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The first few years of the 1980s were massively dramatic for the development of heavy metal as a distinctive genre, as it underwent a startling metamorphosis from a murky indistinct corner of the heavy rock scene into a distinct entity with its own sets of rules, styles, and stereotypes.

Stadium rock ruled the heavy world in the late 70s. Fans of the harder side of things freely moved within a songlist that had nasty rockers like AC/DC and Judas Priest, and larger-than-life mega-rock gods like Queen and The Scorpions. Heavy metal, as such, was really just another term (allegedly American) for what the British liked to call heavy rock. In other words, here was music that was simply a heavier, nastier version of what lots and lots of bands were doing at a variety of levels of nastiness. Blue Oyster Cult, for example (I can’t be bothered to type in the stupid umlauts), often gets lumped in with the heavy metal genre, but I challenge you to find virtually anything in their mid-70s catalague which is remotely heavy in any kind of more modern sense.

Denim-clad scruffs yearning for the hard stuff in the latter half of the 70s had to be content with a much broader definition of the term heavy metal, and if you look at heavy metal listening charts even through to 1980, you tend to find lots of appearances put in by groups rarely included with the genre today, such as Heart, or Rush. Even AC/DC, with their high-voltage trappings, are probably more accurately termed hard rock, though their popularity was so massive at the time, and their aesthetic so perfectly suited to metalheads, that it’s no surprise they were popular with the metal crowd.

Yet by 1982, and even more so in 1983, the whole hard rock world had undergone a startling transformation, and the heavy metal we know today had been born and reached a certain maturity. What had happened in the intervening couple of years to make the genre coalesce so rapidly?

It was, of course, the advent of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and the rapid dissemination of its updated heavy rock notions throughout the world. The link between late 70s heavy rock and mid-80s heavy metal is almost entirely on the shoulders of the NWOBHM, which partly explains how the term continues to evoke bleary-eyed romanticism in metalheads to this day.

Part of this is a generational thing, as successive waves of young hopefuls hit their late teens, inspired by the past but pushing things along to a new level — the groups debuting their first releases in one year all two years younger than the last wave, each directly inspired by the previous wave, like a tidal movement of successive crests breaking against the musical shores of the rock world. But it’s not just age — Ronnie James Dio would debut the first album of his band Dio in 1983, and it represented just that generational advancement of the genre over his two albums with Black Sabbath (themselves a major development over the Ozzy era Sabbath releases). Yet people were evidently catching musical waves which would break in rapid succession. Ultimately, the rapidity of the change would result in metal’s undoing, as the only path to follow eventually became ever more selective and extreme, driving metal back into the underground and into the hands of ever more selective tastes.

Anyway, 1983 was a real watershed year, with many seminal releases representing the forefront of true heavy metal. The day really belonged to the Americans this year, who had finally come up to speed with the Britons, and were bursting at the seams with their own hybridized sound.

Savatage—”I Believe”
from the album Sirens (1983)

Enter one of the big names of the heavy metal world: Savatage. A band soon to build a checkered, storied, and ultimately metamorphosic story, in 1983 Savatage were one of many fresh-faced kids in America bowled over by the NWOBHM, and by the classic 70s monoliths they’d grown up on, and ready to leave their own imprint on the genre.

And leave it they did. The group that grew into Savatage spent their formative years in Northern Florida in the late 70s dabbling in heavy metal nascently, eventually coalescing in 1981 and eventually ending up in a local studio in 1982 to cut a number of tracks (apparently as quickly and as cheaply as possible on their shoestring budget), the first fruits of which would be their debut album Sirens released in 1983 on the small independent label PAR records (the enduring popularity of this and the second album would result in a much more well-distributed reissue on the bigger Combat Records later in 1985).

It takes all of two seconds of listening to Sirens to realize that emphatically Savatage represent the absolute ideal of heavy metal as a genre circa 1983, and the album stands at the quintessential forefront of the rapidly evolving sound, easily galloping alongside the Dio debut and the Metallica debut as an instant and genre-defining classic.

Boisterous, energetic, nasty, crunchy, distinctive, caterwauling and electrifying, Savatage perfected the heavy metal sound with a hugely unique and impressive frontman, the guitar wizardry of a truly precocious 6-string hero, and a well-honed writing style perfectly suited to create the most satisfaction for the audience’s expectations with the minimum fuss.

Sitting at the flagship spot on this album, and representing for me the highest level the band would ever attain, is the mini-epic that is the enigmatically titled “I Believe”.

Underneath this innocuous little title (a strange one for a heavy metal song, something seemingly better suited to pop or folk rock) lies a five minute science fiction epic about a group of space travelers forced to flee from an Earth rendered uninhabitable by nuclear and environmental devastation, embarking on a millennium-long journey to find a new planet that will be home to the vestiges of the human race. During this uncertain journey, the narrator conjectures about the existence of other life in the cosmos, and whether they will ever meet it –

Where do we go? What’ll we find? Is there life … other than mine?

After a thousand years of wandering space for a new home, the colonists alight on a mysterious world, where they find a black box set in a large green plain. A metallic, alien voice comes from the box (reproduced to cool effect in the song itself):

Welcome to Earth, May we ask who you are? Our race is called Man. The planet is done, done, done, done, done, DONE!

As the strange metallic voice repeats the word “done” with more and more unhinged frenzy, the song itself shifts into overdrive, as the guitar work of Criss Oliva explodes into a kind of tornado of notes over a double-time beat. The next verses are abstract and enigmatic, as if the horrific realization that the colonists’ centuries-long search has brought them back to the very place they fled from in the first place has driven them mad. Each brief little irrational verse is cut off by yet another frenzied guitar solo as the little epic disintegrates into a tempest of insanity, before it suddenly and painfully stops dead, robbing us of a drawn-out and dramatic finale.

