• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 323 0

bands, most prominent being Iron Maiden, the only band on the album to have two tracks (‘Sanctuary’ and ‘Wrathchild’). The rest of the album was a mixture of tracks from the likes of genuine NWOBHM stalwarts such as Samson (‘Tomorrow or Yesterday’), Angel Witch (‘Baphomet’), Sledgehammer (‘Sledgehammer’), Praying Mantis (‘Captured City’) and more opportunistic, old-fashioned album-fillers such as Toad the Wet Sprocket, Ethel the Frog, and even former A&M artists Nutz, a band that hardly qualified as ‘new’ at any stage of its unremarkable career. As Malcolm Dome, who reviewed the album for Record Mirror, says now, ‘I found it all very exciting. It was a shame they couldn’t get Def Leppard or Diamond Head as well [but] I still think it was actually a fine summation of that period.’

The Metal for Muthas tour which followed, was more representative and featured Maiden, Praying Mantis, Tygers of Pan Tang and Raven, all bona fide members of the NWOBHM elite. Then Maiden guitarist Dennis Stratton, who’d only just joined the band, told me he was ‘shell-shocked by the response [the shows] got from their fans’. He went on: ‘Musically, it was bordering on punk rock…the audience was just fanatical. To me, it was all heavy metal music, but for some reason the fans could pick out that Maiden were different.’ Fellow Maiden guitarist Dave Murray remembers it as ‘people just waiting for the tour to arrive. It felt like the punk thing was kind of coming to an end and there was this gap and that everybody was just waiting for something to happen again. And it was great because rock was supposed to be dead, you know, but the reality was there was loads of kids out there who were coming to the shows or forming their own bands.’

When the self-titled debut Iron Maiden was released in the spring of 1980, it leapt straight into the UK charts at Number Four. As a result, import copies started flooding into the USA ahead of its official release there later that year. Out on the West Coast, Lars Ulrich was one of the first to buy one. As he told me: ‘I was getting Sounds sent to me on a weekly basis, and I was getting care packages from [independent NWOBHM specialist label] Bullet Records.’ The NWOBHM, ‘just gave a new spin, a different kind of edge to traditional long-haired rock music. I mean, I was a teenage Deep Purple fan from Denmark who thought it didn’t get any better than that, you know, who was then suddenly thrown into this whole NWOBHM thing, and it sounds weird, but basically it changed my life.’ The only snag: ‘There was no one I could talk to about this stuff. It was always awkward for me when I landed in LA.’ Enrolled at Backbay high school in Newport Beach, he was the foreign kid with the funny accent and weird taste in clothes and music. ‘It was literally five hundred kids in pink Lacoste shirts and one guy in a Saxon T-shirt – me. I didn’t like to get beat up. I wasn’t like one of those guys. I was more like a loner. I was an outsider – doing my own thing, living in my own world and sort of not really relating to anything that was around me, in school or in Newport Beach’ where he now lived with his family. NWOBHM was ‘heavy metal played with a punk attitude’, he insisted. ‘My heart and soul were in England with Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Diamond Head, and meanwhile I’m sitting here in this barren musical wasteland of Southern California being bombarded with REO Speedwagon and Styx. I had all the merchandise sent over from England. I’d walk around school with a Saxon T-shirt on and people would look at me as if I was from another planet.’ He had tried to integrate himself into the local scene, he said, going to see Y&T at the Starwood club in Hollywood just before his seventeenth birthday, but the only real friends he found he could relate to – that even knew what it meant when he walked in wearing a Motörhead or Maiden tee – were those he corresponded with via the then-emerging cassette-tape-trading scene.

Finally, Lars made contact with some new, like-minded buddies in the shape of two slightly older rock fans from Woodlands