Nowadays we’re used to women in metal bands, with hordes of Scandinavian symphonic metal bands fronted by opera-trained sopranos. If there was a punk element to their sound, there was also a prog rock side, too – which is still present in their music – as shown by the complex middle section. If you don’t already know the song, you might recognise the intro from the Lucozade advert featuring Daley Thompson.
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But in the early days, with original singer Paul Di’Anno, they were a different beast from the polished metal machine they are today, with a rawer, almost punky element to their sound (though in the TV series Metal Evolution, band mastermind Steve Harris denied any affinity for punk). Iron Maiden were one of the few NWOBHM bands who managed to achieve escape velocity by the time the scene faded away in the early 80s, and fill arenas and stadiums around the world to this day. Our New Wave of British Heavy Metal playlist on YouTube 6. Demon fell into the latter category, with the soaring guitars and bluesy vocals of Dave Hill, but their reliance on Hammer Horror occult lyrical themes was more than enough to put them firmly in the metal camp. For every band who hinted at the more aggressive sounds that would come to define metal in later decades, there was another who had evolved from the more melodic sounds of the previous one. The NWOBHM label covered many different styles within the broad spectrum of hard rock.
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.
But they didn’t start out like that, and their debut single on their own label, Bludgeon Riffola, helped kickstart the whole NWOBHM movement. It’s as if they had the same sort of relationship with metal as Blondie had with punk.
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. As one of the band later remarked, had that many people had actually bought the record, it would have been far more of a hit than it was. At Reading festival in 1983, the between-bands DJ had the entire audience singing the chorus. But it’s the title track of their eponymous album that’s remembered the best. They did, however, foretell the direction metal would take in future decades, especially on songs like Angel of Death. Though they were sometimes dismissed as a poor man’s Black Sabbath, their music hinted at a potential that was never realised. Angel Witch were perhaps too far ahead of their time in the early 1980s: for years they were best known as the answer to the quiz question: “Which band has spent the least time on the singles charts?” (Their 1980 single Sweet Danger spent a single week at No 75, the bottom slot).
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