I often hold “I Believe” up as a quintessential example of a perfect heavy metal song possessing all the ingredients needed to make the best potion the genre can offer. It’s got a semi-epic tale to tell brimming with excitement, wonder, and eventually madness, it tells that tale in a musical structure that grows and evolves to match the evolution of the story, and it undergoes a metamorphosis of pace and intensity midway in. It also does what all good heavy metal should do: it spotlights the individual talents of each band member, at the same time that no one ego ever sabotages the unified teamwork nature of the piece. Heavy metal should always be about a group of musicians working together in perfect sync and harmony without losing their individuality, and “I Believe” represents that balance to a fault.

Criss Oliva is justly famous for his spastic and unique guitar flamboyance, but I think the band’s greatest weapon lies in his brother Jon’s vocals, which are massively dramatic and wonderfully adaptable to so many moods. Like with the legendary Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, Jon can alter his voice at whim from strident and high to booming and low to rasping to pure to anything in between, and he doesn’t shy away from swinging wildly in any direction that the music demands. And the man knows dementia. I have never heard someone shriek or cackle as effectively (and without inducing irritation) as Jon Oliva.

Savatage would survive through thick and thin in the ensuing years, reestablishing their artistic integrity after a disastrous and unwanted push into commercial waters, and ultimately earn a devoted fanbase by the late 80s when they developed into a more progressive metal outfit, churning out elaborate (and expensive) rock operas and concept albums. Tragically, genuis guitarist Criss Oliva would be killed by a drunk driver in the 90s, but brother Jon kept the band alive, and it exists in one form or another to this day. Astonishingly, Savatage has survived most of these years as one of the few bands to stay with a major record label, Atlantic.

1983 was a watershed year for heavy metal, and all the exuberance and power that it brought to the genre is never more perfectly and fully represented than in “I Believe”, truly one of the classic tracks of this silly, scruffy-haired bastard child genre of rock.

Technorati tags: heavy metal, Savatage.

A couple of weeks ago Wil Wheaton went on a bit of a ramble about how much he was enjoying last.fm, another one of those Web 2.0 sites with a kind of stupid name, a widget to put in your site’s sidebar, a little client program to download, and a new silly made-up word or two.

I listened to his enthusiasm, accepted that he liked it, and then naturally assumed it was great for him and not for me, because whenever I hear someone talk about anything music-related, I naturally assume it applies to other people’s tastes in music and not to mine. Classic heavy metal and hard rock is a narrow, narrow field, and some of my favorite bands are so esoteric that they generally cause music software to start talking in a shrill voice and belching smoke, kind of like when Captain Kirk throws a whole lot of unsolvable dilemmas at a fascistic planet-controlling computer built by a long-dead ancient race.

For one reason or another, I eventually decided to give it a whirl — probably because I was a little unhinged after having to spend that one extra hour pulling HTML markup out of a poorly-designed PHP class. And the results were much more interesting than I expected.

For those not yet aware of last.fm, it is a web application that’s entirely free at which you set up an account and then begin building up a profile by listening to music on the media player of your choice, as well as listening to last.fm’s streaming “radio”, which tailors the songs to either a keyword you punch in, or an artist you punch in. The app monitors what you play, makes note of it, allows you to love or hate tracks as they’re played, and thereby build up a kind of matrix of your listening tastes by corellating them with the tastes of others who like similar stuff.

Now, none of this should sound new. The concept of building up recommendations based on the choices of others who like the same things you do is as old as the h1 tag. Amazon.com has done it for years. But I’ve always found that these types of recommendation-building engines are very flawed. Amazon.com, for example, makes some horrendous recommendations to me with both books and music, to such and extent that I simply don’t bother to look anymore. And Netflix? WTF?

Because my tastes in music are about as fashionable and popular as leg warmers, I decided to throw some of my more obscure favorites at the last.fm player just to see how much it would choke. 80s heavy metal Hawaiians Sacred Rite were first out of the gate, one of my mostest bestest bands but which precious few could possibly know. As mentioned, last.fm has a type of streaming radio which you can play either through their website, or through a little player you can download, and each “station” is built on the fly to play music based on a keyword you type in (like “female fronted beauty and the beast gothic stained black metal”) or a band. Type in your selection, hit play, and see if anything comes up … and when it does, if it’s even remotely going to be like what you consider a similar type of music to your input.

When I typed in Sacred Rite and punched Play, I assumed that one of two things would happen. That a) last.fm would stare at me blankly and tell me it didn’t have a clue who the fuck I was talking about, or b) it would play music that was horrifically inappropriate, like Linkin Park.

To my surprise, neither occurred. Instead, last.fm happily accepted my selection, acknowledging their existence, and proceeded to play what little it had in its database of licensed music that was, all things considered, not too far afield at all. Musical styles are always a combination of genre and period, so if last.fm had started spewing out very recent music — even which otherwise might qualify as traditional heavy metal — I would have been disappointed. But it managed to cough up related music that was more or less contemporary and more or less stylistically similar to what is — let’s face it — a very obscure band in the broad scheme of things.

