The next night I played it at the Soundhouse and everyone went mad." "I went into the lounge, fired up the old sound system and listened to Maiden's demo three times. "My first wife was asleep in bed when I got home," he says. Though not overly enthusiastic when Harris buttonholed him, Kay vividly recalls playing the tape later that evening. Resident DJ Neal Kay had made a name for himself by playing heavy rock music there to a devoted clientele through massive speakers. Similarly motivated, Iron Maiden paid £200 to record a four-track demo tape on New Year's Eve bassist Steve Harris took his band's cassette to the Heavy Metal Soundhouse at the Bandwagon, a grandiloquently named function room adjacent to the Prince of Wales pub in Kingsbury, northwest London. "John Peel played Def Leppard on his radio show four nights in a row and people started making enquiries." "That was the smartest thing I ever did," says Elliott now. One night in early 1979, Radio 1's John Peel was midway through a DJ set at Sheffield University when Elliott jumped up on stage and handed him a copy of The Def Leppard EP. Rather than wait to receive record company support, towards the end of 1978, Def Leppard borrowed money from singer Joe Elliott's father to fund their first EP. We came along a bit too early for it." The other shared characteristic was attitude. "The NWOBHM was great for some bands," Motörhead frontman Lemmy recalls. Part of what unified them was simply that they happened to emerge at the same time, which is why older metallers such as Motörhead and Judas Priest stood apart. Stylistically, too, the spectrum was broad: Girlschool were an all-female outfit while Girl consisted of men who dressed effeminately. Clearly, geography wasn't a defining factor for the scene. Fellow front-runners included Tygers of Pan Tang and Saxon, from Whitley Bay and Barnsley respectively. Once again, here was rock resetting the dial and going back to basics: it was cheap entertainment for fans to enjoy on a Friday night, something that didn't mean a trek to Earl's Court and shelling out big money for an arena act.Įast End metallers Iron Maiden and Sheffield five-piece Def Leppard were two of the bands rising to fill the void. With a nod to punk's DIY approach to making music and getting it heard, the burgeoning scene took root in pubs, mixing hard riffs with amateur dramatics. But for a time it was a blast of gritty exuberance that reinvigorated rock music and really did alter its course for good. No Friday night BBC Four retrospective has ever been commissioned on Angel Witch. Lacking any modish cachet, it has never received the appreciation afforded to the likes of, say, post-punk or ska. It was made up of an odd, and oddly British, bunch. Into this void came something called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or NWOBHM ("nuh-wob-um") as it became known. ![]() Punk had been fashioned into a mass-market commodity before it, too, fizzled away. The biggest, Led Zeppelin, saw the year out in the incongruous surrounds of Abba's Stockholm studio, recording their eighth album, In Through the Out Door, the last before drummer John Bonham died. The heaviest acts of the day – Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple – were either defunct or in drugged-out decline. ![]() In 1978, British rock music was in a funny place.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |