(TheBRHM.com) Crack open almost any history of the genre and the plot runs identical. Birmingham birthed Black Sabbath. Judas Priest sharpened the blades, then a swarm of leather kids calling themselves the New Wave of British Heavy Metal hauled the whole thing into the 1980s. Maiden. Saxon. Diamond Head. Tidy little story, isn’t it? Flatters one soggy island and quietly buries a truth any real digger already feels in his chest.
Reality is messier and a good deal cooler. While the London press was busy anointing kids from Sheffield and the East End, young players in Solingen, Copenhagen, Stockholm and the American heartland were welding their own version of loud together. Many were developing at considerable distance from one another. Nothing resembling today’s instant exchange of music and information existed yet. Nobody handed them a map. They just heard the same electricity crackling in the air and grabbed for it with both fists.
Take Germany. Accept were already at it in Solingen well before Helloween turned up or the Ruhr Valley thrash crowd got loud. Udo Dirkschneider fronted them, a squat guy with a voice like gravel tipped down a drainpipe, and nobody who caught it forgot the sound. Throw on Restless and Wild from 1982 and the opening shot is “Fast as a Shark.” It opens on this goofy little oompah folk bit, almost a gag, until somebody drags the needle off the record and the group barrels in. People love arguing about who birthed thrash. That intro settles more of the fight than most want to concede. The California thrash movement was still taking shape when Udo already had the throttle wide open. Twelve months on, Balls to the Wall delivered an anthem so thick you could chew it. These cats weren’t copying anybody. Germany was cooking with its own gas, and down in Hanover the Scorpions had been flying that flag since the early seventies. Wolf Hoffmann’s fretwork carried a classical spine half of Europe would spend the next decade chasing.
Roll north to Denmark, where a skinny singer in stark black and white occult makeup changed the temperature of an entire room. Melissa showed up in 1983 and King Diamond opened his mouth. Nothing out of England sounded remotely like it. He was hitting these witchy high shrieks that put grown men on edge, layering on candles and pentagrams and the full Satanic spook show, and the riffs holding it together were no joke at all. Anyone itching to file him under gimmick had to eat those words once the songs landed. Don’t Break the Oath came the next year and, somehow, went even further. Metallica took serious inspiration from those songs, later paying explicit tribute with a five song Mercyful Fate medley. A fat slice of the extreme underground that followed drew from Mercyful Fate too. One small Scandinavian country, punching a hole clean through the ceiling of what this music was allowed to be.
Sweden gets forgotten worst of all, which is a crime. Heavy Load formed in the mid seventies up in Stockholm, brothers Ragne and Styrbjorn Wahlquist at the wheel, and by the time Death or Glory landed in 1982 they were playing a triumphant style, all raised swords and mountaintop choruses, that anticipated plenty of what folks would later slap the “power” label on. Viking imagery. Soaring hooks. You could fit the production budget in a shoebox, yet the anthems still tower anyway. They ran their own imprint and released records through their own Thunderload label, answering to nobody. Purest strain of underground there is.
Then there’s home soil, and this is where the tidy tale gets downright insulting. America did not just wake up in 1983 when Metallica dropped Kill ‘Em All. Riot, out of New York City, had been grinding since the middle of the previous decade. Fire Down Under, released in 1981, is a stone classic that record executives fumbled so badly the group nearly broke apart over it. Guitar work on that thing screams. Vocals soar. It should have turned those players into superstars, yet instead it became a collector’s holy grail, whispered about in tape trading circles for ages. Out on the plains it gets stranger and better still. Wichita, Kansas of all places gave us Manilla Road, Mark Shelton’s outfit that treated fantasy novels and brooding epics like scripture. Crystal Logic arrived in 1983, and there is nothing polite about it. Shelton’s tone sounds like it was captured inside a grain silo, his voice an acquired taste that fans would go to war for, every song a doorway into some crumbling mythic realm. California had Cirith Ungol dragging Michael Moorcock paperbacks onto their sleeves and playing like the apocalypse was already booked. New York offered Virgin Steele reaching for the operatic. All of it happening at once, coast to coast, while the cameras stayed pointed across the pond.
Now here’s the part the fairy tale really can’t stand. Borders aren’t the only thing the canon erases. So who actually taught the electric guitar to scream, long before any of these guys strapped one on? Track it back to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer running a dirty tone and ripping leads in the 1940s that would embarrass a bunch of players who came later. That is not a reach. It is right there on the recordings if you bother to go listen. Chuck Berry drew the map nearly every riff still follows. Little Richard hollered loud enough to rattle the china while respectable folks clutched their pearls. Hendrix grabbed all of it and forced it through a wall of fuzz until it came out snarling. The family tree stretches far deeper than the moment somebody finally called the music heavy metal.
Fast forward and the same erasure keeps repeating. Bad Brains were pushing hardcore toward astonishing speeds by the end of the 1970s, while folding reggae into a sound almost nobody else could duplicate. Those D.C. guys were doing things that would echo through hardcore, crossover and the faster edges of metal for years. Stone Vengeance came together in 1978 in San Francisco, up in Hunters Point, and they played vicious. Barely a soul outside the Bay heard them, which is its own small tragedy. Sound Barrier were scorching Los Angeles stages in the early eighties too, and try locating them in the tidy reference books. Then 1988 hits, Living Colour struts onto MTV with “Cult of Personality,” and all of a sudden the business acts like it knew it all along. Footnotes, my foot. They were part of the foundation holding the whole roof up, painted over by whoever wrote the official version.
So why does the shorthand survive? Follow the ink. Britain had Sounds, Kerrang!, a press machine that ran in English and shipped worldwide, plus journalists eager to crown a homegrown movement. Language greased the wheels. The kid in Kansas, the quartet in Solingen, the Black group in Los Angeles got no such megaphone. Geography did some of the rest, since a scene photographs cleaner when the clubs sit an hour apart on the same rainy motorway. Comfort did the last bit, because a neat picture of who owns this music was easier to print than an honest one. Convenient beats accurate nine times out of ten, especially when there are copies to move.
None of this shrinks what the island did. Sabbath invented a vocabulary. Priest built the uniform. Those British kids lit something real, no argument there, and they earned the flowers they got. Fair is fair. Just don’t swallow the notion that the whole thing was born and buried on a grey little island packed with one type of guy. That bit is a fairy tale, and not even a good one.
Point is, this racket was boiling up all over the place across the same run of years, cooked up by folks working miles and sometimes oceans apart, a scattered lot of them chasing the identical gut pull while information traveled slowly and scenes grew on their own terms. Some sang in accented English. Others pressed records in a garage. Plenty had been building the foundation for decades while the credit floated elsewhere. All of them reached for the future with both hands. History books just took a while to catch up, and plenty of them, cozy with the old shorthand, still haven’t bothered.
Next time somebody recites the polished version, cue up “Fast as a Shark,” then Melissa, then Fire Down Under, then some Sister Rosetta and a jolt of Living Colour back to back. Watch the neat map fall apart, and the portrait right along with it. That there is the true record, and it belonged to every corner and each hand that ever plugged in, never to a single flag on a single grey coast.
Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson
This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.