Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (14 page)

While Ozzy and his ex–Black Sabbath bandmates were both undergoing career-changing transitions, Judas Priest was working the formula they built on
Sad Wings of Destiny
into more concise, arena-ready songs. They were also revamping their presentation, cementing their now-iconic biker look. Encouraged by rabid fan response, the danger and drama became more important than ever, and the farther they ventured, the more risks they took.

ROB HALFORD:
We played a gig at the Birmingham Odium, and afterwards we said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could bring an actual bike onstage when we do ‘Hell Bent for Leather’?” We didn’t have our own bikes back then, but bikers would come to our gigs and we would say, “Hey, we’ll buy you a couple of drinks if we can bring your bike onstage.” We would use whatever bikes were in the venue if “Hell Bent for Leather” was on the set list. I would literally come roaring out onstage on this borrowed bike and the crowd would think, “What the fuck is this? This is crazy!”

GLENN TIPTON:
Rob has fallen off his bike or driven it off the stage, but fortunately he usually wasn’t hurt. As the productions got bigger, the secret was knowing where
not
to be at a particular point during the show, when a bomb went off or flamethrowers came out.

IAN HILL:
A piece of the lighting rig broke off on the
Hell Bent for Leather
tour. The front hinge broke and missed [drummer] Dave Holland by inches. It started the whole truss rocking. If that had fallen into the audience it would have been terrible. Sometimes you’re at the mercy of your equipment. On the
Turbo
tour we had a robot onstage that used to pick up Ken and Glenn. There were a couple of occasions where one of them almost fell out or they got stranded in midair when the hydraulics broke.

In 1980, after touring the United States, Europe, and Japan, Judas Priest headed into Tittenhurst Park, the UK house formerly owned by John Lennon, to work on
British Steel
, the album that would cement their reputation as self-proclaimed metal gods. Perhaps most impressively, they wrote and recorded all the songs in less than a month, including the classics “Living after Midnight” and “Breaking the Law,” in conditions that could euphemistically be described as hectic.

ROB HALFORD:
We were moving at the speed of light, making a record every year, working very, very hard to get all of the music ready in time for release. I suppose as a result of that, we put together a very uncomplicated, uncluttered, very minimally produced bunch of songs that really got the music and the message across in a very quick forty-minute blast. There were some really cool moments on
British Steel
, like “Rapid Fire” and “Steeler,” which some people attest to being the early rumblings of thrash metal.

GLENN TIPTON:
I was bashing a riff out late one night and Rob was in the bedroom above and came down all disheveled and said, “Hey guys, it’s after midnight,” and we said, “Yeah, we’re living after midnight.” And we just went with it. “Living After Midnight” became one of our most popular songs.
British Steel
was a very immediate album like that. But we had a surplus amount of energy and enthusiasm at that time, and I suppose there’s a certain argument to be made that if you give yourself a deadline, you’ve got to come up with the goods, and we actually did. It was done and dusted in twenty-eight days.

ROB HALFORD:
I don’t recall feeling that much pressure, and it was really cool being in the house where John Lennon used to live. It looked as if John and Yoko had just recently vacated, and there were touches of them all through the house. Glenn’s room was where John and Yoko used to sleep, and in the bathroom were two toilets next to each other and each had little plaques with their names on it. You can imagine them sitting there holding hands when they used the loo in the morning. I mean, how far are you prepared to love each other? “I still love you while I’m taking a dump.”

GLENN TIPTON:
One night [our producer] Tom [Allom] was practically passed out behind the bar and he was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on a big hunting horn. We were pouring large vodkas down it and that’s the only thing that interrupted his melody. He’d guzzle up and then start again. Most nights, we’d be in the pub and then straggle back to the studio and play in a drunken stupor, and Tom couldn’t have been too bad off because he managed to put all that stuff together quite nicely.

