Print: – Joe Elliott on the NWOBHM

[Shawn]

Print: – Joe Elliott on the NWOBHM - May 16TH, 2019 The Guardian

"Inspired by punk’s energy, the new wave of British heavy metal helped put the ‘snot and piss’ back into rock music. Forty years on, its leading players tell the story"

"Joe Elliott (singer, Def Leppard): The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) was a phrase invented by Sounds magazine [in May 1979]. It’s an easy hook for many bands that came out around 1979, at a time when nightclubs were starting to let bands play again after disco had shut it all down."

"Joe Elliott: When you hear the energy of the Undertones or the Pistols or the Damned’s New Rose, it’s got an insane energy that had been so lacking. I would see these bands live, and the odd ones who were brave enough to do Top of the Pops, like Generation X, and the first thing I would say was: “I could **Censored** do that.”

"Joe Elliott: Sounds had a more open-minded editor [Alan Lewis], who allowed Geoff Barton a bigger say in that particular area of the magazine than you would ever get out of NME. That then spread to Kerrang! [launched in 1980] so now we had a glossy that’s focused on the music."

"Joe Elliott: Talk about marginalised … shove the rock show out at 10 o’clock on a Friday night when everybody that likes that kind of music isn’t at home. If you’re 18, you’ve just discovered pubs. 9.55, I’m gonna leave. Why? I’ve got five minutes to get home for Tommy Vance. Not happening. So you’re looking at people who were so into music that they’d kill their social life to stay in and listen to Tommy Vance. I’d be one of them."

"Joe Elliott: We made the Def Leppard EP at Fairview Studios in Hull. It cost £148.50. We budgeted for £150, but I think we took three cassettes less than they expected. We had £1.50 left over, with which we bought fish and chips to share between us in the back of the car. I thrust a single in the hand of John Peel; he nearly shat himself when he saw me jump up on stage at Sheffield University with a copy of it. Then on Monday, I’d just got home from work and my mum answered the phone. She said, “There’s a guy on the phone for you, he says his name is John Peel.” He played it every night that week. All the magazines started taking a bit more notice, then the record companies. It was the best thing ever, and it was totally born out of punk."

"Joe Elliott: Our management looked after Aerosmith and Ted Nugent and AC/DC. They saw England as not being good enough for us. We wanted management who knew what they were doing, and there’s a bigger world out there."

"Joe Elliott: What brought us together is the collective that was available to us: Sounds, Tommy Vance, Top of the Pops, Whistle Test. Maiden were the first band of our time, of that kind of music, to make Top of the Pops. We did it in 1980, but got cut because we did it the same day as the launch of the first space shuttle, which they covered live instead."

Complete
Source

Michael Hann
Thu 16 May 2019 14.35 BST

[Shawn]

The new wave of British heavy metal – 10 of the best

"The music that became known as NWOBHM was short lived, but it bequeathed rock an enduring legacy of hugely influential bands"



4. Def Leppard – Getcha Rocks Off

"Nowadays we think of Def Leppard as an AOR band with a sound airbrushed for American radio by Robert John “Mutt” Lange on the albums Pyromania and Hysteria. It’s as if they had the same sort of relationship with metal as Blondie had with punk. But they didn’t start out like that, and their debut single on their own label, Bludgeon Riffola, helped kickstart the whole NWOBHM movement. This raucous twin-guitar gallop is an ocean away from Pour Some Sugar on Me, and sounds like the product of working-class Sheffield rather than something out of LA."

Source

1. Diamond Head – Am I Evil?
2. Tygers of Pan Tang – Don’t Stop By
3. Angel Witch – Angel Witch
4. Def Leppard – Getcha Rocks Off
5. Demon – Father of Time
6. Iron Maiden – Phantom of the Opera
7. Girlschool – C’Mon Let’s Go
8. Samson – Vice Versa
9. Venom – Warhead
10. Saxon – Machine Gun

[edwardcreighton]

Very good article(s) many different contributors from bands associated with NWOBHM.

Phantom of the Opera and Am I Evil? Immense.

