![]() ![]() ![]() "Walk in the door with long hair and that was an end to it. "If you were in a band you had a hard time getting a gig," says Neal Kay, who DJed at the Bandwagon pub in Kingsbury in north west London. "The people who ran these clubs found the easy way out in getting a DJ in." "So many punk bands got live music banned from the little clubs around the UK, at the same time as disco was really kicking off," Joe Elliott says. Not just punk, but disco had taken their toll on the grassroots circuit for rock bands. While Lizzy and UFO and Priest were consolidating, though, hard rock in general was being sidelined. These were the bands who were providing something exciting to younger fans of hard rock. There were exceptions, though: Judas Priest were moving away from the dreary blues rock of their debut towards something diamond hard and razor sharp Thin Lizzy and UFO were perfecting a melodic, concise hard rock based on songs with gigantic hooks and radio-friendly tunes. The titans of British hard rock were not in a great way, either splitting (Deep Purple), directionless (Black Sabbath), or lumbering into druggy ennui (Led Zeppelin). By the second half of the 70s, British hard rock was in a peculiar state. NWOBHM had its roots in a confluence of circumstances. And when he said, 'So about this heavy metal …' I was like, 'WE ARE FUCKING NOT HEAVY FUCKING METAL!'" So we were doing an interview with Garry Bushell for Sounds. No 1 in the heavy metal charts? Michael Jackson? I saw red. "What made me put my foot down was when Michael Jackson got in the bloody heavy metal charts in Kerrang! with Eddie Van Halen doing a solo on 'Beat It'. ![]() That was always our stance and we've stuck with it for 40 years."Īt the other end of the sonic spectrum, Cronos from Venom is just as adamant. We went: 'We don't want to be part of a movement.' Same as you can't accuse the Beatles of being part of the Mersey sound. "And the first thing we did was react against it. "When we started getting a bit of traction we noticed we were being lumped in with all these other bands we weren't aware of," Leppard singer Joe Elliott says. At the commercial end of hard rock, Def Leppard continue to insist they were never a NWOBHM band. It came to be applied to scores of bands, regardless of what they had in common, so long as they sounded at least faintly metallic. The phrase itself was coined by Sounds editor Alan Lewis, inserted as a sub-heading on Geoff Barton's review of the Heavy Metal Crusade gig – featuring Samson, Iron Maiden and Angel Witch – at the Music Machine in London (now Koko) on. NWOBHM was, in some respects, a media invention. The sound they loved was that of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. One that transformed metal in the UK, and sowed the seeds for thrash (and therefore, paradoxically, for the extreme metal styles that eschewed melody). One that helped shore up the careers of an earlier generation of hard rock artists, who rode its success back into the charts. The sound they loved, they said, was one that's 40 years old. ![]()
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