As inelegant acronyms go, NWOBHM was at least onomatopoeic: an approximation of metal’s thudding, bludgeoning bass registers. Certainly the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal”, for which the acronym stood, was thudding and bludgeoning — and many other things described well in Michael Hann’s entertaining and poignant oral history of the sub-genre.
Born on a night in May 1979 when Sounds magazine’s Geoff Barton reviewed Samson, Angel Witch and Iron Maiden at Camden’s Music Machine, NWOBHM was a kind of accidental revolt, a parallel to punk’s toppling of stadium-rock pomposities. (Where the ostensibly hipper, less “rockist” NME and Melody Maker had long looked snobbishly down their metropolitan noses at it, Sounds kept faith; indeed, the gaping hole in Denim and Leather is the absence of Barton himself.)
NWOBHM rescued metal from its moribund late ’70s status, reviving a key musical subculture and giving a new generation of bedroom riffologists a sense of meaning and belonging. Without it, there might never have been a Slayer, a Metallica, or a Mastodon.
For NME writers of the era, metal existed in a different and slightly absurd dimension, one I experienced close-up after being sent to review the second Monsters of Rock festival at the Castle Donington racetrack in 1981. This heaving melee of spotty white males — their studded jean-jackets festooned with patches declaiming the names of favourite bands — struck me as the very essence of tribal conformity, and Hann’s interviews with NWOBHM’s key dramatis personae explain why.
In Denim and Leather we hear from Def Leppard’s always articulate Joe Elliott, Iron Maiden’s slightly deluded original singer Paul Di’Anno and Judas Priest’s bravely gay frontman Rob Halford — but also from such shrewd observers of the NWOBHM phenomenon as Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, rockademic sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris, Monsters of Rock publicist Jennie Halsall, and surviving members of the anomalously all-female Girlschool.
The book’s real core, though, lies in the recall of the regional musicians who paved the way for Metallica and “the Lepps” but never truly made it: Vardis’s axe-wielding Steve Zodiac, Saxon’s gimp-masked drummer Thunderstick, and the genuinely unsettling members of Newcastle’s satanic trio Venom.
England’s industrial north-east was a particularly fertile source of NWOBHM bands and labels. Part of the charm of Denim and Leather — though it could be construed as patronising — is Hann’s rendering of local accents, even as his interviewees hold forth on their lurid flirtations with the dark side. To take any of this any more seriously than, say, Hammer horror movies or This Is Spinal Tap comes down to how willing you are to suspend your cynical disbelief and rock snobbery.
NWOBHM clearly gave headbanging, Kerrang!-reading air guitarists a sense of codified communion that postpunk did not. Rooted in onanistic fantasy it may have been, but its sonic aggression was harmless — at least until the influence of Venom dripped through to disturbing (and murderous) Norwegian “black metal” bands such as Mayhem and Burzum. And whatever your musical tastes, riffs such as Raven’s “Rock Until You Drop” and Diamond Head’s “It’s Electric” remain as bone-quakingly exciting as anything on Metallica’s so-called Black Album.
Hann winds up his narrative with the gradual dissipation of the movement. To lay its “fall” at the feet of Def Leppard and their producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange is an oversimplification, but the American breakthrough of the Sheffield band’s 1983 album Pyromania did testify to a new ’80s need to bust out of the English provinces and emulate the “AOR” (album-orientated rock) sheen of bands such as Van Halen: in other words, to reclaim America’s stadiums for the Brits. With Pyromania the metal story effectively came full circle, but not without NWOBHM’s lasting influence on the countless black/speed/death/thrash-metal bands who’ve kept the faith ever since.
Denim and Leather: The Rise and Fall of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal by Michael Hann, Constable, £20, 480 pages
Barney Hoskyns is editorial director of Rock’s Backpages
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Denim and Leather — how the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was forged
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