NEWS

The following story is courtesy of Roy Wilkinson from Guardian.co.uk:

This year sees the 30th anniversary of one of our most thoroughly titled musical genres: the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, abbreviated to NWOBHM, and pronounced "nuh-wobbum". It's a realm of rapid-fire riffs and heroic declarations about motorbikes, the Charge of the Light Brigade and sticking it to the boss. It's also a place of much bathos and human fallibility. One NWOBHM group toured in a van bearing the trademark of its previous owner: Sid Cummings - TRIPE DEALER. Another band's drummer played inside a cage while wearing what was often referred to as a "rapist mask". He called himself Thunderstick, though his parents knew him better as Barry Purkis.

NWOBHM was not solely the preserve of bathos. Two of its leading lights, IRON MAIDEN and DEF LEPPARD, went on to become among the biggest groups in the world, forging long-lasting careers. But they do not, perhaps, represent the British metal scene in its truest light. Def Leppard's transatlantic inclinations soon removed them from the scene that spawned them (and from the affections of hardcore metalheads back home), while Maiden became the international gold standard for metal. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal centres on the hordes of bands who never quite eclipsed the thing that spawned them. They came pouring in from the provinces - bands such as SAXON (from Barnsley), SLEDGEHAMMER (Slough) and the TYGERS OF PAN TANG (Whitley Bay). And the club that became the unofficial HQ of NWOBHM was perhaps the least glamorous centre of any scene. Where the British R&B boom of the 60s had the Marquee and New York punk had CBGBs, NWOBHM had a room attached to the Prince of Wales pub in the north-west London suburb of Kingsbury, where the Soundhouse club would see fans playing along to favourite songs on hardboard cutout guitars - a trend begun by a wedding photographer called Robin Yeatman. So influential was the Soundhouse that Iron Maiden's first release was called The Soundhouse Tapes.

The term New Wave of British Heavy Metal was first used in 1979 in the now-defunct British music weekly Sounds. It encompassed a mass of young hard rock bands who swore fealty to LED ZEPPELIN, BLACK SABBATH and DEEP PURPLE, but who mixed this heritage with a new urgency and a DIY mindset, both derived from punk - and the scene was drawn together by a compilation album called Metal for Muthas released in February 1980.

"Punk was definitely important," says Saxon frontman Biff Byford. "It just created a different mood - like when Def Leppard put out their own EP. We actually supported the Clash in Manchester in 1977. I bumped into Joe Strummer about five years ago. I couldn't believe it, but he actually remembered the show. He said they'd been jamming our song 747 in their dressing room."

Saxon are the band who toured in the tripe van. They're generally linked to Barnsley, but Biff Byford grew up in a West Yorkshire village with an even more dripping-infused name: Skelmanthrope. His life before Saxon reads like something from Mike Leigh. Before becoming a rock star - it's easy to forget now, but Saxon had proper hits in the early 80s, appeared on Top of the Pops, and were on the bill of the first Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in 1980 - he had been a miner and a textile worker, which cost him part of a finger. In his 2007 autobiography, Never Surrender, he remembers his sexual initiation at the hands of two women for whom he'd been baby-sitting. "They gave me a hand job there and then," he writes. "They still paid me as well - two shillings and sixpence."

Read more here.