It’s always heartbreaking when a band decides to call it a day, but ending your career with a humdinger of an album can at least turn that tragedy into something more bittersweet. No one wants to see their favourite artist wrap things up as a shell of their former selves, and the 10 swan songs listed below made sure that some of metal’s icons ended their careers on their finest form. From Black Sabbath’s 13 to Death’s Sound Of Perseverance, these are the ultimate finales from throughout heavy music history.

Black Sabbath – 13 (2013)

In 2013, metalheads hadn’t heard a new Black Sabbath album in 18 years, and hadn’t heard one that was actually worthwhile since 1989. Mercifully – despite being short one Bill Ward – Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler were able to bring the heavy pioneers back to their woozy, sludgy best on 13. When the Brummies called it quits in 2017, this became the perfect send-off: one last throwback to their ’70s heyday.

Motörhead – Bad Magic (2015)

Released mere months before Lemmy died of prostate cancer in December 2015, Bad Magic has retroactively become an epitaph declaring that the Motörhead leader always lived life hard, fast and rowdy. Heavy-hitters like When The Sky Comes Looking For You strike with the same gruff rock ’n’ roll that once made the band one of the most dangerous-feeling in the world. Everything louder than everyone else until the bitter end.

Death – The Sound Of Perseverance (1998)

Chuck Schuldiner was always pushing Death to new frontiers, from perfecting death metal to being a progenitor of the tech-death and melodeath styles. On The Sound Of Perseverance, Tampa’s best forayed into a spacier progressive metal landscape, emphasising hulking grooves and pensive segues as much as breakneck speed. Many deem it the band’s magnum opus, and everyone else can at least agree it was a fitting send-off for such a restless musical force.

White Zombie – Astro-Creep: 2000 (1995)

By the time White Zombie entered the studio to record Astro-Creep: 2000 in 1994, the writing was on the wall. Singer Rob Zombie and bassist Sean Yseult had broken up, and the band had just run through a whole host of drummers. Nonetheless, the horror hounds were able to hold it together long enough to release an industrial metal classic, which set the tone for Zombie’s impending and wildly successful solo career.

Celtic Frost – Monotheist (2006)

Celtic Frost’s style-smashing ways made them idols across extreme music, from black metal to thrash. When Tom G. Warrior and Martin Eric Ain awoke the band from a near-decade-long slumber in 2001 then released Monotheist, they doubled down on what made them so special, reducing subgenres to a nebulous concept. Ain’s 2017 death sadly eliminated any chance of a followup, but how many bands get to bow out with their most ambitious-sounding music?

Strapping Young Lad – The New Black (2006)

Although Devin Townsend considered the work of Strapping Young Lad to be complete after 2005 magnum opus Alien, this swan song shouldn’t be overlooked. The New Black boasts one of the band’s most celebrated songs in Almost Again: a rarity in that it’s persisted into Devin’s solo setlists. With other entries spanning from SYL’s melodic gang-chanting to the industrial rampage of You Suck, you can see why so many still miss Strapping so much.

Bolt Thrower – Those Once Loyal (2005)

Those Once Loyal was never meant to be a finale. It was planned to be just another Bolt Thrower album (albeit one that saw the return of classic vocalist Karl Willetts) but then turned out so perfect that the band gave up recording because they couldn’t top it. Although the UK death metal kings lasted another 10 years, this slab of hulking, growling, bass-heavy and slyly melodic excellence is how they’ll be remembered.

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Dissociation (2016)

By the time Dillinger announced their sixth album and impending breakup simultaneously in 2016, they were idols from whom perfection was routinely expected. However, even with the mathcore renegades’ back-catalogue being as flawless as it was, Dissociation was still a standout, leaping from punky freakouts to moody, progressive suites. The band went separate ways early simply because they wanted to “go out on top” – and there’s no doubt that that’s what they did.

Every Time I Die – Radical (2021)

Every Time I Die’s dissolution was incredibly public and painful to watch. The band had long been at the pinnacle of the metalcore scene, and suddenly singer Keith Buckley was slinging back-and-forth accusations with his bandmates via social media. It wasn’t a glorious conclusion personally but, musically, ending with something as energised as Radical is enviable. Despite being 20 years in, the New Yorkers sounded every bit as savage as they always had.