VINNIE PAUL ABBOTT (Pantera, Damageplan, Hellyeah):
That album was huge for us. My brother [late Pantera guitarist] Dimebag [Darrell Abbott] wore the Judas Priest [
British Steel
] razor blade around his neck his whole life. It meant everything to him. We were fucking crazy about that album. At the time, we thought, “That’s the band we want to model ourselves after.”

K.K. DOWNING (ex–Judas Priest):
British Steel
could almost have been called
The Almanac for a Teenage Rebel
. People were a bit down-spirited in the UK. Nothing was going particularly well. So it was the kind of album that sent out waves to everybody that said, “There’s good things ahead, and we knew how you feel, and we were all feeling it the same.” I think the fans wanted somebody or something to look up to and, lucky for us, they turned to Priest and
British Steel
.

ROB HALFORD:
The nation was coming off the back of a number of very turbulent years under Margaret Thatcher. The recession and the strikes and the street riots were very difficult for a lot of people, and we felt a real kinship with them. “Breaking the Law” was almost a political protest song: “There I was completely wasting out of work and down . . . / You don’t know what it’s like.” “Grinder” was about rejecting the establishment. I saw the system as the grinder and it was grinding people up. And “United” was very much about sticking together to get through these tough times.

Over the decades, countless metal scholars have compared Judas Priest to Iron Maiden. Both bands feature dynamic, octave-spanning vocalists, a multi-guitar approach (Maiden upped its “guitarsenal” to three players in 1999) all capable of precision riffs, searing harmonies, and mind-bending solos. Both rigged their stages with more props and pyro than a Fourth of July celebration. Like Priest, Maiden’s beginnings were modest, and its growth gradual.

STEVE HARRIS (Iron Maiden):
I wanted to be a drummer, but I thought, “I ain’t got room and it’s just too fucking noisy.” I thought I’d do the next best thing and get a bass guitar and start playing along with the drums. I had an acoustic guitar and learned a few chords, then traded it in and got myself a Fender copy bass, 40 quid [about $70]. Once I got going, I started trying to be a bit clever and trying to learn stuff by [Yes bassist] Chris Squire. I was heavily influenced by progressive rock like Genesis, Jethro Tull, ELP, Yes, King Crimson . . . I used to love off-the-wall changes coming out of nowhere.

DAVE MURRAY (Iron Maiden):
Like Steve, I’d been a skinhead. Then I went completely to the other extreme and became a hippie. It was a case of finding out more about the music and getting away from the violence. I heard [Jimi Hendrix’s] “Voodoo Chile” on the radio and I thought, “Fucking hell! What is that?” I started wearing an Afghan coat, playing guitar, and going to gigs.

Taking its name from a Renaissance-era torture device, Iron Maiden formed on Christmas Day, 1975. The original lineup featured bassist and lyricist Steve Harris, guitarists David Sullivan and Terry Rance, drummer Dave Matthews, and vocalist Paul Day, who was soon replaced by Dennis Wilcock. Both guitarists left the band when Harris met axeman Dave Murray in 1976. Murray, who later anchored the band along with guitarist Adrian Smith, actually quit because he couldn’t get along with Wilcock, but returned in 1977, the same year singer Paul Di’Anno joined.

STEVE HARRIS:
Dave was the best guitarist I’d ever played with. Still is. After he joined we came up with early versions of “Wrathchild,” “Prowler,” and “Transylvania.” “Purgatory” comes from that time, only then it was called “Floating.” If we did a cover we’d make it one that people wouldn’t necessarily know. So instead of “All Right Now” by Free we’d do “I’m a Mover.” But as soon as an original came in, a cover would go out.

