Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [86]
Enter their knight in cockney accent, Martin Hooker, then head of his own UK-based independent record label, Music for Nations. Still in his twenties, Hooker had already enjoyed a successful career in the music business, working for EMI for six years, ‘handling promotion, label managing [and] lots of different jobs’, he says, for artists ‘from Queen to Kate Bush and all stops in between’. The one job he most coveted, however, in A&R, scouting and signing new talent, ‘was the one thing I didn’t do’. EMI kept denying him the opportunity, citing a lack of experience. Frustrated, Hooker decided to leave and start his own label – Secret Records, which he describes now as ‘predominantly a punk label’ but which really came into its own in the aftermath of the original generation of British punk rock bands.
Typical of Secret was one of Hooker’s first releases, the Punk’s Not Dead album by The Exploited – deliberately designed to distance itself from the less musically bilious ‘new wave’ that had followed directly on from punk and to re-establish what the band and its followers saw as original punk’s aggressive, uncompromising stance, musically and image-wise. Released in March 1981, Punk’s Not Dead went to Number One in the UK independent charts and would eventually become the biggest-selling independently released album of the year. It was not a fluke. Hooker recalls, ‘We then had nine chart albums out of nine releases – things like The Exploited, the 4-Skins, Chron Gen, Infa Riot…all sorts of things.’ Released at a time – the summer of 1981 – when the UK was undergoing an almost nightly series of anti-government inner-city riots, suddenly the ‘very hardcore punk’ that Secret specialised in ‘was big news. Literally, everything that we put out went straight in the charts.’ Looking back now, he attributes this instant success to a mixture of spotting a gap in the market and ‘just really liking that stuff. It was the era and it was exciting and fun.’ And in terms of running your own label, ‘an absolutely fantastic learning curve’.
As a result, several of the London-based major labels invited Hooker to come and run their A&R departments: ‘But by that time I had the money to not necessarily do that.’ Instead, his next move was to look beyond the confines of the UK punk scene towards a form of music he felt would have more international appeal. ‘I was quite keen to move into a more heavy metal area.’ Unlike, punk, however, Hooker was less interested in the domestic scene: ‘I was very much a rock fan but I wasn’t that keen on many of the NWOBHM-type bands. I was much more into the American side – Mötley Crüe and those sorts of bands.’
Towards the end of his time at Secret, Hooker signed Twisted Sister – a US metal band whose outré image lay firmly in the glam tradition but whose music veered more towards a UK punk-metal hybrid. Disentangling the band from its New York roots and replanting them in England, where he recorded their debut album, Under the Blade, released on Secret to great success in September 1982, had given Hooker the taste for more. ‘It was a great experience. That album went straight in the chart and Dee [Snider] was one of the best frontmen I’ve ever seen. We got them on the Reading Festival where they just completely stole the show. So after that, I thought, this is crazy, I’m gonna start a heavy metal label and I came up with the idea for Music for Nations. I thought it was a good name for it because [metal] was the one type of music that never came in or out of fashion.’ And unlike punk, ‘I could see it in every country in the world.’
Working out of a small office in Carnaby Street with initially just his girlfriend Linda there to help, Hooker got Music for Nations under way at the end of 1982 by inviting contacts in the USA to send over copies of any recent metal-orientated product he might potentially look to release in Britain and Europe. Within weeks his desk was overflowing with demos and one-off independent releases. Settling on ‘a handful to get