The whole key to last.fm’s flexibility is, I think, the fact that it records everything you play on your computer, not just what you play via their streaming radio (they call this feature, rather stupidly, “scrobbling”). Thankfully, this means that you’re not limited only to what they have in their licensed catalogue, but can still interact with their system and get some benefits out of it. Over the last week or so I’ve been flitting back and forth during my computer workday between playing stuff in my own collection, and popping into the streaming radio feature to see what it can come up with, and by and large what it’s giving me is fairly sensible and fairly shrewd, and most of the time its selections are in keeping with what I consider aesthetically similar music to whatever I’ve punched in. On the few occasions where a horrible gaffe is made (because, say, there are two artists in existence with a certain name associated with the style I’m listening to and last.fm spits out the wrong one), I simply click on the “ban” button and last.fm is suitably chastened.

Now, Sacred Rite is not in last.fm’s radio, unsurprisingly. But a few other somewhat surprising esoteric artists in the same mold are, and I was somewhat pleased when last.fm pulled out a track from Omen, a track from Savatage, and then some more mainstream but not at all unreasonable stuff from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. They say they are constantly adding music to their radio database, of which I have no doubt, but what’s there already is not too shabby at all.

In the end, the key to the software’s strength is that its knowledge of music and its ability to learn about tastes from what people are playing is not limited to what is in its own bank of licensed music. Without that feature, I think last.fm would be just another lame example of a “Recommendations” engine, good for a moment or two of tittering laughter, and little more. Instead, even with someone with tastes as specific as mine, you stand to find your musical self at least acceptably well represented. I’d give it a shot.

Oh, and where would a Web 2.0 app be without a nifty little widget to stick in your site’s sidebar? You can probably see one now on my own sidebar, and with it you now have the power to see what I’ve been listening to recently, and point, and laugh, and say, “My word, but the man has silly taste — is he actually listening to music?”

At the rate I’m going with this, we’ll get to the 30th song in this oh so important list by about 2009. However, I know you’ve all been champing at the bit for the second installment in what may well prove to be one of the most important blog series ever written. Oh, you don’t like heavy metal? Oops.

For those of you still with us, this time we’re travelling back to the ancient times (1983) for one of the forgotten (or just plain ignored) sorta-masters of the genre:

Cloven Hoof: “Laying Down the Law”
(from their self-titled 1984 debut)

Cloven Hoof were one of the more notable bands to emerge after the first romantic blush of infatuation with genuine homegrown talent that was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or nwobhm for short. The first era of the nwobhm had pretty much fizzled out by early 1982, when the British music press decided that, since they’d given fame to their own country’s heroes, they could damn well take it away, too. By this point, those bands who had risen to prominence in the heady years of 1979 and 1980, had either self-destructed, completely lost their artistic sense of direction, or clawed their way to international superstardom.

But while the British press had pretty much declared the New Wave dead and buried, and decided that America and its well-funded rockers were the ones to watch, the nwobhm was kept alive by its fanbase, and by a whole new wave of musicians who kept the flame of British metal alive for all eternity … or until about 1985, whichever came first.

It’s important to bear in mind that the evolution of this neglected bastard child of rock was accelerating at a very rapid pace, and the colour and texture of the genre was vastly, vastly different in 1983 than it was in 1980, and here’s why. In 1980, bands like Iron Maiden and Tygers Of Pan Tang had a simple agenda: take the hard rock that they had grown up on — British hard rock, mostly — and re-energize it with a good dose of adrenaline. They succeeded admirably at this, and their infectious new sound galvanized people all over the world, who were themselves inspired to dabble in this adrenalized heavy rock.

By 1983, heavy metal had evolved into an international form, with tons of bands in, for example, Sweden, Germany and North America lending their own sensibilities to what had pretty much been entirely a British working-class musical genre just a couple years before. This new heavy metal standard, although heavily inspired by the nwobhm, was very different: it was faster, it was more aggressive, it was more technical, and it obviously was less idiosyncratically English. 1983 was a watershed year, in which, among others, Dio, Savatage, and Metallica all released their first albums.

And what of other British bands emerging at this time, themselves inspired as much by Iron Maiden and Diamond Head as by Rainbow and Judas Priest? The musical climate was as different for them as it was for bands in North America and Germany, and they too were playing something what was rather different than the first nwobhm bands were playing. In fact, it’s distinct enough, and the whole musical climate was distinct enough from the 1979-80 scene that it’s sometimes called the 2nd New Wave of British Heavy Metal. It’s a silly name, no doubt, but it’s apt enough, because this second wave of bands were very different indeed from that first, legendary wave. And most importantly, they were definitely thinking internationally in their asthetic, something that would save many from instant extinction (there was nothing like a tour of metal-mad Germany to pay the bills).

One of the bands from this 2nd Wave of British Heavy Metal is Midlanders Cloven Hoof, who’d been plugging away for a number of years before they nabbed a chance to record their first LP, with the ubiquitous Geordies Neat Records in 1984. With their occult name, and pop-Satanic lyrics, not to mention their elaborate stage attire, it’s kind of hard to think of these guys seriously, and even after an objective listen to their album, it’s hardly an instant classic; it would never make a top albums list of mine, or most other metal fans. However, these trappings aside, there’s a bit of a gem hidden among the grand occult gestures, and it’s a good ‘un.

Take the anthemic strutting of Judas Priest. Add a long and varied guitar solo ripped right from the best German power metal. Coat liberally with the vocals of a singer who somehow manages to pull off hoarse and gruff with melodic and spirited. Complement with a lyric that straddles the line between typical tough-guy heavy metal and just plain ridiculousness. And you get Cloven Hoof’s great classic contribution to metal, “Laying Down the Law”.