Letlive – If I’m The Devil (2016)

Letlive’s self-categorised “punk rock soul” and uncompromised political messaging made them fast standouts in the 2000s post-hardcore landscape. Then their music only grew in brilliance as the band continued. By The Blackest Beautiful and career finale If I’m The Devil, they were regularly releasing album-of-the-decade candidates. So – when they split abruptly in 2017, citing “a divergence in views and aims [that] has developed within the camp” – many were rightfully inconsolable.

On July 3, 1983, 14-year-old Springfield, Virginia schoolboy Dave Grohl went to Washington DC for a free Rock Against Reagan festival headlined by Dead Kennedys. The gig would change his life. “I had just discovered punk rock and here were some of the best punk bands in America playing on my doorstep,” he recalled in 2009.

‘When I showed up [Texan ‘crossover’ thrash/hardcore band] D.R.I. were onstage. I couldn’t even believe [what I was seeing], so much so that afterwards I bought their 22-song 7” [debut EP] from their singer out of their van. That whole night… I’ve got chills just thinking about it. It was so unbelievably moving. It was like our own personal Altamont, our Woodstock. And that’s when I said, “Fuck the world, I’m doing this.”

Many years later, in the spring of 1999, Dave returned home to Virginia. He bought a house in Alexandria in which, with the help of his producer friend Adam Kasper, he built a recording studio. It was here that Foo Fighters would record their third album, There Is Nothing Left To Lose. Both the album, and its laid-back first single, Learn To Fly, would win Grammy Awards, rubber-stamping Foo Fighters’ status as one of the world’s best-known rock bands. But now Dave Grohl’s inner metalhead was screaming to be heard.

Purely for fun, he began recording old-school metal riffs with Adam, later adding bass and drums. When he played these instrumentals to his friend Matt Sweeney, former frontman of post-hardcore band Chavez, the pair started fantasising about which underground metal vocalists could sing on the tracks if they were to create the compilation album of their teenage dreams. In 2001, after hearing Dave enthuse about this idea, MTV News reported that, “inspired by Santana’s [30 million-selling album] Supernatural” he was intent upon creating “the ‘death metal’ version of the multi-artist project”, under the name Probot.

Dave Grohl: “The whole thing started in February of 2000. Foo Fighters had made There Is Nothing Left to Lose in 1999, which was a pretty mellow record for us. We went out and played a lot of those songs live. I would find myself listening to Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. before going onstage, and then singing a song like Learn To Fly. Which I thought was kind of funny - like, ‘What am I doing with my life, man?’

When I was young, my favourite bands were fucking Bad Brains, Void, Minor Threat, MDC, D.R.I., Corrosion Of Conformity, Slayer, Trouble, Voivod, Venom, The Obsessed and Mercyful Fate, and here I am playing music that sounds like the fucking Eagles or something!”

Matt Sweeney: “MTV really said Probot was influenced by Santana? Ha ha ha! I don’t remember ever talking about Santana, but I like that, let’s leave that in! We were hanging out a lot and Dave said, ‘I have this idea about doing a record with all these amazing metal singers that were overlooked, particularly the 80s underground metal dudes’, and I said, That’s a great idea.

We came up a dream wish-list of who that might include, and Dave was like, ‘OK, so this song could be for that singer…’ He sorta had it all mapped out in his head, and it was wild watching him record the instrumentals. So yeah, we were totally trying to cash in, à la Santana, on the incredible demand for underground 80s metal vocalists, we figured we had to get in on that.”

The list that Dave and Matt compiled for Probot read like a who’s who of the 80s underground metal scene. It included Sepultura’s Max Cavalera, Snake from Voivod, Cronos from Venom, former Napalm Death vocalist Lee Dorrian (then fronting Cathedral), King Diamond, Celtic Frost’s Tom G. Warrior, D.R.I.’s Kurt Brecht, ex-Obsessed frontman Wino, and Lemmy from Motörhead, among others. Matt Sweeney was tasked with reaching out to each singer, explaining the concept of what Grohl was trying to do. One by one, the singers signed on.

Matt: “I gotta give almost all the credit here to Kevin Sharp from Brutal Truth, who’s an old friend of mine, because he got me the numbers, and also he knew a lot of those guys, and knew the best way to approach them. Some of them knew Dave already, and if not, they’d heard of Nirvana or Foo Fighters, at least. But Dave was really nervous about talking to these guys, and was kinda shy about it, so I made the calls. That’s when I found out that Cronos was an aerobics instructor, which was pretty funny to me at the time.”

