'NWOBHM 25th Anniversary written by Jess Cox'

25 years! Jesus! Who did that? Wasn’t I just 22 a couple of years ago? Who’s that old bastard in the mirror looking at me? I never thought in 1979 that I would be reminiscing about the NWOBHM movement in 2004! I do remember I had a vague idea at the time that I might be either lying on a private beach in Malibu sipping Pina Coladas (monkey on a stick extra) or back in my old job at the DSS. As it happens I am doing neither. Oh well, lahdy da. What of those days, though, and the perennial “where did you get your name from?” interview questions. Well, read on.
“What the hell’s a Def Leppard?! What a stupid name!” I thought to myself sitting outside our bassist Rocky’s parent’s house, reading a centre spread two page feature on this unknown band in Sounds music paper after a band rehearsal in the summer of 1979. This was my introduction to the existence of another young rock act in the UK. Our band was called the Tygers Of Pan Tang - we’d been together for 10 months, had done 50 or so local pub gigs & were armed with one 3 track demo. We even had a manager - Tom Noble. ‘Manager’ was probably a bit of a grand title at that time as Tom was a full time school teacher/part time local DJ & music critic. What he did have , like all of us,was boundless enthusiasm, a love of rock music & the perverse bloody mindedness & belief that the band was destined for greater things: quite what, no one knew: until now that is.

“They sound like you” said Tom after reading the said same article. “We’ll send Sounds your demo.” After scouring the paper for an address, off our tape went & the next week we were in Sounds with (I think) 4 other acts : Iron Maiden, Samson, Def Leppard &, maybe, Saxon. Writer Geoff Barton was busy enthusing about this ’new wave’ explosion of young metal acts in the UK & coined the now legendary moniker : New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.
Until that point none of us knew anything about any other rock acts playing metal around the UK & I’m quite sure that none of our future NWOBHM colleagues knew or cared about the existence of each other either. In retrospect, metal was probably pretty unfashionable in the UK at the time (what’s new?!). We were all aged between 18 & 20 and had grown up with Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin etc and then had got into the prog scene with bands like Yes, Genesis and ELP; through to the off the wall acts of Bowie, Roxy Music and Alice Cooper and on to the West Coast sound of The Eagles, Springsteen and Little Feet. The UK had just come out of the punk era and was into a Ska thing in ’79 with acts like Madness, The Specials and The Selecter all over the radio. So being in a metal band was not that cool! So why did we do it and how did this explosion of new metal acts spring up at the same time across the UK ?


Jess with Lars Ulrich

( Dec 2003 )

 The NWOBHM scene happened because kids who liked metal went and took a leaf out of the punk movement,s book - they made their own sounds and formed their own labels from which they could release their own singles: Def Leppard and Maiden’s labels are examples. Holocaust also had Phoenix Records - Phoenix was actually the name of the record shop where the then Holocaust vocalist Gary Lettice worked.
It was the embracing of the NWOBHM by the major labels, always on the lookout to exploit the next big thing, that really kicked off the metal explosion. With Maiden & Angelwitch going to EMI; Leppard went to Phonogram & the Tygers went to MCA. Others followed, but the Majors lost interest by ’82. Bar Maiden/Leppard/Saxon, a lot of these acts were dropped. Other newly formed independent labels did, however, sign & develop a lot of the talent before (& long after) the heyday of the NWOBHM. Neat Records was (even though I went on to own the label myself!) the most successful & prolific: originally launching the careers of the Tygers & bringing the likes of Venom, Raven, Blitzkrieg, White Spirit, Fist & Jaguar, to name a few, to the world. The label was based in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England & signed so many New Wave acts that Sounds/Kerrang! actually originally called this phenomenon the (NE)NWOBHM (ie. North East). The label had all the ingredients to succeed. Firstly, they had their own in-house studio called Impulse &, secondly, the area had an abundance of young metal acts. One act, Venom, not only became the label’s flagship act after the Tygers left but, prior to the evil ones even striking their first note, Cronos (or Conrad as he was known then) was the junior studio assistant! Tyson Dog lived a few streets away. The Tygers, Raven, Venom, Fist, White Spirit et al all lived within 15 minutes drive of Neat Records. The bands were literally queuing up at the door! Raven were brought to Neat by the Tygers’ manager; Venom had an ‘in’, as I said, with Conrad being employed at Impulse. Others like Avenger, for example, were brought by Venom’s manager whose brother was the vocalist. It wasn’t all sweetness & light, of course, with the bands competing for dominance over each other: rivalries were, to say the least, razor sharp! As the vocalist with the Tygers I know that certain acts did, & probably still do to this day, resent the Tygers ‘succeeding’ by being signed to MCA. David Wood, the then label owner, had a large 3 foot mount made for Neat offices of me on stage - which basically became used for darts practise by other Neat acts when they visited! I also remember playing our big homecoming gig at Newcastle’s Mayfair Ballroom on the Wild Cat Tour to 2000 fans - only to see members of Fist throwing glasses at us from the middle of the crowd! I can laugh at these things now (not that we really gave them a second thought at the time either), but it does somewhat tarnish the myth that all the bands of the NWOBHM were some kind of big happy family.
Well, the truth probably was not that there was a plethora of heavy metal acts emerging in the UK in ’79, rather there was just a handful: Leppard in Sheffield; Maiden, Angelwitch and Samson in London; Saxon in Barnsley and us in Newcastle. The rest came along, albeit at a great pace, after the first Geoff Barton NWOBHM piece in Sounds. Even now, a metal magazine could probably call for metal demos from young acts in the UK, pull together a band in each town, call it a movement, give it a name, push it through the media and cross their fingers that it takes off. That could be me being old(er) and cynical - but it’s more or less true. Having said that, today they wouldn’t find the diversity and originality of acts. What they’d get now is 10 Marilyn Manson, Metallica or whatever soundalikes. Not that there’s anything wrong with these bands, but one of each is quite enough. ’79 saw and celebrated such a diversity in the NWOBHM scene for several reasons:

In ’79 metal bands didn’t expect to get ‘signed’. It just didn’t happen often if at all. Also they listened to a wide variety of music, not just metal as I’ve already explained. With no expectations of being signed, and by creating music from what they’d listened to throughout their life, a wide spectrum of different sounding bands was the result. They just played what they liked in naïve bliss without the artistic restraint of trying to sound like the ‘in’ acts of the time. For instance, Iron Maiden didn’t sound like Def Leppard who in turn sounded nothing like the Tygers who in turn were a million miles away from Raven’s sound.

