New wave of British heavy metal
The new wave of British heavy metal was a nationwide musical movement that began in England in the mid-1970s and achieved international attention by the early 1980s. Editor Alan Lewis coined the term for an article by Geoff Barton in a May 1979 issue of the British music newspaper Sounds to describe the emergence of heavy metal bands in the mid-to-late 1970s, as punk rock declined amid the dominance of new wave music.
Although encompassing diverse styles inherited from rock music, the music of the NWOBHM is best remembered for infusing earlier heavy metal with the intensity of punk rock to produce fast and aggressive songs. The DIY attitude of the NWOBHM bands led to raw-sounding, self-produced recordings and a proliferation of independent record labels. Song lyrics were usually about escapist themes, such as mythology, fantasy, horror, and the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.
The NWOBHM began as an underground phenomenon growing in parallel to punk and largely ignored by the media. Promotion by Sounds and rock DJ Neal Kay moved it into public consciousness and toward radio airplay, recognition, and success in the UK. Its musicians and fans were largely young, white, working-class men who suffered the hardships of unemployment after the 1973–75 recession. As a reaction to their bleak reality, they then created a community separate from mainstream society to enjoy each other's company and their favourite loud music. The NWOBHM was criticised as being local media hype for mostly talentless musicians. Nonetheless, it generated a renewal in the genre of heavy metal music and furthered the progress of the heavy metal subculture, whose updated behavioural and visual codes were quickly adopted by metal fans worldwide after the spread of the music to continental Europe, North America and Japan.
By some estimates, the movement spawned as many as a thousand heavy metal bands. Only a few survived the advent of MTV and the rise of the more commercial glam metal in the second half of the 1980s. Iron Maiden and Def Leppard became superstars; Motörhead and Saxon also had considerable success. Other groups, such as Diamond Head, Venom, and Raven, had more limited chart success, but influenced the successful extreme metal subgenres of the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s. Many bands from the NWOBHM reunited in the 2000s and remained active through live performances and new studio albums.
Background
Social unrest
In the second half of the 1970s, the United Kingdom was in a state of social unrest and widespread poverty as a result of the ineffective social politics of both Conservative and Labour Party governments during a three-year period of economic recession. As a consequence of deindustrialisation, the unemployment rate was exceptionally high, especially among working class youth. It continued to rise in the early 1980s, peaking in February 1983. The discontent of so many people caused social unrest with frequent strikes, and culminated in a series of riots, including one in Brixton and another in Toxteth. During this period, the mass of young people, deprived of the prospect of even relatively low-skill jobs that were available to the previous generations, searched for different ways to earn money in the music and entertainment businesses. The explosion of new bands and new musical styles coming from the UK in the late 1970s was a result of their efforts to make a living in the economic depression that hit the country before and during the governments of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.The desperation and the violent reaction of a generation robbed of a safe future are well-represented by the British punk movement of 1977–1978, whose rebellion against the establishment continued diluted in the new wave and post-punk music of the 1980s. These self-proclaimed punks were politically militant, relishing their anarchic attitude and stage practices like pogo dancing. They wore short and spiked hairstyles or shaved heads, often with safety pins and ripped clothes, and considered musical prowess unimportant as long as the music was simple and loud. However, not all working-class male youths embraced the punk movement; some preferred to escape from their grim reality in heavy metal, which was equally effective in providing fun, stress relief, and peer companionship, otherwise denied because of their unemployment.
Heavy rock in the UK
The UK was a cradle of the first wave of heavy metal, which was born at the end of the 1960s and flowered in the early 1970s. Of the many British bands that came to prominence during that period, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple achieved worldwide success and critical acclaim. The success of the music genre, usually called heavy rock at the time, generated a community of UK fans with strong ties to psychedelia, hippie doctrines and biker subculture. Each of these bands was in crisis in the mid-to-late 1970s: Led Zeppelin were plagued by discord and personal tragedies and had drastically reduced their activities, Black Sabbath had fired their charismatic but unreliable frontman Ozzy Osbourne, and Deep Purple disbanded. As a consequence, the whole movement lost much of its momentum and media interest, which were refocused on what British writer Malc Macmillan calls "the more fashionable or lucrative markets of the day" such as disco, glam, mod revival, new wave and electronic music. Just like progressive rock acts and other mainstream music groups of the 1970s, heavy rock bands were viewed as, in the words of journalist Garry Bushell, "lumbering dinosaurs" by a music press infatuated with punk rock and new wave. Some writers even declared the premature demise of heavy metal altogether.The crisis of British heavy rock giants left space for the rise of other rock bands in the mid-1970s, including Queen, Hawkwind, Budgie, Bad Company, Status Quo and Nazareth, all of which had multiple chart entries in the UK and had conducted successful international tours. The British chart results of the period show that there was still a vast audience for heavy metal in the country, and upcoming bands UFO and Judas Priest, also had tangible success and media coverage in the late 1970s. Foreign hard rock acts, such as Blue Öyster Cult and Kiss from the US, Rush from Canada, Scorpions from West Germany, Thin Lizzy from Ireland, and especially AC/DC from Australia, climbed the British charts in the same period.