[CindyJ]

Running Free: Looking Back 40 Years To The Birth Of NWOBHM
Michael Hann , June 13th, 2019 08:16

Michael Hann talks to Joe Elliott of Def Leppard, Cronos of Venom, Biff Byford of Saxon and more about the grassroots movement termed the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal which revitalised the genre and laid the foundations for extreme metal as we know it today

Joe Elliott excerpts:

And 16 miles south, in Sheffield, there was a young band called Def Leppard, with a glam rock fan singer, hard rock guitarists, and a desire to reach arenas. "The first thing we did was learn 'Suffragette City' by David Bowie," Elliott says. "That sets our stall out for the kind of music we wanted to make. We had to have something to play – this is when we were still a four piece. Having said that, Pete [Willis, guitar] was adamant we were going to do the Earl Slick David Live version, not the Mick Ronson Ziggy version. I was just happy to sing it. We did 'Jailbreak', 'Emerald' and 'Rosalie'. We had an abortive attempt at ‘Only You Can Rock Me’. But straight away we were writing songs. Me and Sav [Rick Savage, bass] wrote 'Ride Into The Sun' within a month of us getting together. We didn't have a rehearsal room, or a microphone, so we were a band in name, and it was least a month before we even performed a song. They didn't know what I sounded like as a singer, but I was enthusiastic, tall and had a great record collection. What more do you need?"

Despite their ambitions, the young Leppard were confined to their locality at first. "We hadn't gone any further than Mansfield," Elliott says. "We'd played a place called Monsal Head, which was a biker venue in the middle of nowhere. It has to have been the premise for the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf In London. You shat yourself driving up to it, thinking, 'I might never come out of this alive.' But mostly it was the Limit Club, pubs, the Broadfield in Sheffield. The first gig we ever played was a school. The second was a field in front of 15 mates, and when it went dark they had to drive a car in front of us and turn the headlights on so people could see us. And then the third gig we opened for the Human League at the Limit Club, at a free festival, which meant we didn't get paid, but they didn't charge to get in. So the place was rammed. And we brought our own fanbase. We had 50 or 60 mates crammed at the front. That was mostly where we played. We played in Rotherham, we played a couple of gigs in a pub in Chesterfield. We couldn't afford to go anywhere. You only got paid £20 and it cost you 30 to play the gig. Which is why we supplemented our income by doing the odd working men's club, because they'd pay £350. It was one of those where Geoff Barton and Ross Halfin came to see us and we got the full page spread in Sounds, which kicked everything off. We didn't play London until we opened for Sammy Hagar."

Elsewhere, though, friendships were born. Joe Elliott remembers he and Leppard going to Retford Porterhouse to see Iron Maiden when they made an early excursion north, and establishing a lasting friendship with Maiden bassist Steve Harris. Another relationship forged in the early days of NWOBHM – with the London band Girl – would eventually lead to Girl's Phil Collen joining Leppard and becoming a crucial creative part of the group as they ascended to US superstardom with 1983's Pyromania album.

"A lot of those people relied on each other, so I don't remember too much negativity," Elliott says. "I've always supported the underdog, and when Girl came out, they got flak in the media because [singer] Phil Lewis was dating Britt Ekland. Can you not see past that and listen to the songs? Phil Lewis and Phil Collen came and stayed at my mum's house after their Sheffield show, because their hotel was in Buxton. Don't know why. We went out on the town. There was this NWOBHM band called Sledgehammer playing the Genevieve, which is a disco. We went down and we were **Censored** hammered. We went down to the dressing room and said, 'Can we borrow your gear?' And the four of us decided to be a band for the night. I went on drums, Phil Lewis sang, Phil Collen played guitar and Steve [Clark, Leppard guitarist] played bass. And we blagged our way through 'You Really Got Me'. We tried to play 'Do You Love Me' by Kiss, but Steve fell asleep on the drums. These were great bonding moments. My mum woke up the next morning and said, 'Who's that who stayed in the spare room? There's mascara on the pillowcase!' 'Yes, that's my friends from the band Girl.'"

"Sometimes things just have a natural energy, and you can't say why it happened," Joe Elliott says. "We were all in the same headspace and had the same thought process going on. It's just that Maiden were doing it in London, we were doing it in Sheffield, Diamond Head were doing it in Birmingham, Tygers were doing it in Newcastle, Vardis were doing it in Wakefield, Saxon were doing it in Barnsley."

Complete Article

[rockastansky]

Brilliant article. Did it appear in print or just online?

[CindyJ]

Jun 13, 2019 12:21:41 GMT -8 rockastansky said:

Brilliant article. Did it appear in print or just online?

The Quietus is online only.