Check out a young person’s record collection from 1979 and it would probably consist of older rock acts like Purple/Sabbath, some USA West Coast bands like Cheap Trick and The Tubes with a sprinkle of the more diverse acts like Zappa, Little Feat and early Roxy and Alice Cooper. You probably also had a thick collection of punk albums and 7” singles. Throwing all this music together with the do-it-yourself-anyone-can-be-in-a-band punk attitude it’s not surprising that young rock acts in the UK sounded so different and were busy going off to their local recording studios to record their demos etc for 50 quid: results can be heard in Leppard’s EP Bludgeon Riffola, Maiden’s Soundhouse tapes and the Tyger’s Don’t Touch Me There 7”

Another factor why metal bands didn’t sound like each other was that there was little to no rock on the radio, TV or in the press in the 70s! It was a time of pre MTV, internet or specialist print mags. There was no Kerrang! (later to become the NWOBHM specialist weekly bible). There were 3 music broadsheets (Sounds, NME and Melody Maker). That was it. Until Geoff Barton’s intervention in Sounds you had little metal music in any of these publications. Deep Purple would sit in the news pages of The Melody Maker with the Stylistics and Captain Beafheart.
The NWOBHM scene happened because kids who liked metal went and took a leaf out of the punk movement,s book - they made their own sounds and formed their own labels from which they could release their own singles: Def Leppard and Maiden’s labels are examples. Holocaust also had Phoenix Records - Phoenix was actually the name of the record shop where the then Holocaust vocalist Gary Lettice worked.

Jess with James Hetfield

( Dec 2003 )

Other labels that flew the flag at the time were mainly Heavy Metal Records in Wolverhampton and Ebony Records in Hull. Heavy Metal Records were responsible for such classic acts as the Handsome Beasts (check out their un pc cover for their first album Bestiality - marvellous!), Witchfinder General, Split Beaver (charming!) and Shiva to name a few. Ebony, of course, released a clutch of classics including Savage’s debut Loose ‘N Lethal. They also gave us albums by the brilliant Grim Reaper and Chateaux. Again, these labels had an abundance of local acts and owned in-house studios. Sadly, Ebony went bust years ago although Neat did re-released Savage’s (and Shy’s) debut a few years ago. In 1995 as boss of the label I saw no one was bothering with NWOBHM acts so I contacted some and got them to record new albums. Blitzkrieg , Holocaust , Jaguar and Witchfynde were some that did and I managed to release the Tygers Of Pan Tang catalogue too which was kind of strange . I also got the Chateaux and Holocaust catalogues back out there on CD for the first time through Sanctuary Records.

I’ve already highlighted other ‘also ran’ labels like Phoenix in Edinburgh (Holocaust), but there were others such as Rondolet (Gaskin, Witchfynde); Reddington Rare (Quartz) and Guardian Records (who were responsible for rare but highly collectable 7” & compilation albums including Satan’s debut single Kiss Of Death).

Ironically outside the UK the NWOBHM never really went away and while the fickle UK media moved (rock wise) on to the God that is all things American, the spirit of the UK metal scene was kept alive outside the UK by a group of fans who have gone on to become label bosses, magazine editors, concert and festival promoters and managers. Pony Canyon in Japan for instance released some 30 + of Neat’s albums between 1995-2000. Spitfire Records in America and Rock Brigade in Brazil did like wise. On the live front I have been able to supply NWOBHM acts yearly to festivals around the world and have had bands play like Praying Mantis, Samson, Diamond Head and Fist to anything between 2,000–30,000 metal heads while they’d struggle to pull 50 punters in a pub here.

Well, there you are. A little bit of history and a little bit of waffle for you and, though outside of Maiden Leppard and Saxon some of you may not have heard of a lot of these NWOBHM bands, that does not matter as the bands involved generally did not care one way or the other and did not want to change the world or get a record deal, but to be the best metal act in Scunthorpe, Wigan, Basildon or Whitley Bay! The rising of American ‘poodle rock’ in the mid 80s effectively killed off the NWOBHM. Depending on your point of view, this colloquial naiveté amongst British acts could very well have been the movement’s Achilles heel - or, in my opinion, it could be its most endearing legacy.

As for me, being the imperialist lacky for the capitalist running dog that I am, I still run a NWOBHM label called Metal Nation Records. If you want to check out releases by many of the NWOBHM acts above go to www.metalnation.co.uk where my new site still has catalogue from many of the acts. I am also putting together a 25th NWOBHM Anniversary show next year and have confirmed some acts already. The venue is being decided at the moment but it is likely to be in London and held around May. Info will appear on the Metal Nation Records site and good metal magazines like the one in your hand!

Oh yes . PS, the name Tygers Of Pan Tang comes for a Michael Moorcock book called ‘Stormbringer’. There you are. Told you you’d fine the answer to this question !

Jess Cox (July 2004).

O