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NWOBHM for the beginner


NTNR

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  • 1 year later...
  • 1 year later...

You start with April 1980. During the course of 4 glorious weeks, Priest, Saxon, Maiden, Motorhead and (just as importantly) Black Sabbath all put albums into the UK top ten.

The 1980s was the golden era of Heavy Metal and it was the breakthrough of the NWOBHM that kick-started it all.

4-13 British Steel (UK 4)
4-13 Wheels of Steel (UK 5)
4-20 Iron Maiden (UK 4)
4-27 Heaven & Hell (UK 9)
5-04 The Golden Years: Live EP (UK 8)

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7 hours ago, dmiller458 said:

You start with April 1980. During the course of 4 glorious weeks, Priest, Saxon, Maiden, Motorhead and (just as importantly) Black Sabbath all put albums into the UK top ten.

The 1980s was the golden era of Heavy Metal and it was the breakthrough of the NWOBHM that kick-started it all.

4-13 British Steel (UK 4)
4-13 Wheels of Steel (UK 5)
4-20 Iron Maiden (UK 4)
4-27 Heaven & Hell (UK 9)
5-04 The Golden Years: Live EP (UK 8)

Priest, Sabbath, and Motörhead all predated the NWOBHM movement though. Just sayin'.

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Reading is fundamental. I didn't refer to any one band as being a part of the NWOBHM. I said that 1980 was the breakthrough year.

If only one or two bands had charted during those four weeks instead of all five; it wouldn't have that big of an impact on the industry or on British metal.

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47 minutes ago, dmiller458 said:

Reading is fundamental. I didn't refer to any one band as being a part of the NWOBHM. I said that 1980 was the breakthrough year.

If only one or two bands had charted during those four weeks instead of all five; it wouldn't have that big of an impact on the industry or on British metal.

If that was a breakthrough year for the movement and you're basing that on the charting of mostly bands that don't belong to it, that seems to miss the point of it entirely. It wasn't that heavy metal was becoming popular or charting, the movement received the name because there was a new wave of heavy metal bands in the area at the time that were coming out of the woodwork in incredible numbers. 

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51 minutes ago, BlutAusNerd said:

If that was a breakthrough year for the movement and you're basing that on the charting of mostly bands that don't belong to it, that seems to miss the point of it entirely. It wasn't that heavy metal was becoming popular or charting, the movement received the name because there was a new wave of heavy metal bands in the area at the time that were coming out of the woodwork in incredible numbers. 

"If that was the breakthrough year"? IF? You mean that you're not sure; that you don't know?

"...heavy metal was becoming popular"? Heavy metal was popular from day one.

And it was the 1979 success of Priest and Motorhead that opened the door for these other bands to even get recording contracts. Otherwise, why would those labels take a chance by signing them in "incredible numbers"?

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14 hours ago, dmiller458 said:

"If that was the breakthrough year"? IF? You mean that you're not sure; that you don't know?

"...heavy metal was becoming popular"? Heavy metal was popular from day one.

And it was the 1979 success of Priest and Motorhead that opened the door for these other bands to even get recording contracts. Otherwise, why would those labels take a chance by signing them in "incredible numbers"?

Wow, and you tried to tell me "reading is fundamental"? It's a straightforward sentence, not sure what's hard to understand about that. Whomever opened the door for these bands to be signed is irrelevant, as the movement was made even bigger by the many bands that only released demos or had small appearances on compilations. In either case, Priest, Motorhead, and Sabbath weren't part of the NWOBHM movement because they weren't new, plain and simple.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/11/2017 at 2:37 PM, welkyn said:

I consider Priest, at the very least, to be part of the NWOBHM movement because they championed the style.  Not really Sabbath or Motorhead, because they didn't produce albums with the classic "NWOBHM" sound (to my ear, at least).

We argued this before, but they can't be a part of a movement that they predated.

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  • 1 month later...

Totally, if you're talking about "NWOBHM bands," i.e. "New Wave of British Heavy Metal Musicians," then Priest are too old school to fit the bill.  Rocka Rolla is '74, don't know if many people even considered whether most bands were "heavy metal" back then!

But I think, if you're going on albums, then Defenders of the Faith, Screaming for Vengeance, British Steel etc. fall within that category of "New Wave of British Heavy Metal Music," even if the band is an older band.

I mean, if they'd changed their name to "Prudence Yeast" in 1980, would that have let them to fall into the NWOBHM category - assuming they released the same music?  I dunno, I always thought of NWOBHM as a style more than a collection of bands.  That's how people today are calling their music "NWOBHM" even though, technically speaking, we're 25+ years on from the actual event!  Maybe you call it "trad metal" at that point - but Priest were "trad metal" before NWOBHM was a thing...

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  • 6 months later...
On 3/7/2012 at 9:34 AM, NTNR said:

Re: NWOBHM for the beginner

Diamond Head suck. I've got one of their CD's and I don't know why. They're painfully boring and their singer was terrible. I don't know how they obtained the cult status they did. Their singer was terrible and their song writing was shit. Granted they did have one or perhaps two passable songs. The rest of what they did was just awful. I left them off the list because I wanted to put good bands down. 8-)

To each their own. Diamondhead was amazing.

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Has anybody mentioned Power Games by Jaguar. Rowdy stuff for 1983.

On 7/28/2017 at 5:34 PM, dmiller458 said:

You start with April 1980. During the course of 4 glorious weeks, Priest, Saxon, Maiden, Motorhead and (just as importantly) Black Sabbath all put albums into the UK top ten.

The 1980s was the golden era of Heavy Metal and it was the breakthrough of the NWOBHM that kick-started it all.

4-13 British Steel (UK 4)
4-13 Wheels of Steel (UK 5)
4-20 Iron Maiden (UK 4)
4-27 Heaven & Hell (UK 9)
5-04 The Golden Years: Live EP (UK ?

1980 was the biggest year for metal that I can remember, at least in terms of quality.

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