. But the real devotees, the guys with a million patches and all the albums were a pretty tough bunch. They also took music more seriously than anyone else, they were forever getting away to gigs, usually with older brothers who had full-time jobs in their teens. I travelled with a couple of them to the U-2 Croke Park gig in 1985 (still think it was a great concert by the way) but the lads complained that it was a poor spectacle compared to something like Monsters of Rock and that U-2’s showmanship fell far short of what you’d get from Maiden or Motorhead. There was also the sense in which being a HM devotee was shorthand for being a hard bastard in the same way that being into Kung-Fu had been in the seventies and wearing a Celtic jersey is today.

As EamonnCork noted in the original comment that kicked this off it was a lingua franca, and it was then and remains so ever since. I’m never more comfortable discussing music than with metal fans because the reference points are so clear. The canon is agreed and then it tends to be a matter of finding new or obscure acts.

But let’s be honest, there was no end of sneering from others. Those who had been into punk had by 1980-82 moved onto post-punk and all the myriad streams that flowed from there. It might, though, be fair to note that those who were 16 in 1976 were just about hitting their 20s in 1980 when the next cohort behind them got into metal. That’s no gap at all when you’re 30, but at 16… And metal, or rock more broadly, had taken a big hit after punk, one which it took the best part of a decade to recover, but ironically it was the energy and dynamics of the first part of the NWOBHM which was most influential musically, rather than the imagery of the second part which came to characterise (or infest if you will) metal more broadly.

Politically… well there wasn’t much politics. This wasn’t music advocating a confrontation with the state, let alone the man. Listen to the lyrics of “Strong Arm of the Law” by Saxon detailing the band being pulled over on a drug bust by the cops who discover to their surprise that despite “the clothes they wear and the way they look” they don’t have any drugs. Hmmm… you’d have to have a heart of stone not to find that just the tiniest bit funny, and not for the reasons Saxon might think. But am I slagging Saxon? I am not. Their “Princess of the Night”, a paean to a train was pretty fine, their “Denim and Leather” an odd little bit of almost self-reflection in a genre which didn’t usually bother with such matters. Their “Dallas 1 P.M.” about the assassination of JFK, well let’s just say it was an oddity.

“Strangers In The Night” is a great song and Saxon could be very good indeed. “Denim and Leather” [is] a rare self referential anthem about rock fandom and it does epitomise the closeness between band and fans which seemed unique to HM. It was certainly absent from punk, most of whose leading figures seemed to regard their fans with contempt and irritation. I think there was a certain old fashioned working class decency idea in HM about giving people an honest couple of hours entertainment when they handed over their money

For all the sturm und drang of the guitars and drums, or the overblown lyrical content – particularly when it strayed into matters fantastical, it was fairly safe stuff. One will search mostly in vain for the reports of metal-heads on the rampage in city centres. Injuries where they occurred tended to be mostly self-inflicted, but let’s not go there. Sexism. Well, yes and no. Few would dare to argue that there was much progressive thinking going on there. But in some respects it was remarkably coy – bar the occasional foray into bad taste or worse again outright misogyny [and a big hello there to Venom, amongst others].

If we consider sexuality more broadly it might be unkind to say that this betrayed the concerns of your typical early to mid adolescent male in Ireland [and perhaps the UK at the time], unkind, but not entirely inaccurate. It is best seen as being typical of the issue and reality of sex for them, an aspiration rather than a concrete reality and therefore not unduly overshadowed by more important issues like having an [usually unspecified but generally involving alcohol] good time.

Which is not to say it was entirely male oriented, but women made up only a small number of the bands – though more of the fans – involved, albeit interestingly these were all-women groups rather than being women fronted. And so Girlschool and Rock Goddess, to name but two, because there were just about two(! – though well I remember Lita Ford, more or less straight from the Runaways and others attempts to jump upon the bandwagon a couple of years later), also had more than a hint of that punk DIY ethos. And a punk sound. Listen to “C’mon Let’s Go” by Girlschool and you can hear Ramones DNA threaded through it – I have the single on vinyl somewhere. And Girlschool were not merely great in their own right but also released with Motorhead a dynamic cover of “Please Don’t Touch”…

The Motorhead/Girlschool record is great though amazingly the best bit, the whispered intro, is on the original Johnny Kidd and The Pirates record. Now there was a band who were miles ahead of our time. Girlschool, as far as I remember, managed to avoid being seen as sex objects (at least in comparison with almost all mainstream female groups today), you tended to think they’d be great to have on your side in a fight. The singer and guitarist, name escapes me, had serious cred with male HM musicians but died of cancer in her forties. Very few of the HM people are dead, compared to the punk people, I suspect this may have something to do with the choice of alcohol rather than heroin as drug du jour. It doesn’t do much for you long term but it doesn’t kill you as quickly oy by accident.

