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Louder, faster, funnier: how the New Wave of British Heavy Metal saved rock
As the giants of metal fell, scrappy working-class upstarts named Venom, Saxon or Samson emerged to fill the vacuum. A new book salutes them

In the spring of 1983, Venom arrived in the United States with enough explosives to start a war. According to the music promoter Jonny Zazula, the Geordie trio had “a bomb board” of a kind “used by the IRA”. They “had dynamite”, too. During an appearance at the Paramount Theatre, on Staten Island, one of the band’s homemade pyrotechnics “blew up like a satellite, like a flying saucer”. Such was the velocity of the night’s first explosion that “the whole front row of the audience went blackface”. 

As the smoke cleared, Abaddon, the group’s drummer, recalls “the hole in the stage was the first thing we saw when we realised that things had gone drastically wrong”. 

This scene is just one of a number of lively vignettes in Michael Hann’s fascinating and entertaining new book Denim & Leather: The Rise And Fall Of The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. As an occasional acronym, NWOBHM certainly wasn’t pretty, but then neither were many of the bands amassed under its vast canvas. Whether they cared for the term or not – and, naturally, the best groups didn’t – Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Saxon, Samson, Diamond Head, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Girlschool, Praying Mantis, Witchfinder General and many more were all labelled thus. 

They came with energy to burn. As Joe Elliot, the front man with Def Leppard, told me in 2019: “My generation were the first generation after the hippies that looked at [music] from a tangible point of view and went, ‘It’s okay to put two fingers up at The Man and smoke weed, but you’re treading water’. We were the first to go, ‘You’re not making any progress’. For us, we didn’t have a white-collar mummy or daddy to bail us out. This was all on us… so we built our own rocket and we jetted off to other planets.” 

Whether by accident or design, their timing was perfect. Certainly it’s worth considering what might have become of very loud music were it not for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. As John Gallagher, the vocalist and bassist with Raven, astutely observes, “around ’78, or ’79” the established order was disintegrating. “You had Aerosmith fall apart,” he tells Hann. “[Led] Zeppelin were falling apart. Even coming up to their height, UFO were barely hanging on.” The reason for this, of course, was “the drugs”. 

Joe Elliott and Rick Savage perform as part of Def LeppardCredit: Getty

The tranche of young bands that emerged to fill the vacuum didn’t much look like saviours. As Denim And Leather’s opening sentence correctly states, “[NWOBHM] was both a real thing and a confection”. The movement’s authenticity was the result of a shared working class identity that made the adjacent punk scene look like the Stewards’ Enclosure at the Henley Regatta. The confection was that, musically at least, many of its groups had very little in common. This British new wave found house room for everything from pub rock to proto-speed metal.  

It’s likely, even, that some of the acts never even met each other. Forget denim and leather, often it was chalk and cheese. In the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire, Barnsley’s Saxon mastered their craft, not to mention an enviable groove, playing hundreds of gigs on a northern club circuit at which bingo was far more important than musical entertainment. By comparison, Venom barely gigged at all. Audaciously, the trio’s first concert in London was a headline appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon. More remarkable still was the fact that they could barely play. 

These otherwise disparate strands were brought together by Alan Lewis, the editor of the music weekly Sounds. A legend in the field of music publishing, by minting the term the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal Lewis capably and conveniently lassoed bands from up and across the country into a scene that was notable for its lack of a geographical base. With reliably vibrant prose – Angel Witch sounded like “Black Sabbath played through a cement mixer”, apparently – in its pages Geoff Barton became the movement’s writer in residence. 

“[Barton] was so powerful,” recalls photographer Ross Halfin. “He was. Because at the time everyone took him seriously… He broke Iron Maiden, I don’t care what anyone says. He broke Def Leppard. He really did.”

Talk about a bygone age. In 1980, the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and Sounds – the four British music weeklies – were shifting a million copies between them every seven days. Sounds’ maniacal boosterism for a heavy metal movement it had itself defined led to airplay from Tommy Vance, Alan Freeman and John Peel. Appearances on Top Of The Pops became the norm. A group’s profile could be changed overnight. 

Iron Maiden, pictured in 1982Credit: Getty

It’s even fair to say that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal changed the face of music publishing itself. On June 6 1981, Sounds issued what was intended to be a one-shot magazine dedicated solely to its loudest bands. Its title, Kerrang! – a word which first appeared on the backdrop used by Motorhead on their Ace Up Your Sleeve tour – denotes the sound of a guitar struck with force. Edited by Geoff Barton, by the middle of the 1980s Kerrang! was knocking out 51 issues a year. In 2002 it overtook the NME to become the world’s best-selling weekly music magazine.