“Laying Down the Law” is classic, straight-on, no-farting-around anthemic heavy metal in the grand Priest tradition: catchy, instantly memorable, with the delicacy of a pneumatic drill and the emotional sensitivity of a debt collection agent. It locks into third gear right from the start and barrels forward with the measured ease of someone who’s strutting his stuff and in no particular hurry to get where he’s going (which is probably the pub, or perhaps prison, anyway). It doesn’t concern itself too much with throwing in lots of variation or experimentation, and it doesn’t need to: the band knows they’re on to a good thing and they’re going to work it.

A few minutes in it’s guitar fiddling time, and while this one doesn’t win any awards for awe-inspiring technicality or astonishing blasts of afterburner-fueled speed, what makes it cool is that it’s long enough that it gets the whole band in on the act, with these really cool riffs that bounce off the bass and drums in pure classic let’s-be-a-team headbanging. The solo is less about getting thirty seconds to wow the audience and more about taking a minute to go on a kind of journey, working its way down and around and up and through a whole structured segment of the song, weaving in and out of some interesting rhythmic changes that the drums undergo into a kind of semi-melodic mini-epic, but never ever disrupting that easy mid-paced strut that makes this piece of leather-bound metal so classically Priest-derived anthemic.

Another solo starts in at the end after a number of refrains of the “sing-along, mates!” chorus-line, the repeating chant of “Laying down, I’m laying down the law!”, just as the fade-out kicks in, as if to suggest that, man, if they had the time, they could have kept this up for another ten or fifteen minutes at their mid-paced swagger and still kept the audience chanting along.

But what’s it all about? Actually, it’s somewhat of a little-used bit of theme this one is based on: Prohibition-era Chicago, where the singer casts himself in the role of a policeman patrolling the streets, itching for the chance to rain punitive justice down on hoodlums, gangsters, and other scum…

You say I’m dreaming to believe in a better way
For this rat trap we call home
I’m the enforcer making sure crime don’t pay
and I’m not alone…

Anything written from the perspective of law enforcement is pretty unusual in metal. Most bands tend to cast themselves in the role of the outsider or the hunted, the victim of the law, either warranted or otherwise. But this is kind of a good example of why Cloven Hoof are subtly unique, and why this song in particular manages to stick its head above all sorts of other mid-paced anthems from the 80s — it’s just got something subtly unique about it.

But let’s not get above ourselves here: the reason this song makes the list is that it’s so damned catchy, so classically and addictively tough and swaggery, and just so damned fun. Cloven Hoof had their dreams of elaborate stage shows and nine-minute epics about battles between good and evil, but here in “Laying Down the Law” they forgot all of that and just got down to the business of blasting out one classic piece of tough, strutting heavy metal that never fails to coerce the listenger to chant along, “’cause I’m laying down, I’m laying down the law….”

Technorati tags: heayv metal, nwobhm, Cloven Hoof.

Except for a brief period of time in the mid-80s which was, let’s be honest, horrifically embarrassing anyway, heavy metal is by definition a cult genre. The vast majority of bands write a very specific kind of music for a specific group of scruffs, and the adoration of the masses is pretty far from their minds (except, again, during the Embarrassment Era, when pop metal was a big thing and many hours spent primping in front of the mirror — dark days).

So, in that way people have of always obsessing over organizing anything and everything into lists — top ten favorite 70s movies, top twenty favorite episodes of ST:TNG, top eleven and a half favorite spaces at Trader Joe’s — I’ve been thinking lately of a kind of thirty essential list of heavy metal songs that anyone really ought to hear before the world shatters into a trillion pieces and all life on the planet is thrown into the void to suffocate and die.

I should warn you all that it is probably the single most subjective list you could ever hope to see, because it simply has no criterion at all upon which it’s based. It’s just my mind pondering thirty songs from the genre that, gee, it would be a good idea to listen to before armageddon. It does not represent thirty of the most popular metal songs, or the most famous, or the most highly-regarded, or the most lucrative, or even thirty of the most obscure songs (though many are indeed pretty obscure to casual fans), or thirty from a particular era, or style, or … well you get the picture, which is that there is no picture. Casual listing of the undisciplined mind.

And each post I will choose one of these thirty Songs to Hear Before The Planet Explodes and talk about it, and why it rocks out with its cock out, and why its particular fiddly guitar solo is better than other fiddly guitar solos, and why the screaming and raving of the singer is better than the screaming and raving of another singer, etc etc etc.

Oh, and one more thing — there’s no order here. It doesn’t start with the least most important Song to Listen To Before The Planet Explodes, and end with the most important Song to Listen To Before The Planet Explodes, or anything like that. Favoritism wounds tender feelings, so if any song makes it in to the List of Heavy Metal Song To Listen To Before The Planet Explodes, it’s just as important as all the other 29 songs To Listen To Before The Planet Explodes. For all metal that is true and not poseur metal (”True Metal forever! All poseurs must die! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” … erm, ahem) is our children and we cherish each and every one.

Right, then, with that thoroughly unprofessional rambling preamble out of the way, on to number 30 (or number 1, depending on your point of view):

Cutty Sark “Heroes”
(from the 1985 album of the same name)

Cutty Sark (”we’re named after the boat, dude, not the whisky!”) made kind of a strong splash in their home country between their first four-song EP in 1983, and their second and final album in 1985, although I rather think they were virtually unknown beyond their borders at the time, and never broke into the North American market. The story stereotypically ended with a nasty spat with their record label, and then no record deal at all when the only offers came with the usual demands of primping, prancing, and popping up their image. Rather than go glam, they went bust, and that was that. The cool thing is that they were friends at the time, and I believe remain in touch to this day, so at least it’s not a situation of big egos blowing a band apart.