Image and music…

And if much of this was unquestionably juvenile, not all of it was. Lemmy, cool as fuck in 1980, was an undeniably adult presence amongst the fresh faces, was perhaps in some sense modern in a way that many of the others weren’t and never would be. But then Motorhead, even with the leather waistcoats somehow had a pared down imagery both musically and visually that transcended most of the sub-theatrical nonsense that others were getting up to.

Which neatly leads us to the output of NWOBHM itself? Ah well, here we run into trouble. Let’s just say that in relation to lyrics and image there were problems. Big problems.

Consider, if you will, Exhibit A – “Breaking the Law” by Judas Priest. In a way this sums up the best and worst of the NWOBHM, and that’s before we get to the fact that Judas Priest had been around for years before the movement took flight. How many years? Well they were founded in 1970 and released their first album in 1974.

First the good. A song, a short song with no real guitar solo. The lyrics? They’d grace many a punk band perfectly. Quite a step forward for a metal band. But then there’s the step backwards, this being metal. The video. The video. Fer Christ’s sake, the video. They hold up a bank with guitars? Believe it or not this was made by Julien Temple of Pistol’s fame. Was he serious? Were they? Who can tell, but the evidence of later videos isn’t comforting.

And where Judas Priest went others followed with a will. Within a couple of years if we examine that remarkable cultural artifact, the video to their song “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming”, we can see Rob Halford had adopted a mixture of sub-bondage leather and studs style which was taken up by Iron Maiden and others (perhaps most entertainingly by US based metal crowd Manowar who almost incomprehensibly ‘refined’ this to a mock Viking/caveman look, and fun fact for completists let’s not forget their first album treated us to a spoken narration by Orson Welles).

That Halford later came out as a gay man was little surprise to most of us and of no great significance I suspect to most of his legion of fans, typifying a beery and usually good-natured indifference to such matters.

I think in the BBC4 doc Metal Britannia Halford actually says that he’d picked up a lot of the stage gear during his voyages in the world of gay S and M and thought it amusing to see the fans and bands following suit. There’s a great documentary about the trial JP went through in America, and I remember thinking at the time how like the West of Ireland the place was, religious fundamentalism, stasis, a general feeling that life was elsewhere. We needed, as my friend Mike McCormack (a great and grievously under-rated writer) songs about hard rocking men loving foxy ladies on the lonely boulevards in the heart of the city.

Def Leppard perhaps characterised the worst excesses of this. One brilliant album – their third if I count correctly, or possibly their second, Pyromania, produced not coincidentally by Jeff ‘Mutt’ Lange (long-time AC/DC producer) followed by a dubious succession of ever more pop-rock output that has, almost incredibly, continued to this very day [it’s also worth asking just how influential they were on a later generation of hair metal bands. Well, okay, maybe not that much worth asking].

And these image problems persisted.

Consider too the rather brilliant Tank, whose lead singerAlgy Ward had been in the Damned and before that the Saints – my God, the man was almost a punk aristocrat – and who arguably were the clearest example of a punk/metal crossover, not least because they modelled their approach very very closely to that of Motorhead. Great songs which eschewed much of the swords and sorcery nonsense of their peers, but gaze in wonder at the cover of their album Filth Hounds of Hades, and what of that title… dear oh dear oh dear.

Diamond Head, whose first album contained the none-more-influential “Am I Evil”, didn’t do themselves any favours in the appearance wars either, with a look that was rooted in that of Zeppelin circa 1974. Speaking of “Am I Evil”, listen to that and you’ll see or hear that it provided a template for more than one or two tracks later put to vinyl by Metallica [and the influence was acknowledged by the latter band]. That their second album proper, Canterbury, saw them transform into a cross between prog and a metal inflected new wave/pop did them no favours with their fan base, but made for an interesting and on occasions quite excellent listen.

One genuinely disturbing track from Diamond Head. I think the band, and Venom, meant it man. In the Metal Britannia doc you get the impression that DH might well have taken the old satanic side of things seriously. And people did, I knew lads who were obsessed with rumours of black mass and animal sacrifice in the rural countryside. And Bishop of Achonry Thomas Flynn called in local teachers to warn them that there were satanic messages in HM records if you played them backwards. Which was pretty observant for a man who couldn’t spot a rampant paedophile priest in our village. I used to be fond of the Canterbury album, it’s an odd thing, they’re really trying to create something beautiful but they don’t have the vocal or lyrical chops to do it, yet it’s an extremely gallant failure.