Cronos (Venom): “I was sent the raw music for pretty much all of the songs. There was quite a lot of them where I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this’, because it was so not like what I’d done before. So when Dave said, ‘Track three is yours’, I was so relieved because that was the one I wanted: I was buzzing because that was my favourite one on there.”

Lee Dorrian: “When Dave’s old band, Scream, came back to England in ’88 I put them on at a place called The Inn Hotel in Coventry. They had nowhere to stay and I had a council flat in Coventry, 52 Hillfields House, so they piled back to my flat. There were holes in the windows and doors made by some Dutch band who’d stayed the week before, and I had to go around to a squat around the corner to nick some furniture. But they were just happy to have a roof over their heads. And they were good company. Dave was a particularly witty character. He was really knowledgeable and excited about music, too.

Napalm had just recorded a session for [Radio 1 DJ] John Peel and Dave really wanted to hear it, so I played it. It completely floored them, they thought it was nuts. Dave and I spent the rest of the night talking about Sabbath and Celtic Frost and Voivod.”

Matt: “I remember King Diamond walking me through his plans for his vocals, doing the screams and laughs down the phone line. It was so thrilling, my hair was standing on end.”

Dave: “Man, every time I hear King Diamond, I just think about the sheets of acid I was taking listening to [1987 solo album] Abigail and [Mercyful Fate’s] Don’t Break the Oath. A lot of time was spent screaming songs like Corpse Without A Soul with a fuckin’ beer bong in my hand.”

Matt: “It was so fucking cool talking to all these guys, and they really fucking delivered. Cronos sent us some bass overdubs, and we were freaking out. And he had three different lyric ideas…”

Cronos: “One was like a sleazy, red light area, ‘Going out for a whore’ kinda song, another one was about young guys going out for a fight and drinking on the town, and then I also wrote Centuries Of Sin, which was the Venom-ous one. Dave went, ‘I just want you to do your thing on it. Don’t think about Dave Grohl, don’t think about Foo Fighters and Nirvana, think as if you were doing a Venom song.’ And I was like, ‘Brilliant!’”

Matt: “The only people we couldn’t get were Tom Araya from Slayer and Phil Anselmo. I remember Dave actually rented a party bus for us to go see Slayer in LA with Pantera opening and we were backstage, and Tom Araya and Phil were right there, but we were too nervous to fuck with him.”

The exact date on which the Probot album was considered finished is up for debate, but by 2003, Dave had 12 songs (including I Am The Warlock, with Jack Black on vocals, intended as a hidden track). All but Lemmy’s contribution, Shake Your Blood, recorded in LA, were delivered by FedEx. Now he had to find a home for the record.

Dave took meetings with a number of record labels, but was unimpressed. Finally Pete Stahl, the former frontman of Scream, suggested Southern Lord, the label founded by his Goatsnake colleague, Greg Anderson.

Greg Anderson: “I had started Goatsnake with Pete Stahl so I’d run into Dave now and again, and every time I’d see him we’d sequester ourselves in a corner and talk about metal. He was this giant pop star in my eyes, but all he wanted to know about was what cool metal records he should go out and buy, and I thought that was cool.

Dave would mention to me that he was putting together these songs and he mentioned Lemmy and Cronos, so it was just kinda talk; he never, ever mentioned business to me. And then the way I heard the story from Pete Stahl was that one day Dave was playing Pete songs from it and saying, ‘What the hell should I do with this stuff? I don’t feel like a major label will understand’, and Pete said, ‘Well, what about Anderson’s label?’ I laughed and thought nothing would come of it, but then Dave called me and said, ‘Hey, I wanna talk about this Probot record…’”

Dave: “Major labels would have taken this record and slapped my name real big on a sticker on the front of the CD - ‘Dave Grohl’s fuckin’ metal band.’ And that would have ruined everything, because, to me, the focus should be on these vocalists. Some of the people at labels were asking who these singers are and why they should be on the record, and it was important that I give the album to someone who understood these people and this kind of music and who wouldn’t take advantage of the easy sell.”

Probot emerged on Southern Lord on February 10, 2004. It’s a gnarly, nasty, and authentic collection, the work of men who know what it is like to taste blood, and to find themselves with puke on their shoes. In the hands of another superstar rock musician, it could have been viewed as a vanity project… and everybody hates a tourist.