But they did leave two albums and an EP behind, which to the adventurously curious turn out to be this wonderful mixture of great uniqueness and instantly recognizable familiarity all at the same time — and, remarkably, actually in print from German reissue label High Vaultage, albeit not in the most ready supply. You could say that their music typifies a high-quality example of true classic early 1980s heavy metal, but with enough individuality and deft manipulation of the genre’s staples to really set them apart from the crowd.

“Heroes”, eponymous track of their second and final album, ideally represents everything that was strong about the band, which aside from the usual requisites (strong songwriting, tight drumming…) was the unique vocals of Conny Schmitt, and the blazing guitar firepower of Uwe Cossmann.

Any attempt to describe Conny’s singing style is only going to make him sound bizarre, so suffice to say that after perhaps an initial breaking-in period the listener starts to get quite comfortable with his sound, and then to realize that his expressiveness is an integral part of what drives these songs beyond mere copycat conformity.

Uwe, conversely, is easy as pie to describe. You know how Viv Campbell is a huge part of why those first couple of DIO albums rock out so hard? It’s the same kind of situation here — Uwe is just all over this song, which starts with a really a swaggering guitar intro before leading into the vocals, proceeds to shatter hyperactivity records with a hugely enthusiastic and grinding main solo, and then … well, then just refuses to stop, as Conny comes back in for the final couple of verses, and Uwe just keeps plugging away in the background, keeping things intensifying at a steady rate until they literally snap at the end. If you’re a big fan of flashy guitar (especially which puts the quality and variety of sound above pure fiddly neoclassical technicality) then you are immediately trawling ebay for a copy of this, because you know that any band that writes songs in this style is going to have guitar heroics all over it. But it’s not just heroics, because Uwe isn’t playing just so you have to listen to him twiddle — the lead guitar is an essential and almost nucleic part of the song structures on Heroes (and indeed on all their songs), an organic kind of lead guitar which doesn’t sit quietly in the background strumming its chords until its 30 seconds of swaggering allow it stand up and massage its ego, but rather a guitar whose purpose is there to tell the story of the song just as integrally as Conny’s vocals are.

And the story, for the geek inclined, is a really cool one. What I can make out of it is that “Heroes” tells of a man who tries to become a hero and make a positive change in the world around him, and through his own inadequacy and even blind arrogance becomes a failure overcome by the world’s ills. The listener is cast as a spectator, watching this would-be hero amaze everyone with his fearlessness and his selfessness, then watching him defeated and finally broken when he finds his will unable to endure a world that refuses to be healed.

Actually, the lyrics are fairly abstract — this is my own interpretation of what amounts to something very subjective.

The hero in the song is referred to as “a Batman”, but whether or not the song is literally about Batman or if the name is simply a kind of euphemism for all would-be superheroes who try to fix society’s ills remains unclear.

Say, I just thought of something as I was writing this. You know what this song kind of reminds me of? Watchmen. It has that same sense of tragedy that comes from witnessing people who decide naively to confront evil, only to be consumed by it.

“Heroes” is pretty damned near a perfect classic heavy metal song, both exuberant and optimistic and turgid and cynical. Have a listen before the planet explodes. And just try to get through it without throwing a little air guitar. I dare you.

Technorati tags: Cutty Sark, heavy metal

If you want blood (and flashbombs and dry ice and confetti) you’ve got it
—The New Wave of British Heavy Metal: first in an occasional series by Deaf Barton

This article headline, written by Geoff “Deaf” Barton and appearing in the May 19, 1979 issue of Sounds magazine in Britain, innocuously and unsuspectingly kicked off a musical revolution, or to put it more accurately, dug up a proliferating underground, slapped a badge on all its members, and thrust it into the, erm, overground.

Barton credits the invention of the rather less-than-elegant name “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” to his then-editor at Sounds, Al Lewis, who apparently had a predilection for bestowing grand, sweeping statements on the articles in the rag. Elegant or no, the name instantly caught on — it truly was a kind of membership badge for a whole generation of young heavy rock bands throughout the Isles who, until they saw those series of articles in 1979, had no idea they were part of something bigger than themselves.

But they were. There were hundreds of bands, and after that first little article in May (in which Barton reviewed a concert in Camden with Samson, Iron Maiden, and Angelwitch), the floodgates began to open. Article after article would appear, many by Barton, others by people like Malcolm Dome, covering this new “musical movement”. It was almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy: they called it a new wave, and a new wave it became.

If the effect of this one article seems too serendipitous to be true, it’s because it is. While the benefits of the new name for the movement probably came as a surprise to all involved, a certain dedicated individual had been working tirelessly behind the scenes for years to get just the kind of press coverage for his beloved genre as this article afforded. He had been courting Geoff Barton for ages, calling him weekly over the phone to pressure him to give heavy metal and his venue much-needed exposure in Sounds, throughout a period when heavy music was almost completely absent from the mainstream papers. It was he who had organized and emceed the triple-bill concert in Camden, the very concert whose review would mark the official beginning of the nwobhm in May 1979. His name was Neal Kay, and he treated the “cause of heavy metal” with the single-minded determination of a holy missionary in a land of cannibal heathens.