Then there’s Iron Maiden. I’m well old enough to remember the first incarnation with Paul Dianno on vocals, and in particular their breathless classic “Women in Uniform”, a cover of Australian band The Skyhooks. Listen to either of their first two albums, and you can hear on songs like Running Free that punk/metal crossover. Sure, the guitar solos are there, but the singing is rudimentary and all the better for it (indeed listen to most Oi bands, The Business spring to mind most immediately, and you hear a convergence from the other side of the musical Berlin Wall – and a better example again are Discharge who music was clearly inflected by NWOBHM guitar sounds but who remained very clearly punk in output and attitude).

After that the Bruce Dickenson version never quite measured up in my estimation [though, and I’ve mentioned it before, an infrequent contributor to the CLR is known to have been quite the fan in his day]. Sure, “Run to the Hills” is speedy, but it’s glib and if Saxon used the front page of the Sunday Mirror in one hand for their inspiration, Dickenson-era Iron Maiden always seemed to have a copy of Dennis Wheatley or some novel about 19th century soldiery in the other. But that’s a personal gripe. Who am I to complain? I don’t have to listen to them [one could note also the way in which their imagery was appropriated by Loyalism, a charming cultural cross-pollination to some, to others…].

Or listen to The Tygers of Pan Tangs first album, Wildcat. Their singer at the time, Jess Cox, also exemplified that punk vocals style with a flat but oddly compelling approach – and the guitar work when it eases out of a sub-Pistols chugging is pretty odd too with lots of U2 styled harmonics in the background. An album later – clearly following the Iron Maiden trail – they had jettisoned Cox and taken up with the more rock oriented Jon Deverill on vocals whose tenure saw them have a reasonably big hit with a cover of “Love Potion No.9”. Again, note the way in which, like Gillan, they too were mining older pop and rock and roll standards to give a poppy but abrasive edge to their output.

One of the curiosities of the NWOBHM was how it included some and excluded others. Priest got in, but UFO stayed firmly on the outside. Their 1981 album No Place to Run, produced by George Martin, wasn’t at the races. Perhaps because UFO, unlike Priest didn’t transition their sound to something more hard edged and speedier but remained locked in a more blues influenced style. Others, such as Sabbath managed to speed up but remained somewhat offside. But then in some ways having written Paranoid they could with justification point to being the earliest adapters. Ozzy was there or thereabouts with “Crazy Train” and some of the tracks off Diary of A Madman being equally speedy, but already there was a strong whiff of cheese and the west coast about the enterprise.

Then there’s bands like Jameson Raid with their “Seven Days of Splendour” (and hat-tip to EamonnCork for this one, I’d never heard of them). Listen to them and they seem to more neatly into a Pink Fairies/Hawkwind early 1970s lineage mixed with an element of punk and more than an hint of Thin Lizzy [and expect the Pink Fairies to feature in a This Weekend… soon]. And then one listens to “Do It The Hard Way” [the studio version is unavailable on YouTube] and it sounds like a direct precursor of late Kyuss and early Queens of the Stone Age. Funny that.

And for something not entirely dissimilar look at Vardis whose first album 100 MPH was actually a live recording. They were crossing into the NWOBHM from pretty traditional glam/boogie roots with a side order of punk. Their sound isn’t really like any of the others to be found here, but none the worse at that. And they had an excellent cover of Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” on their second album.

Preying Mantis – again a tip from EamonnCork – came from an entirely different place being more melodic, AOR and even prog in their approach. Though their “Panic in The Streets” has an interesting edge to it more characteristic is that descending scale which underpins their classic “Children Of The Earth”, not unfamiliar perhaps to those of us who have listened to Rush. Oh yes. As are the multi-tracked vocals on the chorus to those who have allowed the odd Journey album to grace their CD player. But hey, broad church… broad church, folks.

It’s fair to say that one significant problem for the NWOBHM, indeed metal more widely, in the 1980s and afterwards was the release of Spinal Tap, and yes, it’s far too easy to slot much of this into that perspective. Because some of it was awful. Terrible. But it was never entirely clear to me whether Tap was parodying Sabbath era bands or newer arrivals – perhaps both. Either way it in its own way locked into the styles of metal that developed in that decade.

And what of our own contribution to the erm … NW of British Heavy Metal… Mama’s Boy’s. Nice lads who made the sensible decision to modulate their own soft Irish tones by treating the vocals.

Generally treated as a joke band because they were self deprecating and prone to publicity stunts. But Needle In The Groove is great and so are In “The Heat Of The Night” and the brilliant “Freedom Fighters”

Talking of which the latter had a sort of political content. Sort of.

