NWOBHM*
* NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL
July 1981, and Diamond Head - the perennially underachieving
kings of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) - have
just played a routine gig at south London's Woolwich
Odeon.
A 17-year-old Danish-American kid muscles his way backstage
and explains that he has saved up years of pocket money to fly
half way around the world to see his favourite band, one that
he'd followed in California through airmail copies of the
British music weekly, Sounds.
"We were impressed that he'd come so far" says
Diamond Head guitarist Brian Tatler, in his doleful Brummie
tones. "And rather shocked that he didn't have anywhere to
stay. He ended up kipping on my floor in Stourbridge for a week,
in me brother's old sleeping bag, and then spent a month with
the singer, Sean. He was a lovely kid, bursting with enthusiasm,
freaking out and playing air drums while me and Sean wrote songs
together".
That
kid, of course, was Lars Ulrich, and a few months later he was
back in California leading a Diamond Head covers band called
Metallica, who by the end of the decade would be one of the
biggest rock bands on earth.
For Lars and thousands like him, The Head seemed to have it
all. They had a good-looking lead singer - cocky Steve Tyler
look-alike Sean Harris - and they wrote ten minute rock anthems
that welded together hook-laden punk energy, prog precision and
metal abandon.
Unfortunately an almost comical run of bad luck put paid to
these ambitions . . .
Diamond Head sent the master tapes for their first album to a
German label, which promptly lost them. It took them years to
get a deal with MCA, and when they did around 20,000 copies of
their 'difficult' third album were rendered unlistenable by a
pressing fault. They were offered representation by the mighty
Q-Prime Management, but they turned it down to be managed by the
singer's mum.
They supported AC/DC on tour in January 1980 and were
declared "facking great" by front man Bon Scott, but
when he invited them as special guests for his end-of-tour party
the next day, they got lost. "We didn't have an
A-to-Z" says Tatler. "We couldn't find this house he
was staying in. So it was back up the M1 to Birmingham for a
bottle of cider and a game of Monopoly. Bit of a shame that we
missed that party, because Bon died a week later . . ."
More than any other band, Diamond Head seem to sum-up the
pulse-quickening excitement, brilliance, bathos and idiocy of
the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.
Decades on from its humble beginnings in scabby working men's
clubs, pubs and nightclubs across England's ravaged industrial
heartlands, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal - the acronym of
which is pronounced "nuh'wobbum" - seems to attract
fanatical devotion from some of the world's biggest rock bands.
Metallica and Megadeth worship at the feet of Diamond Head
and Saxon; members of Green Day, Muse, the Red Hot Chili Peppers
and the Foo Fighters will happily reel off their favourite Iron
Maiden album tracks and Parallax b-sides; while Anthrax, Slayer
and countless other thrash metal bands owe their existence to
Newcastle's Venom, who used to lead their crowds with the chant
"Fucking Black Metal!" while waggling their tongues.
NWOBHM has also attracted its fair share of ridicule. The
Comic Strips' 1983 film Bad News Tour, featuring three
quarters of The Young Ones, was a spoof rockumentary of
an inept East London NWOBHM band. It was followed a year later
by Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, which lampooned
countless heavy rock archetypes.
Legend has it that Iron Maiden angrily stormed out of the
premiere, believing it to be a personal attack on them. Actually
it was their NWOBHM colleagues Saxon who were the prime source
material for Spinal Tap's co-creator, Harry Shearer.
"The fella who played the bassist in Spinal Tap apparently
came on tour with us as part of his research" says Saxon's
frontman Biff Byford. "And, in hindsight, you could tell
that he probably did model his character [Derek Smalls] on our
bassist, Steve Dawson. Like him, Dawson had the tight striped
trousers, the handlebar moustache, and he would pluck the bass
with his right hand while raising his left fist aloft".
There's even a rumour that Saxon inspired the Spinal Tap scene
where the band get lost trying to find the stage. "Oh we
got lost backstage loads of times" sighs Byford.
"Every band does. You crawl through miles of corridors, get
on stage, salute the audience and realise you're facing the
wrong way!".
Not that NWOBHM needed much exaggeration to take it into
comedic territory. Samson - who featured a pre-Iron Maiden Bruce
Dickinson - had a drummer called 'Thunderstick' who would wear
what he described as a "rapist's mask" while drumming
in a giant cage (sometimes guarded by circus strongmen).
Early Iron Maiden gigs saw the band trying to create dry ice
in a kettle, and making horror movie effects with a giant
papier-mâché head and a fish tank full of stage blood. When
their first lead singer, Dennis Wilcock, put a fake blood
capsule in his mouth and pretended to slash his face with a
sword, people would sometimes faint.
The NWOBHM label encompassed a variety of working class heavy
rock bands united mainly by chronology. Most formed around 1977
while in their late teens, most released their first
(independently pressed) records in 1979; many appeared on
Sanctuary's era-defining compilation, Metal For Muthas in
February 1980; some were signed by major labels later that year,
and a lucky few were hitting the arena circuit by 1982.
But the term lumps together a host of quite distinct outfits.
Def Leppard, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Praying Mantis and Girl, for
instance, all had a slightly funky edge and a melodic
sensibility that served as a bridge between glam rock and hair
metal, while Girlschool tended to play a particularly
brutalised, up-tempo form of the blues.
But the defining sonic characteristic of most NWOBHM bands -
Iron Maiden, Samson, Saxon and Diamond Head in particular, and
also the Black Sabbath copyists like Witchfynde and Angelwitch -
was that they tended to subtract any traces of blues from their
heavy rock template. Where the holy trinity of hard rock's
'first wave' - Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath - all
emerged from the 60's Brit-blues revival, their disciples in the
NWOBHM came with no such baggage.
Iron Maiden's twin-guitar frontline, for instance, might have
been a nod to Wishbone Ash or Thin Lizzy, but Maiden's
guitarists would perform highly a metrical, ultra-fast series of
hammer-ons and pull-offs that utterly eschewed the blues.
A circuit of small venues quickly developed for these bands.
The Soundhouse - the backroom to a (now-demolished) mock Tudor
pub in Kingsbury, north west London - had been home to a heavy
rock disco since 1975, and soon became the epicentre of the
NWOBHM scene, under the aegis of its charismatic DJ Neal Kay.
Other London venues included the Bridgehouse in Canning Town
and the Ruskin Arms in East Ham.
Around the country there was the Retford Porterhouse (in
between Nottingham and Sheffield) and the Spread Eagle in
Birmingham. Bands would then graduate onto the Mecca promoter's
circuit of Mayfair and Locarno nightclubs, each hosting
late-night gigs to around 1,500 punters.
By 1980, not only had heavy rock commandeered the Reading
Festival, but Rainbow's promoter Paul Loasby had set up the
rival Monsters Of Rock festival in the grounds of the Castle
Donnington racetrack in Leicestershire.
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