Kay had long since created a bastion for hard rock as DJ of the Heavy Metal Soundhouse, a few-nights-a-week disco at the Bandwagon pub in Kingsbury in northwest London. Frequented by dedicated “scruffy longhairs”, with their denims and their leathers and their propensity for headbanging, Kay had bands like Motörhead, Nugent, Rush, and Judas Priest on heavy rotation, played for people who weren’t interested in whether or not heavy metal was fashionable. But Kay was a tireless promoter, and he had already coerced Barton into an article about the Soundhouse way back in 1978, long before anything having to do with new young bands in a new, young movement. Kay organized the show in May 1979 with Angel Witch, Maiden, and Samson at the Music Machine in Camden for just this reason — to spread exposure beyond the limited suburban confines of Kingsbury and, hopefully, into the national consciousness.

Neal Kay was a funny sort of person. He was so serious, so dedicated to this heavy rock lark, that he often came across as pedantic, even ridiculous. In 1980, when Janet Street-Porter directed an installment of the music programme 20th Century Box about the nwobhm movement, Kay and his Heavy Metal Soundhouse would figure prominently. Appearing like a cross between an idiot and a cultish guru, Kay was nevertheless nothing if not sincere in his love for heavy rock. But the way the show portrayed him made it hard to take him seriously. Standing in front of his LP collection, he gave a hard line stance about how the term “heavy metal” was an outmoded American term, and he preferred the term heavy rock, or just rock. All well and good. But it might have been easier to take his words seriously if he hadn’t been wearing a t-shirt with the words “HEAVY METAL SOUNDHOUSE” boldly written across his chest…

Geoff Barton is adamant that, if there can be said to be anyone who kickstarted the nwobhm movement, it was Neal Kay. After all, it was Kay who had engineered the whole backstory which would culminate in that article in the May 19, 1979 issue of Sounds that would galvanize the movement. And his Heavy Metal Soundhouse would continue to be the unofficial capital of heavy metal in the UK throughout nwobhm’s brief little life. When Steve Harris was looking for an opportunity to gain exposure for his East End rock band Iron Maiden, he fished their demo tape to none other than Neal Kay, who grudgingly agreed to play a track or two. By the end of 1979, the tracks from that demo tape would be in the top fifty most-requested songs for the entire year, published in bold ink in Sounds for all to see. Harris freely admits that the support of Kay and his Soundhouse was one of the critical steps which would lead them to their ultimate success. And Kay would have a major role to play in assisting other nwobhm bands, such as Praying Mantis and Def Leppard, find public exposure and record deals.

By late 1979 and into 1980, regular articles on the nwobhm were appearing in all the major weeklies, and dozens upon dozens of formerly obscure rock bands were finding themselves thrust into the spotlight through their unwitting participation in this grassroots movement which was fast moving to replace the void left by the carcass of punk rock.

It was only natural that in the wake of this frenetic interest, the record labels would come calling, sniffing for the next big thing, or at least the big bucks from the next quick come-and-go fad. Bands like Iron Maiden, Tygers of Pan Tang, Girlschool, and others landed major record deals and debuted their first long-players deep into the Top 40 charts in 1980 (Girlschool hit 28 with their debut “Demolition”).

But let’s back up for a moment, and shift all those major label releases aside. Because, the essence of what made the nwobhm unique has nothing to do with EMI, or RCA, or whatever. It has a lot more to do with deciding not to wait for the labels to come calling, and do your thing on your own and just get it out there, and the hell with the mainstream. And, despite the protests of the bands themselves (who want nuffink to do wiv it), this is where punk rock and nwobhm really join forces.

If you glance at a list of any amount of nwobhm releases in 1979 and 1980, two major points will become obvious: firstly, that many of these releases were self-financed records produced on homegrown labels; and, secondly, that most of them are singles.

Consciously or unconsciously, the nwobhm bands of the time, realizing that nobody was going to come knocking and just do things for them, took their cue from the revolutionary industriousness of punk rock — typified by Johnny Rotten’s statement to “fuck off and form a band” — and scrounged together a few quid to record a track or three in one of the little studios peppered throughout the country and knock out some vinyl on their own little invented label. Armed with a thousand copies of their new 7- or 9-inch disc, they would cart them around and sell them after their shows, ship them off to reviewers at the papers, or wrangle them into the shops. Romantically, they took their destinies into their own hands, went all entrepreneurial, and produced.

Diamond Head, who for a while were simply assumed to be the next big thing, released their full-length LP “Untitled” (AKA “Lightnin’ To The Nations”, AKA the “White Album”) to major acclaim (and an ultimate place as one of the movement’s seminal releases). Okay, so they forgot to put their name on the sleeve, which was actually totally white — on later copies they simply pencilled in the tracklisting.

Def Leppard released their own EP “Getcha Rocks Off”, on their Bludgeon Riffola Label early in 1979, another seminal release, and long before they scored any kind of record deal.

Tons of other bands either produced and released their own singles and EPs on their own pence, or produced them at their own expense and released them through tiny little labels.

Very, very few of them would ever make it to the full album stage, either self-financed or on a major record label. To a large degree, the archaeology of the nwobhm rests largely in the world of the single. The nwobhm is one of those movements where many of the finest bands contributed just a lone, solitary — yet explosive and unforgettable — track to the catalogue.

This entrepreneurial, independent spirit is one of the most endearing foundation stones of the nwobhm. Here, for a change, it was more about the music than cashing in. These were not half-assed musicians who happened to look good, packaged together by managers and record execs and farmed to gullible kids to make a killing, their music heavily doctored and manipulated by armies of engineers into a kind of aural cotton candy. This was all about honing your craft in the pubs, getting cheered when things worked and booed when things didn’t, and then getting four hours in the studio to cut five tracks and ripping it loose essentially live, and then farming them out to a crowd of punters who knew the genre and knew what they liked (and what they hated).