Instead, it’s a celebration not just of true underground metal, but of the values that informed that community: the point of underground metal, and indeed thrash and hardcore punk, was that its tonality and totality was such that it discouraged the attentions of the poseur. Probot, the album, never begged for one’s attention, and Probot, the collective, never played a gig, ensuring that, with its 20th anniversary just over the horizon, its purity remains intact.

Greg: ‘I’ve been told by several people that Probot was their gateway to check out Wino’s band, or Corrosion Of Conformity for the first time. It was like an introduction to this music, like, Dave recommends… We got a lot of attention for it, and the label profile as a whole was really elevated. Having that record in our catalogue was a great foot in the door for us.”

Kurt Brecht (D.R.I.): “It was a fun idea to be a part of. I don’t really know Dave Grohl, still, but it seems to me that Dave has got what every musician wants: freedom.”

Dave: “I can’t tell you how much it means to have the luxury of this opportunity. Not only of Probot, but all the opportunities that success allows me. It’s important to extend yourself to other types of music, to other types of people. It’s good for your fucking soul, for your fucking heart. It turned into something so beautiful that I’d hate to taint it by trying to do it again.”

Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford once opened up on the moment he met the legendary Dolly Parton, as well as the unlikely collaboration their meeting eventually spawned. The two beloved singers crossed paths at the 2022 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony, where Parton was inducted into the Hall itself and Priest were honoured with a special Musical Excellence Award.

Near the end of the night, Parton invited some of that year's hosts and inductees, including Brandi Carlile, P!nk, Duran Duran's Simon LeBon, Sheryl Crow, Annie Lennox, Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo, to come on stage and sing trademark hit Jolene with her. Halford was amongst the stars to take part in the amazing spectacle, meaning the Metal God got to meet a longtime idol of his.

“Somehow, instinctively, I knew we were going to meet,” Rob explained to Metal Hammer. “I always tell the story of my mother’s grandmother, who was a clairvoyant, and I still think I’ve got a little of that in me, because something went, ‘You’re going to meet Dolly Parton.’ Two or three days later, these emails come into the office, and Dolly’s reached out, asking, ‘Would you sing some lines on Jolene?’ You sit at home and go, ‘Oh my god, this is truly going to happen!’ Being a gay guy, ‘I’ve got nothing to wear!’ I know that she likes to sparkle and I like to sparkle, so what I wore on that night was apropos.”

As overawed by the encounter as Halford evidently was, it seems Parton herself was also very impressed to meet the heavy metal hero - not least because of his impressive facial hair.

“She goes, ‘I love your beard!’” Halford exclaimed, “and she starts to clean my beard! It was so surreal! I’m meeting this living legend and she’s tickling my beard and going, ‘So you’re going to sing some Jolene with me?’ I was just floating.”

The following year, Halford's new-found friendship with Parton would level-up courtesy of an appearance on her rock 'n' roll album Rockstar, where the two would duet on the track Bygones. Halford recorded his vocals separately from Parton, sending her the demos to rave reviews.

“We’re on the phone to each other and she’s going, ‘Send me the files! Send me the files!’" Halford said. "So I sent her the files and she calls back and goes, ‘I love these! This is gonna be great!’ This is Dolly Parton on speakerphone! Ha ha! She’s just this beautiful beacon of life. You can tell by the way I’m speaking that this is important to me as a musician, to have had this literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with someone so great.”

Anyone who's even loosely followed Lady Gaga's career knows she has a special love for rock music. The pop megastar, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, has made no secret of the influence that British rock icons Queen have had on her art, or the inspiration she's taken from the likes of Kiss when it comes to her love of stagecraft and huge live shows. Then, of course, there was her iconic, if chaotic, collaboration with Metallica at the 2017 Grammys and her proud channelling of David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails for last year's Mayhem album.

If there's one band in history that Gaga has most proudly gone to bat for, however, it might just be Iron Maiden. The heavy metal legends have struck up a longstanding mutual respect with the chameleonic singer-songwriter, dating back well over a decade; in 2011, in an interview with Rolling Stone, Gaga gushed over a Maiden concert she had attended earlier that week, stating: “It was just awesome.”

Gaga had begun the show watching, as most major celebrities would, from a corporate box high up in the venue. When the band launched into hallmark anthem The Number Of The Beast, however, she rushed out of the box and into the crowd itself, mixing it up with the pleasantly surprised metalheads suddenly finding themselves in the presence of pop royalty.