And if “Needle in the Groove” bears certain similarities to “The Strong Arm of the Law” by Saxon, to pick two songs at random, then that’s okay. Venom’s “Angel Dust” was but a hop skip and a jump from Motorhead. And but a further hop skip and a jump to black metal, death metal and so on, and that was both a function of Venom’s interest in all things occult (a trait shared by Diamond Head) and of the music itself. That’s how this worked.

Indeed one aspect of metal, and this was very true of the time and to some extent continues to this day, was a sort of reverence of earlier waves, so to see this as Year Zero in the way punk was, with a similar kicking over the statues of predecessors, would be incorrect. Those into NWOBHM didn’t forswear Purple or Zeppelin or UFO or Rainbow (Rainbow itself was marginally influenced by these goings on and had a number of hits with Graham Bonnet, and later Joe Lynn Turner, fronting them during much the same period, when Ritchie Blackmore adopted a harder edged guitar sound), or Rory Gallagher, or whoever.

And again speaking of an Irish influence as Eamonncork notes:

Parochial point. There were two Dubs in Gillan, Bernie Torme on guitar and Liam Genockey on drums. I always found it amusing that Bernie Torme was actually Bernie Tormey and have had hours of amusement referring to a well known FG figure as Bill Torme at election time.

Everything rocks and nothing ever dies – the rise and fall [and sort of rise again] of the NWOBHM

There are those who argue that the departure of Dianno from Iron Maiden was the death knell for the NWOBHM. And there’s something in that. Look at the differences between Dianno fronted Maiden and Dickenson fronted Maiden or what of the difference between the videos for “Breaking the Law” and “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming”, a mere couple of years between punk roots and seeing it dissolve into metal, all metal.

In fairness though, metal wasn’t the same after the NWOBHM. But then, neither was punk with parallel and intermixed evolutionary processes evident thereafter, particularly, but not exclusively, as regards hardcore.

And it provided an even clearer path for later metal bands who were in no way shy about articulating their debt to punk as much as heavy rock.

As for the NWOBHM itself, it’s amazing how influential this stuff was on Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth who bear the same relationship to it as Oasis bear to The Beatles. Your point about Lizzy is well made, their late albums are hugely influenced by the movement. Of course they acknowledged this by poaching John Sykes from Tygers of Pantang, thus ruining maybe the best band of the lot.

One great benefit was a sense that barriers began to come down between the two areas. Read the comments under many of these clips on YouTube and see how the Pistols and the Clash are thrown in as reference points those into NWOBHM should also be listening to. Read Kerrang! or RockSound today [not that I necessarily am suggesting you should] and you’ll see how both areas and others are now regarded as being interlinked in many ways to an extent that still seems remarkable to me thirty odd years later.

It’s also remarkable to see Def Leppard still gigging. Remarkable, yes, but you wouldn’t catch me at one of those gigs. For me their [first and] last moment was Pyromania. Maiden, Priest and even Saxon are still out there. Most others forgotten, which in some cases is a pity, in others – not so much. Jameson Raid are apparently back together for a gig this summer. Preying Mantis are still gigging. It’s like Robert Christgau once wrote… and not necessarily in a positive way… Everything rocks and nothing ever dies.

So, finally, was it any good. Ach, sure, as Theodore Sturgeon, the US science fiction author wrote,

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.[1]

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

Which leaves 10%, but that’s okay, generally the singles are the ones to listen to. And if we can turn the amps up to 11 maybe more than 10%…

AC/DC – Girls Got Rhythm

Van Halen – On Fire

Gillan – No Easy Way

Gillan – New Orleans [live]

Motorhead – Ace of Spades

Judas Priest – Breaking the Law

Judas Priest – You’ve Got Another Thing Coming

Iron Maiden – Running Free [with Paul Dianno]

Iron Maiden Run to the Hills

Girlschool – C’mon lets go

Girlschool/Motorhead – Please Don’t Touch (1981)

Jameson Raid – Seven Days of Splendour

Saxon – Strong Arm of the Law

Saxon – Denim and Leather

Diamond Head – Am I evil

Tygers of Pan Tang – Suzie Smiled

Tygers of Pan Tang – Blackjack

Venom – Angel Dust

Mama’s Boys – Needle in the Groove

Mama’s Boys – Freedom Fighters

In the Heat of the Night [live from Reading]

Angel Witch – Angel Witch

Tank – Struck by Lightening

Vardis – Let’s Go

Black Sabbath – Mob Rules

Preying Mantis – Children of the Earth

Preying Mantis – Panic in the Streets

Def Leppard Rock! Rock! TIl You Drop

Thin Lizzy – Cold Sweat [John Sykes from Tygers of Pan Tang was the guitarist]