Of course, before long a number of small labels had gotten wind of the heavy metal fad and started signing bands in the hope of cashing in. One of the most important of these was Newcastle’s Neat Records (who had their own recording facilities). Drawing on the immense local Northeast scene, Neat began releasing a spate of singles and then albums that would rival the output of any other company, putting their stamp on Fist, Raven, Warfare, and Venom, just for starters. In fact, the output from the Geordies was so prolific that the press soon began rather absurdly referring to a nenwobhm, a “North East New Wave Of British Heavy Metal”.

So, throughout the UK, at the turn of the Eighties, an entire world of heavy rock bands found exposure, and the tide of interest turning their way. Circumstances would be such that their brand of rock, and the independent, underground nature of the way they cultivated their music, would garner a name, and be dubbed a movement.

But did they really share a unified musical vision and style? Were they all united together by the same aesthetic, the same taste? Or were they lumped together by circumstance and geographical proximity, given a tag by the press which they had not invented, not been a part of, and which meant nothing to them? Were these hundreds of bands scattered throughout the UK all playing the same types of music?

Many people expect the term “nwobhm” to refer to a musical style, like “thrash music” or “lo-fi”. They pick up bands linked to the movement expecting everyone to sound like Iron Maiden or Diamond Head. Unfortunately, perhaps, the truth is that there is no musical genre called “nwobhm”. Instead, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal is really a cultural term. They were united by time and by a similarity of instrument, but not necessarily by taste or sound, not with the specificity that some would like.

Loosely, of course, they sounded similar. They were mostly drawing inspiration from the same groups of sources, the same classic bands of the previous generations. And they were largely playing with the same setups of instruments (of course, so were the punks, so that really doesn’t count for much). But as anyone with even the remotest understanding of rock music can attest, you can play with an electric guitar or two and call yourself a hard rock band and sound like anything. Two “rock” bands can follow each other on the same stage and play the same rigs and sound nothing alike. The first can be aggressive and speedy and rough, the second sedate, sentimental, and smooth. Both are still rock, or even heavy rock, but in terms of taste they’re worlds apart.

The bands affiliated with the nwobhm ran the gamut of rock music, from the kind of heavy metal that would make Metallica fans proud to the kind of hard rock music which has “love” and “baby” as every third word. For every Blitzkrieg you have a Black Rose.

In part, I think we’re spoiled in 2006 by what the term “heavy metal” came to represent after the nwobhm. Bands like Metallica and Megadeth, and eventually all the death and black metal and all that crap were taking the aggressiveness factor and notching it up level after level, to the point where now we have things like brutal technical speed death, which is so fast and so aggressive that it makes the heavy metal bands of 1980 — even the famously speedy ones — look like the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare race. Positively plodding. Although nwobhm bands were widely-regarded as infusing the old heavy metal standard with the exuberance and pace of punk rock, to our much more jaded ears many of them are naively tame by modern standards. “Heavy metal” in 1979 was a much looser and simpler term than it came to be later, ironically enough, thanks in large part to the influence of the nwobhm itself.

But there’s something else about this musical style issue that must be noted. Whereas we might now think of many of these nwobhm bands as incompatible musically, at the time the general fanbase seemed to accept them together much more readily, despite the gulf in taste. Where the truth of the nwobhm as a bona fide movement becomes most obvious is in the countless concerts and gigs throughout the nation in 1979 and 1980, gigs where mega-headbangers Iron Maiden easily shared the stage with crooning hard rockers Praying Mantis, where boogie rockers Vardis would be attended by the same scruffy longhairs who had just seen quasi-Satanic doomers Angelwitch or Witchfinder General. Or you can take a look at any of Neal Kay’s weekly heavy metal charts from late 1979 or 1980 which appeared in Sounds (tallying up the audience requests of the week at the Bandwagon) to see the breadth of what these kids considered “heavy metal”. Young upstarts like Iron Maiden, Trespass, and Praying Mantis coexisted alongside the real heavy stuff like AC/DC, proggy stuff like Styx and Rush, and southern boogie stuff like Molly Hatchet. The kids at the Bandwagon were looking for stuff to headbang to, and stuff to play air guitar to — I suppose that in the end, that’s what makes heavy metal, stylistic niceties be damned.

So, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was a cultural blink in the eye of the British music scene, a moment when heavy rock music returned to the consciousness of the mainstream world. Heavy rock and heavy metal may never have gone away in the first place, as people like Paul Samson were quick to point out, but despite Samson’s protestations to the contrary, what made the nwobhm a genuine movement was that a new generation of journalists were united with a new generation of bands to bring a whole new generation of fans together, across the UK. It was the participation of the press, the creation of terms and the cross-communication of once-isolated groups of rock bands in isolated cities and towns, that transformed a disparate underground into a genuine national movement. Without that alchemical combination of band, journalist, and fan, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal never would have existed. It’s a lesson in strength in numbers.

Just as Bruce Dickinson of Maiden has often said — he didn’t know he was a part of anything until he read about it in the pages of Sounds, just like everyone else. Fan and musician alike.