“We were dancing and singing and everyone was just so into it," she recalled joyfully. "Jumping and dancing… I mean, it was like absolute no judgment, no prejudice, [just] freedom and love for music. It doesn’t matter who you are; you don’t need to know anything about music to love it. Everybody was hugging me, high-fiving, fist-pumps in the air.”

Gaga even went one step further in her praise of the show, noting that the relationship the band have with their famously passionate fanbase had inspired her on a professional level. “The devotion of the fans moving in unison, pumping their fists, watching the show, when I see that, I see the paradigm for my future and the relationship I want to have with my fans,” she explained.

“Iron Maiden‘s never had a hit song, and they tour stadiums around the world, and their fans live, breathe and die for Maiden, and that is my dream. That is my dream." Photos would soon emerge of Gaga posing with members of the band backstage after the concert, quickly going viral within both the online metal community and Gaga's own fanbase of 'Little Monsters'.

Four years later, Gaga would appear on the cover of high-end fashion publication CR Fashion Book, making a point of wearing a Maiden shirt for the shoot. "I wore my own personal Number Of The Beast tee-shirt on a major fashion cover," she said on Twitter afterrwards. "I'm so proud to be a fan."

"They’re one of the greatest rock bands in history, in my opinion," she told CR Fashion Book in the accompanying interview. "Some people really don’t know the importance of metal and the scope of it. Those guys were filling stadiums, and they still are.

“And it’s because of the culture of the music, the poetry that’s so powerful, that whenever the fans come together they unite in the essence of what Iron Maiden is all about," she continued. "I always used to say to people, when they would say, ‘Oh, she’s the next Madonna.’ No, I’m the next Iron Maiden.”

The appreciation was very much reciprocated by Iron Maiden themselves. Responding to Gaga's comments a few weeks after the CR Fashion Book interview, Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson told Corus Radio: “I think she’s great, and I agree with her: she’s not the next Madonna; she’s way better than that.

“First of all, she can sing - she’s got a belter of a voice," he explained. "She’s a really good instrumentalist. And, I mean, she’s got a great sense of drama. And anybody that could turn up to an awards ceremony dressed as a bacon sandwich gets my vote. I mean, she’s great.”

Speaking to Metal Hammer last year, Iron Maiden founder, bassist and band leader Steve Harris discussed meeting Gaga back in 2011 at the metal titans' own show.

"Yeah, she came to one of our gigs," he recalled. "My youngest, Maisie, she’s 20 now, but she was pretty young at the time; she had her little mates there and she had her photo done with her.

"I didn’t talk to her much," Harris admitted, noting that the band's drummer, Nicko McBrain, was "full on with it all, larger than life character that he is." "I just said hello and stuff like that, asked if she minded having a photo with me daughter, that was about it," he added. "And my daughter said: ‘Daddy, why has she got no clothes on?’ She didn’t have much covering her up! I said, 'I've got no idea!'"

While it seems unlikely we'll ever get a Gaga/Maiden team-up a la her Metallica Grammys collab, it seems this is, at least, one of those unexpected but wholesome mutual appreciations that will go down in metal history.

Rain patters down as the wind whistles. Church bells ring, thunder cracks. Then, you’re enveloped in the ominous sound of the Devil’s tritone as a distorted voice wails, “What is this… that stands before me?”

Within 30 seconds, Black Sabbath’s self-titled song seals itself as the sound of pure evil in musical form. It telegraphed that the landscape of rock ’n’ roll was changing when released in 1970 – removed from feelgood hippie blues to the polar opposite, the chilling presence of the supernatural. And now it’s hailed not just as the first song of its creators’ legendary, 50-year-long career, but the touchstone of the entire heavy metal genre.

Black Sabbath didn’t plan to perfect the metal rulebook when they formed in 1968. When Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler first united, it was under the moniker of “the Polka Tulk Blues Band”. Together they played a form of hard, faintly folky rock. Although the band rebranded as Earth later in the same year, they still needed a hook: something to make them distinct from the soundscape of the day. Then the horror cinema down the road from their rehearsal space presented it to them.

“One day I thought that it seemed strange that a lot of people spend so much money to see scary movies,” Ozzy told NYRock in 2002. “Nobody really wanted to listen to us, so we decided to play slightly scary music. We liked it and, yeah, that’s how it all got started. That’s the story of Black Sabbath.”