PAUL DI’ANNO (ex–Iron Maiden):
They’d been going before me as a little pub band with a couple of different singers. As I was joining high school, Steve was just finishing [school]. Dennis and I had a mutual friend who told me Iron Maiden were looking for a singer. I said, “Who? Who the hell are they?” Because I came from punk music. I spoke to Steve and he said, “Well, are you gonna come out and try out?” I said, “Well, I’m not really that bothered. I don’t care that much.” But I agreed to go to a rehearsal, which is really strange because I knew absolutely nothing about rock music whatsoever. I had a rough idea of one Deep Purple song, like “Dealer” or something. I didn’t even know the words. I just made them up as we went along. Later that evening Steve came around my house and said, “You got the job if you want it.” I said, “Well, not really.” Then a couple months later I went over to his house and he played me some of the songs that became the first Iron Maiden album. I dunno. Something about it just clicked. I thought, “Wow, this could be good.” Because it really was so different. It was complicated metal that was played really fast, and I thought, “Wow, this is cool.”

The NWOBHM movement began at the Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse, located in a corner of the Prince of Wales pub in Kingsbury, North London. DJ Neal Kay spun records by emerging bands, and before long it was a hotspot for local journalists. The place became so popular that Iron Maiden’s legendary first recording with Di’Anno in 1978 became known as the
Soundhouse Tapes
, and the band struck a nerve almost immediately.

NEAL KAY (Club DJ):
I was running and screaming around the lounge like a lunatic. I just couldn’t stop playing [Maiden’s four-track demo]. The combination of speed, power, the key changes, the melody, and Dave Murray’s melody lines bowled me over. It was definitely the most impressive demo I’d ever had delivered to me. The next day I phoned Steve Harris and said to him, “You’ve got something here that could make you a lot of money.” And he laughed at me. He thought I was kidding!

PAUL DI’ANNO:
We did the Soundhouse tapes in 1978 [in a single twenty-four-hour session] at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge. We only did five hundred copies of the original. It’s like gold dust now it’s so rare, and I gave all my copies away. From that, EMI asked us to be on a compilation, the
Metal For Muthas
record, which was put together by Neal Kay. From there on, we were taken over by a real manager, which was Rod [Smallwood] and Iron Maiden was offered a deal on [EMI].

BIFF BYFORD:
[I first heard the phrase New Wave of British Heavy Metal] around 1980, about seven years after me and [guitarist] Paul [Quinn got together]. We were looking at all those [Sabbath- and Priest-] type of bands all through the seventies, really. We chose the rock-and-roll rather than the punk route. We were looking at a lot of progressive rock bands like Yes and Genesis, and obviously we were listening to Zeppelin and Cream. But our music was a bit more aggressive, a bit faster. I think the press just coined NWOBHM to make it a bit different from the more established bands of the time.

JOE ELLIOT (Def Leppard):
Were we part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal? Well, from a timing point of view, absolutely. But to me it’s as relevant as saying we came out in the new romantic period, too, because that was 1979. So you might as well compound us with Duran Duran. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was a convenient label created possibly by Geoff Barton at
Sounds
magazine to create a scene and sell more copies.

BIFF BYFORD:
I
would
[call Def Leppard NWOBHM], but obviously
they
won’t. They seem to think it’s a dirty word. But in the early days they were part of it, definitely. Their first EP is a bit Thin Lizzy-ish. Heavy rock, heavy metal. Later on, they became more commercial and had great success with that, but I think in the early days they
were
part of the movement.

GEOFF BARTON (ex-
Sounds, Kerrang!
):
We ran the NWOBHM feature with Maiden in it in
Sounds
, and the response was just phenomenal. Suddenly there were new heavy metal bands springing up everywhere. Of course, not all of them were as competent or as interesting as Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, but the fact that they were even trying was news back then, and we just ran with it, for about two years in the end.

NICK BOWCOTT (Grim Reaper):
Heavy metal got so big at the time that they would actually have heavy metal charts amongst the regular charts printed in the back of magazines like
NME
[
New Musical Express
] and
Melody Maker
. Those charts were invariably put together by guys like Neal Kay, who were doing heavy metal discos. You could send these guys demos, and if they liked you they’d spin it, and if they got a response they would chart you. Three of our songs charted based on a four-track demo because we were motivated enough to get those demos into people’s hands and they liked the songs.