Motörhead
were founded in 1975 by already experienced musicians. Their leader Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister was a former member of the space rock band Hawkwind, Larry Wallis had played with Pink Fairies, and Eddie Clarke had been a member of Curtis Knight's Zeus. Their previous experience is one element which divides critics and fans over whether the band belongs to the new wave of British heavy metal. Some believe that the band should be considered an inspiration for the movement, but not part of it, because they had signed recording contracts, toured the country, and had chart success before any NWOBHM band had stepped out of their local club scene. Motörhead were also the only metal band of the period recording songs with veteran BBC radio DJ John Peel for his Peel Sessions programme and the first to reach No. 1 in the UK Albums Chart with the live album No Sleep 'til Hammersmith in June 1981. Lemmy himself said, "the NWOBHM ... didn't do us much good", because Motörhead "came along a bit too early for it".Other critics view Motörhead as the first significant exponent of the movement and the first band to fully implement a crossover between punk rock and heavy metal. Their fast music, the renunciation of technical virtuosity in favour of sheer loudness, and their uncompromising attitude were welcomed equally by punks and heavy metal fans. Motörhead were supported by many NWOBHM bands on tour, and they also shared the stage with Lemmy's friends' punk band The Damned. Motörhead's musical style became very popular during the NWOBHM, making them a fundamental reference for the nascent movement and for musicians of various metal subgenres in the following decades.
Characteristics
Identity and style
The NWOBHM involved both musicians and fans who were largely young, male and white and shared class origin, ethics, and aesthetic values. American sociologist Deena Weinstein, in her book Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, describes the rise and growth of the movement as the achievement of maturity for heavy metal, after its birth in the early 1970s and before branching out into various subgenres in the following years. British heavy metal fans, commonly known as muthas, metalheads, or headbangers for the violent, rhythmic shaking of their heads in time to the music, dismissed the simplistic image of rebellious youth inherited from the counterculture of the 1960s and the psychedelic attachments characteristic of heavy rock in the 1970s, updating the shared principles and codes of the heavy metal subculture and definitely separating it from mainstream society.Towards the end of the 1970s, British metalheads coalesced into a closed community of peers that exalted power and celebrated masculinity. According to Deena Weinstein's analysis, their male camaraderie and the general absence of women in their ranks did not turn into machismo and misogyny. In the same article, she wrote that British heavy metal: "is not racist, despite its uniformly white performers, and its lyrics are devoid of racial references." Another characteristic of the subculture was its latent homophobia, less violent, but not dissimilar to British skinheads' disposition; in his book Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Robert Walser calls it a "collective affirmation of heterosexuality", and in a journal British sociologist John Clarke regards it as "a reaction against the erosion of traditionally available stereotypes of masculinity".
Headbangers showed little interest in political and social problems, finding in each other's company, in the consumption of beer and in the music, the means to escape their bleak reality; for this reason they were often accused of nihilism or escapism. In contrast with punks, they loved musicianship and made idols of virtuoso guitarists and vocalists, viewing the live show as the full realisation of their status. The fans were very loyal to the music, to each other and to the bands with whom they shared origins and from whom they required coherence with their values, authenticity and continuous accessibility. To depart from this strict code meant being marked as a "sell out" or "poseur" and being somewhat excluded from the community. The lyrics of the song "Denim and Leather" by Saxon reflect precisely the condition of British metalheads in those years of great enthusiasm. Access to this male-dominated world for female musicians and fans was not easy, and only women who adapted to their male counterparts' standards and codes were accepted, as attested by Girlschool and Rock Goddess, the only notable all-female heavy metal bands of that era.
The music, philosophy and lifestyle of heavy metal bands and fans were often panned by both left-wing critics and conservative public opinion, described as senseless, ridiculous to the limit of self-parody, and even dangerous for the young generation. The 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap addressed many idiosyncrasies of British metal bands, showing comic sides of that world which external observers would judge absurd, but metal musicians regarded the movie's content as much too real.