It’s been woven into folklore that Black Sabbath’s dark, doomy style was also forced into the band and their eponymous song when Tony was 17 years old. At that age, the guitarist was a sheet metal worker and had the tips of his fingers sliced off in a factory accident. Doctors said he’d never play again, but he fashioned himself makeshift ‘fingertips’ using the melted-down caps of washing-up liquid bottles. So the story goes, he then had to downtune his guitar strings to reduce the pressure on his sliced-off digits. However, Tony’s since dismissed this as an urban myth.

“I would have liked to have not chopped the ends of my fingers off,” he told Classic Rock in 2016. “It became a burden. Some people say it helped me invent the kind of music I play, but I don’t know whether it did.”

Black Sabbath is in fact played in E-standard, your run-of-the-mill guitar tuning, and instead draws its eeriness from the tritone: an infamously evil-sounding note progression that has been associated with the Devil since the Middle Ages. Geezer’s claimed that the guitar part was inspired not by Satan, though, but classical – specifically Mars, The Bringer Of War, from the Gustav Holst suite The Planets. Black Sabbath’s tense opening certainly bears a striking resemblance to the movement, where slow, simple notes escalate in intensity.

The lyrics, however, were definitely drawn from the dark side. “I was getting into, not practising, but reading a lot [about] spiritualism and black magic,” Geezer remembered during the 1999 Sabbath video The Last Supper. “A lot of people were doing it at the time. It was the post-hippie generation, so all the peace and love was going out the window, and spiritualism was coming in.”

Apparently, Ozzy somehow got his hands on a 16th-century book all about these occult mysteries. When the singer leant it to Geezer, he “got a really weird vibe off it”.

“That night, I woke up suddenly and there was this black shape at the bottom of my bed,” the bassist continued. “It just vanished into thin air as I was staring at it. I thought it had to have something to do with this book that Ozzy brought around for me. I leapt out of bed, rushed to the cupboard to throw the book out, and the book was gone.”

Geezer told Ozzy about the experience the morning after. Three days after that, the singer used it as the core for Black Sabbath’s lyrics. “Figure in black… is watching me,” they narrate, so slowly as to emulate a moment of heart-stopping terror – before diving into more than a dash of artistic liberty: “Big black shape, with eyes of fire… telling people their desire. Satan’s sitting there – he’s smiling.”

When the song was finished, the band still officially called Earth christened it Black Sabbath, after a Mario Bava film that had been screened at that cinema down the road from where they practised. The music embodied the dark aura that the Brummie boys were out for so well that, in August 1969, they too became Black Sabbath. So began 48 years and 19 studio albums of heavy metal trailblazing. However, not one of the band’s releases in the half-century that followed could touch the impact, excellence and sheer horror of that very first song.

This July, Ozzy Osbourne is set to reunite with his Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward one last time for an all-star farewell performance at Villa Park in Birmingham. But it’s far from the first time Sabbath have reunited over the course of their 55 year-plus career. In 2012, three quarters of the band’s original line-up were back together, with a series of shows and a Rick Rubin-produced comeback album in the pipeline. Hammer talked to Ozzy and Geezer about the band’s return and their staggering legacy.

The debate about who or what instigated the birth of heavy metal will almost certainly continue until we are all reduced to ash or worm food, but for those of us who cherish this music and embrace the culture and lifestyle that goes along with it, there is only one band who can truly lay claim to being the authentic forefathers of everything we hold dear.

The musical elements that combined to form that life-affirming clangour that has resounded around the globe for more than 40 years now can be fairly traced back to earlier points in time, whether they be the primitive blues of the Mississippi Delta, the raucous simplicity of late 50s rock’n’roll groups or even the psychedelic fumblings of early fuzz-merchants like Blue Cheer and Jimi Hendrix.

But the truth is that the essence of heavy metal found its first bona fide expression in that ageless opening riff to Black Sabbath’s eponymous theme song: the opening track on their self-titled debut which was unleashed onto an unsuspecting world on February 13, 1970. That creepy, doom-laden shift from G to D flat – the key ingredients of the notorious Devil’s Interval, music theory fans! – injected an unprecedented level of malevolence, eeriness and foreboding into rock music; the sound of the Birmingham quartet’s blues roots being filtered through a hazy, disorientating occult prism.

“We were influenced by The Beatles, and in Tony’s case, The Shadows,” bassist Geezer Butler explains to Hammer. “They inspired us to want to play music. The roots of our music came from blues and psychedelic bands and singers. When we first formed a band together we were playing mostly blues stuff, like Skip James, Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon and John Lee Hooker. In fact, Warning by The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation made it onto our first album. We used to jam off that song into our original stuff. We built up a following playing in blues clubs and bars around Birmingham and wherever anyone would have us, but we gradually introduced our own songs into the set, and to great success!”

