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By Root 392 0

for thirty-seven consecutive weeks. On 16 May 1983, the same week Metallica began recording their first album, NBC TV broadcast Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, the show on which Jackson famously unveiled his ‘moonwalk’ during a captivating performance before his peers of his hit single, ‘Billie Jean’. The next day the whole country seemed to be talking about it. Fred Astaire telephoned the twenty-five-year-old singer personally to congratulate him. Thriller was now well on its way to becoming the biggest-selling album of all time – an achievement that helped transform the fortunes of the US record biz, then suffering from its second slump in three years. Before Thriller, US industry bible Billboard had reported that record shipments had declined by over fifty million units between 1980 and 1982. Before Thriller, US record companies had been drastically reducing staff and slashing budgets. Now, in its wake, came the era of the ultra-commercial blockbuster album. When, in 1984, Columbia – which had released Thriller and was one of the labels that laughed Jonny Z out of the door when he tried to bring them Metallica – released the next Bruce Springsteen album, Born in the U.S.A., they did so with seven singles already prepped for release from it, all of which would arrow straight into the US Top Ten. Meanwhile, their main rivals at Warner Bros readied themselves to launch five singles from Prince’s next album, Purple Rain, while Mercury, who had seen Def Leppard’s third album, Pyromania, beaten to the top spot in 1983 by Thriller, made sure they beat the odds with their next album, Hysteria, by hitting US radio with no less than seven singles from it – all of them major chart successes. As a result, all these albums sold more than ten million copies each in the USA alone, becoming the most successful of each respective artist’s careers.

The impact of the NWOBHM on the US mainstream had been minimal, barely registering at all outside the same pockets of hardcore underground interest that Metallica itself had sprung from. Of the handful of NWOBHM bands that actually made it across to America by 1983, only Def Leppard had enjoyed significant success, and then because Leppard were colourful and exciting – their impossibly youthful image cut from the same pop-rock cloth as contemporaries such as Duran Duran, their music sculpted in the studio by ‘Mutt’ Lange, the same production genius who had gifted huge chart success to AC/DC, The Cars and the Boomtown Rats; video-friendly, singles-oriented, pop-in-rock-clothing. Even Iron Maiden, the only other NWOBHM band now beginning to see success in America, had done so only after replacing their original short-haired, punk-style singer Paul Di’Anno with the more generic-sounding, trad-rock vocalist Bruce Dickinson. Maiden didn’t rely on mainstream pop success like Leppard, but they still had to tailor their sheet-metal riffs for a broader audience than the one they’d launched their career with in the UK. Indeed, the only other notable successes from the UK in the same period were Judas Priest, like Maiden from a previous generation, and, in 1987, Whitesnake, who followed Leppard’s MTV first template almost to the letter.

The only home-grown rock music that still held purchase with both US radio and the Top Ten album charts came from increasingly middle-of-the-road ‘melodic rock’ acts such as Journey and REO Speedwagon. Huey Lewis and the News, another San Francisco band in the ‘soft rock’ mould that hit Number One in 1983 with their Sports album, only did so, Lewis later revealed, after ‘a huge fight’ with the chiefs of their record company Chrysalis, who actually tried to get Lewis to either change his singing style or hand over vocal duties in the band to an entirely different singer. ‘They actually told me: “That kind of deep voice doesn’t get played on [US] radio any more,”’ he told me in 1984. Fortunately for the future of the News, Lewis, a tough New Yorker who had spent years ‘schlepping around the circuit’, was bloody-minded enough to ignore such ‘advice’. Fortunately for