Fact #139616
When:
Short story:
A feature by Geoff Barton in weekly UK rock newspaper Sounds sparks an interest in a genre which is becoming known by the somewhat clumsy name of The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM).Full article:
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL by Johnny Black
Neal Kay (deejay, founder of The Heavy Metal Soundhouse) : I was a London club deejay in the 1960s, but it got boring in the 70s in the Philly soul era. I got sacked from Gulliver's Club for playing blues to Arab Sheiks who wanted Barry White.
I got out of music for a while, became a trucker, until 1975 when one of my bosses told me about this place in Kingsbury that - once a week - played the kind of loud rock music I loved.
It was known then as The Bandwagon in the Prince Of Wales pub. The main room held about 700 people, maximum, and they had a fuckin' ginormous sound system. I immediately wanted to live there. That night, the most amazing thing happened. They announced that they were looking for a new deejay and anyone who fancied it should come up and have a go.
Of course I went up, got the gig and never looked back. I re-christened it The Heavy Metal Soundhouse and gradually built it up into a heavy rock discotheque with a devoted following.
But punk was the prevalent music, so what was going on at Kingsbury was absolutely unique. I kept badgering Geoff Barton at Sounds to come down, because I knew it was great press story.
Geoff Barton : With his hippy-hangover attitude, gift of the gab and talent for self-promotion, Kay was extremely difficult - make that impossible - to ignore.
Neal Kay : It took a long time to convince him but in the end he came, and he was most impressed.
Geoff Barton (feature in Sounds) : The decor resembles Dodge City, American B-movie Western style, but with alternating flashing lights/darkness your eyes never really adjust to notice that much detail. A bar runs along almost the whole length of one side, so there's never any problem buying a drink.
The Bandwagon and the music that's played there is very much a present day reality, no matter what the fashion pundits might tell you. And to me, and a goodly number of other punters, it's like a little bit of heaven on earth.
Alan Lewis (editor, Sounds) : I coined NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) as a front-page headline. But it was sort of an in-joke. We were always hailing something or other as 'The New Wave Of....' It was part of the sense of humour, a bit tongue in cheek. But there is no doubt that we helped to get that whole scene going.
Bruce Dickinson : NWOBHM was a fiction, really, an invention of Geoff Barton and Sounds. It was a cunning ruse to boost circulation. Having said that, it did represent a lot of bands that were utterly ignored by the mainstream media. Because of that it became real and people got behind it.
Geoff Barton :Â NWOBHM was a catchall title for a melting pot of bands with an immense variety of musical styles. Apart from a pioneering spirit and the occasional mention of Satan, a scattergun selection of bands such as Venom, Jaguar, Shiva, Sledgehammer (more old geezers), Mythra, White Spirit, Angel Witch, L.A. Hooker et al. were often miles apart musically.
Neal Kay : After Barton's feature appeared (Aug 19, 1978), the tapes started arriving. Rock bands from all over the world wanted us to play their tapes.
People started travelling to The Soundhouse from all over the country. Local people were doing b+b at the weekends for people coming to the Soundhouse from Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands, everywhere.
At that time, we couldn't have live bands. It wasn't allowed, but record companies started asking me if they could bring their artists along to the Bandwagon to meet the kids.
We had to get the sound system upgraded because we had the loudest audience on God's earth. They screamed and shouted and made such a racket, that I could hardly hear myself announcing the tracks. The new system was so loud that we had to fly the discotheque console on chains from the rafters to get round the low frequency feedback.
We started getting daily newspapers coming down, and film crews, I loaned my biker section to The Who for Quadrophenia.
Early in January of 1979, a young guy I didn't know came up to the stage and pressed this demo cassette of his band, Iron Maiden, into my hands. He said, "Do me a favour mate. Take this home and give it a listen, will you?"
I said, "Yeah, you and about five million others. If there's anything here I'll call you." I was as rude as hell and to this day I hate myself for it.
I took it home, put it on and it was electrifying. Light years ahead of anything I'd heard. The songwriting was something else ... the melodies, the chord progressions, the key changes, the time changes and the sheer power within the structure of those songs. It had been recorded a few days earlier at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge. The band had splashed out the money themselves.
The next night, I played it at The Soundhouse, and everyone went mad. Geoff Barton started a Heavy Metal Soundhouse chart in Sounds which I compiled every week based on the requests I was getting for tracks at The Soundhouse.
Steve Harris : That was the thing that started people getting interested in the band. I mean, we did the demo tape basically to get work. We didn't dream of it being placed anywhere or anything like that. We was just trying to, you know, because whenever you'd go and try to get a gig, and I was the one who was always trying to get the gig because we didn't have a manager or anything, people'd say, 'Well, what do you sound like?' I mean, we did a four track demo and then we gave it to Neal Kay and he started playing it at his Soundhouse and people started voting for it, and we started getting into these Sounds charts and stuff like that.