For heavy metal fans, the nwobhm continues to appeal because of a slew of factors, all of which have been hinted at. For one, it’s a critical step in the evolution of heavy metal, a bridge between the dim, hazy creation of the genre in the early Seventies, and the global maturation of the style with Iron Maiden and Metallica in the mid-Eighties. Metallica, perhaps the most legendary of all heavy metal bands, was born in the mind of a Danish teenager taking in Diamond Head and Mythra concerts before he relocated with his family to the San Fernando Valley, where his love of the genre led him to form his own band. Metallica’s debt of gratitude to the nwobhm movement is popularly cited to this day because it’s such a perfect example of how a musical movement apparently confined to the British Isles sent shockwaves across the globe nearly strong enough to spawn whole musical industries. Long after heavy metal fell out of favour and back into obscurity in the UK, new young bands in Continental Europe and South America were picking up the mantle and writing music inspired by the nwobhm bands they had loved. Magazines in Germany and in Greece would hunt down their heroes, who had long since forgotten their brief flirt with music stardom, for interviews and retrospectives. Bands were invited to reform and play before thrilled audiences at Summer festivals, alongside younger bands who were playing music inspired by their original releases decades ago. Without the nwobhm, heavy metal probably would have ceased to exist before the Eighties ever got started.

But there’s another appeal to the nwobhm, a cultural appeal. There’s a kind of innocent naivete and simple love of music which permeates through the whole movement. For a brief spell, these bands were releasing their own material on handmade labels, playing to audiences night after night that were so familiar they were practically friends (and often were). And while the big money came knocking and sundered the nwobhm into those that failed and those that cashed in (effectively killing the movement altogether), there was for that briefest of moments a sense of self-fulfilling independence, in an industry that’s all about deceit and fabrication and corporate manipulation. The grassroots underdog nature of the nwobhm holds the same appeal that most grassroots movements do — a whole subculture uniting together whether by design or happenstance to devote themselves to something they genuinely love.

Is this entirely accurate? Probably not. There doubtless was greed and competition and backbiting and backstabbing and all the rest of it. But we’re not talking about individual specifics here. We’re talking about an overarching feel that the nwobhm communicated, in its all-too-brief heyday. For a time, in early 1980 and thereabouts, it just felt like the nwobhm would conquer the world.

There, I think, we find the nwobhm mystique — a grassroots movement that wasn’t, a musical revolution that wasn’t, a world that no-one realized they were a part of, or working for, or contributing to. Something that took everyone by surprise.

Until they read about it in Sounds.

To Be Concluded…

Tags: nwobhm, heavy metal, Iron Maiden.

As any of you who bother to watch movies through the end credits will know, in the last thirty years there has been a huge increase in the amount of contributors to a film who get credit.

In the Golden Age, you had a couple of screens worth of primary contributors before the story got going, most of these being the above-the-line people (actors, director, writers, etc).

Nowadays, virtually everyone is contractually entitled to be credited in the film’s end credits, from the production runners through the personal assistants, drivers, caterers, accountants … enough personnel that bigger movies need ten minutes or more to scroll all the names past. Even the managerial staff of the visual effects companies get credit. They’re all covered, right? Right?

Wrong.

There’s one major group of professionals who virtually never receive credit at the end of a motion picture. They are, so far as I can tell, the last group of professionals to regularly contribute to films who are not contractually entitled to appear in the credits. I’m talking, of course, of the motion picture score musicians.

Play a few of your favorite flicks, and skim through the end credits. Found one that listed all the violinists, oboists, cellists, percussionists, French hornists, and so on whose performance appears in the score? Didn’t think so. You may, perhaps, see a featured soloist or two, but probably only if that soloist is a famous name in his or her own right (like, say, Yo Yo Ma).

Now, go back to one of those favorite flicks, and find the section in the end credits which lists sound and score personnel. If it’s a movie with a big score (like the Lord of the Rings trilogy), you’ll see credits for people like score producers, orchestrators, orchestra contractors, score preparation people, music programmers, and of course music editors. They all get credit, and I believe they’re all contractually entitled to it.

So why aren’t the musicians themselves?

If you forward ahead, to the songs credits, even the most incidental of songs, like a snippet from Handel’s Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No. 6 that lasts for five seconds, or Tom Cruise croaking out a lullaby to Dakota Fanning, will get complete mention, including composer, performer, and publisher (where applicable). Handel has been dead for two-hundred and fifty years, and his music is in the public domain. But they dutifully list his or any other composer’s contribution in the credits, no matter how incidentally it appears during the movie.

So why not the musicians?

It’s been a question that’s really puzzled me big-time, for a long time. Is it because somehow the individual musicians are not perceived of as being contributors, but the orchestra itself? If so, why are orchestras themselves not often mentioned, unless they’re a “name” orchestra, like the London Symphony? Is it because the musicians’ contribution is not considered material enough to warrant inclusion? I’ll argue with anyone who thinks the value of those musicians’ contributions is somehow less than the petty cash accountant, or the Teamster driver.

Or perhaps it’s because the guild(s) to which these musicians belong doesn’t have the clout and sway of the Teamsters Union, or the SAG union, or the WGA. Perhaps there is no unified voice standing up and saying, “put us in the credits, or we walk”.

Occasionally, if the composer is feeling nice, or someone thinks to do it, you’ll see the list of musicians in the compact disc release of the soundtrack. But not always. I’m a big soundtrack collector; many of my discs have no listing of musicians.

I think that sucks. I think it sucks that the musicians appear to be the last professionals in the industry excluded from the end credits, and I think it sucks that the composers, like Hans Zimmer and John Williams and Danny Elfman, don’t push the producers to put those musicians’ names in the credits, whether they’re contractually obligated to appear or not.

Just take a second to imagine Star Wars without the orchestra. John Williams conducting to a room full of empty seats.

People filled those seats, people with names. And their contributions really mattered. So put their fucking names in the credits.

Technorati Tags: music, movies, soundtracks, motion picture scores, film music