Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [7]
Without realising it, Lars had stumbled on one of the most important touchstones in what was fast becoming a watershed moment in rock history. By the late summer of 1979, although still unsigned to a major record label, Iron Maiden was already a band clearly on the up. Boosted by the unforeseen success of The Soundhouse Tapes, a self-financed EP of a three-track demo recorded for next to nothing, Sounds – then one of the most popular weekly music magazines in Britain – had run its first live review of the band: a show at the Music Machine, in London’s Camden Town, where Iron Maiden had been sandwiched between Black Sabbath copyists Angel Witch, and the more bluesy, old-style boogie of Samson (featuring future Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson, then known as Bruce Bruce). Sounds’ deputy editor Geoff Barton, who was there that night, would later write: ‘I do definitely recall Maiden being the best band of the evening, infinitely preferable to the Sabs-worshipping Angel Witch and way ahead of Samson.’ What really intrigued Barton, though, he would later tell me, ‘is that a band like Iron Maiden or Angel Witch could even exist at a time like that’, when punk and new wave had apparently killed off the hard rock and metal genre. Sensing the makings of a follow-on feature, Barton talked Sounds editor Alan Lewis into allowing him to put together a coverall piece not just on Iron Maiden, but on a whole new generation of rock heavies he dubbed, in deliberately eye-catching tabloid style, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. ‘To be honest, I didn’t really feel that any of these bands were particularly linked in a musical way,’ says Barton now, ‘but it was interesting that so many of them should be then emerging at more or less the same time. It was a good thing for the genuine rock fans who had really gone to ground, hiding in their wardrobes waiting for punk to go away.’ They had begun ‘by doing a feature on Def Leppard, who had just released their first, independently produced four-track EP, Getcha Rocks Off. Then Maiden came along’, followed by ‘Samson and Angel Witch, then Tygers of Pan Tang and Praying Mantis, and so we did features on them, too, and it just kept going from there.’
What not even Barton had foreseen, however, was the enormous purchase that one almost comedic phrase dreamed up one rainy afternoon in the Sounds office would have on the music world. ‘We ran the [NWOBHM] feature and the response we got from both the readers and other bands was just phenomenal. It was obvious that, whatever you called it, there was definitely something going on out there. Suddenly there were new heavy metal bands springing up everywhere, it seemed. Of course, not all of them were as [good] as bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, but the fact that they were even trying was news back then and we just ran with it for about two years in the end.’ Ironically, considering the short srift most of the post-punk music critics could be expected to give any band called Praying Mantis or Angel Witch, the motivation behind this resurgence came from a similar dissatisfaction as punk with what a new generation of record-buying kids saw as the self-indulgent, album-oriented monoliths that had preceded them. By 1979, bands such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, ELP and Yes (all prominent members of the ruling rock royalty of the day) were rarely seen on British stages, and when they did deign to make a fleeting appearance, they invariably spurned the idea of actual touring in favour of a more languorous (not to mention lucrative) handful of dates at a large, impersonal arena like Earls Court in London. Rock bands had become grandiose and pompous; the music they played grown old before its time. As a result, the gap between those on stage and those off had never been greater.
Punk’s response was a desire to see the past wiped out; to start again from the ground up. But in its