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Neal Kay (deejay, founder of The Heavy Metal Soundhouse) : I was a London club deejay in the 1960s, but it got boring in the 70s in the Philly soul era. I got sacked from Gulliver's Club for playing blues to Arab Sheiks who wanted Barry White.
I got out of music for a while, became a trucker, until 1975 when one of my bosses told me about this place in Kingsbury that - once a week - played the kind of loud rock music I loved.
It was known then as The Bandwagon in the Prince Of Wales pub. The main room held about 700 people, maximum, and they had a fuckin' ginormous sound system. I immediately wanted to live there. That night, the most amazing thing happened. They announced that they were looking for a new deejay and anyone who fancied it should come up and have a go.
Of course I went up, got the gig and never looked back. I re-christened it The Heavy Metal Soundhouse and gradually built it up into a heavy rock discotheque with a devoted following.
But punk was the prevalent music, so what was going on at Kingsbury was absolutely unique. I kept badgering Geoff Barton at Sounds to come down, because I knew it was great press story.
Geoff Barton : With his hippy-hangover attitude, gift of the gab and talent for self-promotion, Kay was extremely difficult - make that impossible - to ignore.
Neal Kay : It took a long time to convince him but in the end he came, and he was most impressed.
Geoff Barton (feature in Sounds) : The decor resembles Dodge City, American B-movie Western style, but with alternating flashing lights/darkness your eyes never really adjust to notice that much detail. A bar runs along almost the whole length of one side, so there's never any problem buying a drink.
The Bandwagon and the music that's played there is very much a present day reality, no matter what the fashion pundits might tell you. And to me, and a goodly number of other punters, it's like a little bit of heaven on earth.
Alan Lewis (editor, Sounds) : I coined NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) as a front-page headline. But it was sort of an in-joke. We were always hailing something or other as 'The New Wave Of....' It was part of the sense of humour, a bit tongue in cheek. But there is no doubt that we helped to get that whole scene going.
Bruce Dickinson : NWOBHM was a fiction, really, an invention of Geoff Barton and Sounds. It was a cunning ruse to boost circulation. Having said that, it did represent a lot of bands that were utterly ignored by the mainstream media. Because of that it became real and people got behind it.
Geoff Barton :Â NWOBHM was a catchall title for a melting pot of bands with an immense variety of musical styles. Apart from a pioneering spirit and the occasional mention of Satan, a scattergun selection of bands such as Venom, Jaguar, Shiva, Sledgehammer (more old geezers), Mythra, White Spirit, Angel Witch, L.A. Hooker et al. were often miles apart musically.
Neal Kay : After Barton's feature appeared (Aug 19, 1978), the tapes started arriving. Rock bands from all over the world wanted us to play their tapes.
People started travelling to The Soundhouse from all over the country. Local people were doing b+b at the weekends for people coming to the Soundhouse from Scotland, Ireland, the Channel Islands, everywhere.
At that time, we couldn't have live bands. It wasn't allowed, but record companies started asking me if they could bring their artists along to the Bandwagon to meet the kids.
We had to get the sound system upgraded because we had the loudest audience on God's earth. They screamed and shouted and made such a racket, that I could hardly hear myself announcing the tracks. The new system was so loud that we had to fly the discotheque console on chains from the rafters to get round the low frequency feedback.
We started getting daily newspapers coming down, and film crews, I loaned my biker section to The Who for Quadrophenia.
Early in January of 1979, a young guy I didn't know came up to the stage and pressed this demo cassette of his band, Iron Maiden, into my hands. He said, "Do me a favour mate. Take this home and give it a listen, will you?"
I said, "Yeah, you and about five million others. If there's anything here I'll call you." I was as rude as hell and to this day I hate myself for it.
I took it home, put it on and it was electrifying. Light years ahead of anything I'd heard. The songwriting was something else ... the melodies, the chord progressions, the key changes, the time changes and the sheer power within the structure of those songs. It had been recorded a few days earlier at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge. The band had splashed out the money themselves.
The next night, I played it at The Soundhouse, and everyone went mad. Geoff Barton started a Heavy Metal Soundhouse chart in Sounds which I compiled every week based on the requests I was getting for tracks at The Soundhouse.
Steve Harris : That was the thing that started people getting interested in the band. I mean, we did the demo tape basically to get work. We didn't dream of it being placed anywhere or anything like that. We was just trying to, you know, because whenever you'd go and try to get a gig, and I was the one who was always trying to get the gig because we didn't have a manager or anything, people'd say, 'Well, what do you sound like?' I mean, we did a four track demo and then we gave it to Neal Kay and he started playing it at his Soundhouse and people started voting for it, and we started getting into these Sounds charts and stuff like that.