“The world would be completely different sounding place [without NWOBHM],” says Phil Alexander, who in the 1990s became Kerrang!’s third editor. “The other thing is the impact on the media, based on the sheer demand from the audience. What you get off the back of [that movement] is the creation of, for want of a better term, hard rock media, in a very, very real way. Kerrang! is a direct result of that.”

Naturally, the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal liberated its groups too. While much is made of punk’s democratic credentials, not even Sham 69 would stoop to riding around the country in a van adorned with advertising for a brand of tripe. But Saxon did. I’d even go so far as to say that metal in its iconic form – the denim and the leather, if you will – didn’t even exist until 1980. This was the year that Judas Priest sharpened their look on the British Steel album. That summer saw the world’s first metal festival begin its enduring tenure at Donington Park. 

Come the final reckoning, NWOBHM itself produced two bands of long-lasting international standing. Forty-two years after their debut album crashed the British top 10, these days Iron Maiden’s popularity sees them touring the world in a bespoke 747 piloted by their singer, Bruce Dickinson. 

The inner sleeve of Saxon's album Innocence Is No ExcuseCredit: Alamy

This June, Def Leppard will appear in stadiums in North America as part of a co-headline caravan with Motley Crue. From the start, both groups had a resolute sense of their own identity; crucially, they had sound management, too, not to mention supportive record companies. Nevertheless, it’s a respectable pidend for a movement that paid little mind to its commercial potential. 

Elsewhere, the output was chequered. I think perhaps the most telling aspect of Michael Hann’s book is the sense of poignancy that permeates its pages. The reader is reminded that at the start of the 1980s sections of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal represented the heaviest bands in the world. As fusty and quaint as some of the music may sound today, at the time this was the cutting edge. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that major labels, responding as ever to public interest, simply had no idea what to do with many of the bands placed under contract in a mad hurry.

It’s even less of a surprise that so many artists fell prey to the music industry’s mad machinations. Tellingly, Denim & Leather groans under the weight of bands who were ripped off, misdirected, or else lost in the churn. After signing to MCA – colloquially known as the Music Cemetery of America – Tygers Of Pan Tang were disassembled by executives who had no interest in their long-term potential. On the same label, and facing the same problems, Diamond Head went into battle with singer Sean Harris’s mum and his chain-smoking stepfather as their managers. Predictably, they failed to fulfil their considerable potential. 

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Instead, someone else did it for them. Following an appearance at the Woolwich Odeon, in the summer of 1981, Diamond Head met a 17-year old named Lars Ulrich who just that day had arrived alone in London on a flight from his home in Los Angeles. As a founding member of Metallica, over the next 17 years his group would record no fewer than four of the English quartet’s songs. As Ulrich admits: “There wouldn’t be a Metallica without Diamond Head.”

“Metallica’s success is sort of a vindication of what we did,” Harris tells Hann in what might just be Denim And Leather’s most bittersweet moment. “In the sense that we were right about what we were doing. We were right enough to influence the most important metal band of the last 40-years. That has been a vindication. And the fact that I get royalties means I can still survive as a semi-professional musician. That would be the reason we’re not bitter.”

Neither, it seems, are Venom, whose sheer berserk extremity provided the blueprint for what would become the genre’s dominant variant: thrash metal. Just three years after the British group blew a hole in the stage of the Paramount Theatre, Slayer, their heirs apparent, released the unsurpassably rabid Reign In Blood. This was the point at which things would never be the same again. Almost every note of metal music recorded in the past 35-years owes a debt to either Metallica or Slayer, neither of whom would exist without the British wave that preceded them.

Having served its purpose, NWOBHM itself died a death attributable to a curious mixture of exhaustion and success. Truth be known, many of its groups simply weren’t good enough to outlast the initial rush of energy that first propelled them. At the other end of the spectrum, in 1982 Iron Maiden sold a million copies of their third album, The Number Of The Beast, in the United States alone. The following year, Def Leppard went platinum six times over with Pyromania. The idea that either band had any wish to be associated with a movement both had outgrown was for the birds. 

But it didn’t matter – the point had been made. As Lars Ulrich says, speaking for many: “The reason I wanted to be in a band was NWOBHM. Because if those guys could do it, I could do it.”


Denim And Leather: The Rise And Fall Of The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal by Michael Hann (£20, Constable), is available from Telegraph Books