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By Root 316 0

hurry to tear down the edifice, punk had overlooked the obvious – that at its foundations, hard rock and heavy metal was not so different from what the best punk rock imagined itself to be: raw, alive, unafraid to offend, unafraid to be ridiculed and spat on for the clothes it wore and the lifestyle it chose to expound; alert to the creative possibilities of existing defiantly outside the mainstream. NWOBHM bands had also absorbed the more practical lessons of punk: that you could release limited editions of your own records on small independently run labels, as a spur to later getting longer-term deals with one of the major labels. Hence Def Leppard’s Getcha Rocks Off EP, released on their own Bludgeon Riffola label, and Iron Maiden’s home-grown The Soundhouse Tapes EP (original copies of which both now exchange hands for several hundred pounds). Saxon and Motörhead, although neither fell strictly speaking into the NWOBHM category, found themselves lumped in anyway, almost entirely by accident of timing and the fact that their first records were also released by independent labels.

Also like punk, NWOBHM fans started their own fanzines: titles such as Metal Fury and Metal Forces, in the UK, and similar titles around the world like Metal Mania and Metal Rendezvous in the USA and Aardshok in Holland, had all made the leap from the back-room press onto the shelves of record stores and newsagents as the demand for articles on the new, revitalised UK rock scene rapidly grew. With Sounds leading the way, the rest of the large-circulation British music press also moved to get in on the act. Malcolm Dome, a life-long hard rock and heavy metal devotee then working as Deputy Editor for Dominion Press, publishers of educational scientific journals such as Laboratory News, had begun contributing articles on the NWOBHM scene to Record Mirror in 1980, and later became a leading writer for Kerrang!. He now describes the years between 1979 and 1981 – the apotheosis of the NWOBHM – as ‘some of the most exciting for new rock music this country has ever witnessed’. Dome had been recruited to Record Mirror after their previous in-house rock correspondent, Steve Gett, had been poached by the more prestigious Melody Maker, keen not to miss out on what they rightly viewed as a coming wave of important and – more to the point – increasingly popular music. By 1981, the mainstream UK music press was even ready to give birth to the world’s first dedicated rock and metal magazine, Kerrang! – originally begun by Geoff Barton as yet another adjunct to Sounds’ ongoing nurturing of the no longer quite so jokey NWOBHM scene, now about to become a significant part of the media landscape not just in Britain but around the world.

As Dome recalls, ‘Maiden were regarded as at the top of the pile of the NWOBHM. With the possible exception of Def Leppard, they were obviously streets ahead of everyone else. But, of course, like any scene, it completely fed upon itself.’ As a result of all the media attention they were now attracting, both Maiden and Leppard would score big record contracts: the former with EMI, the latter with Phonogram. Indeed, it became a race between the two as to which would break into the national charts first. Maiden’s commercial potential had been made apparent to EMI when their Soundhouse Tapes EP, given limited release in November 1979 on their own Rock Hard Records, sold five thousand copies. Never intended for retail, the five thousand seven-inch vinyl copies of The Soundhouse Tapes were made available by mail order only, priced £1.20, including postage and packing, and were distributed by a friend of the band named Keith Wilfort, who enlisted his mother to help him send them out from the family home in East Ham. Miraculously, they managed to send out over three thousand copies within the first week.

After the band then signed with EMI, they spearheaded the release of a NWOBHM compilation, titled Metal for Muthas, released in February 1980. The brainchild of EMI young gun Ashley Goodall, Metal for Muthas showcased nine avowedly NWOBHM