Rock’n’roll would never sound the same again after Black Sabbath and it scarcely needs emphasising that without that song, this band or the phenomenal body of work that they produced during the 70s – not to mention the many other great works that bore the Black Sabbath imprint in later years – this magazine and the vast majority of music that we celebrate within its pages would simply not exist. It took a while for the band’s unique approach to making music to catch on, however, and the initial critical response to that now classic debut was generally pretty scathing.

“We didn’t give a damn about that,” states Ozzy Osbourne. “I was just happy about getting a record out there. Looking back, it’s a great record. And with the success came all the trappings and we tried every one of them. The drugs, the travel, the women. Our lives were forever changed!”

It would be easy to be cynical about the current proliferation of reuniting rock veterans or the validity of wheeling out old songs to new generations of music fans who have grown up with the pick’n’mix culture that often seems to regard music as a disposable art form, but the return of the original lineup of Black Sabbath deserves to transcend such notions of cashing-in and pandering to idle nostalgia.

Black Sabbath matter because heavy metal matters. Listen to those riffs, those melodies, those lyrics and those compelling grooves and you will hear the sound of our precious world turning: heavy, heartfelt, inspirational, unstoppable and as relevant to the music we love as they ever were.

“We were never a media band, more of a word-of-mouth band,” Geezer tells Hammer. “So with the internet, iTunes and YouTube, we’d probably be more successful now, since we wouldn’t have to look to radio or MTV to try getting our music known. The biggest differences, apart from the ease of communication, is the way the songs are written. Everyone now has a means of recording, whether a simple tape recorder or a computer, whereas we had no means of recording. Reel-to-reel tape recorders, the only means of recording back then, were hideously expensive so every song we wrote had to be memorised! I wish we’d had a means of recording the jams we used to have back then. There’d probably have been some very interesting things going on! The business side of it has all changed too. People now know to consult lawyers and accountants before committing their lives to contracts and major record companies are more reluctant to give original music a fair chance, relying more on what is commercially safe.”

The excitement about a possible reunion of the original Sabbath lineup began in earnest back in August 2011 when a local Birmingham newspaper confirmed that the band had decided to regroup and were making plans to rehearse and record together again. Both Ozzy and Geezer had issued equivocal denials of any plans to reform in the preceding months and, given that Ozzy in particular was visibly immersed in his own solo career, few fans had any real expectations that a genuine reformation was in the offing.

However, when the internet became rife with speculation, Tony Iommi was quick to dispel the idea that anything definite had been agreed, stating on his website that the journalist responsible for the story had used an old quote and that no official reunion had taken place. This, of course, was far from an unequivocal denial and the fact that neither Tony nor his former colleagues came out and kicked the speculation into touch did seem to imply that there was something going on behind the scenes, even if it was at such an early stage that no one was willing to publicly commit.

Another reason that Sabbath fans may have started to get very excited about the possibility of their heroes’ return was that the band have hardly been shy about reforming in the past. The original lineup’s first era came to a rather abrupt end after the release of 1978’s Never Say Die album when Ozzy was unceremoniously booted out due to his reportedly erratic and famously drink and drug-fuelled behaviour. Drummer Bill Ward later stated that the band had become “toxic” and that Ozzy’s inability to turn up for rehearsals eventually drove the rest of the band to conclude that it was time to try something new.

This they did, of course, by enlisting Ronnie James Dio to become the band’s new singer and with that rather smart move the Black Sabbath name was enabled to live and fight another day, albeit in a different form and with a noticeably different musical atmosphere. Ronnie’s contribution to the Sabbath legacy is undeniably important. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that the band would have survived without him or the resurgence they enjoyed as a result of 1980’s classic Heaven And Hell album.

Nonetheless, the sacrosanct status of the original Sabbath lineup remained unassailable and so despite the popularity of the Dio era, fans were ecstatic when Ozzy, Geezer, Tony and Bill reconvened for their first public reunion in 1992, performing at the end of one of Ozzy’s supposedly final solo shows in California. Somewhat ironically, the event led to an acrimonious split between Sabbath and Dio – who had released the crushing Dehumanizer album earlier that year – but also seems to have sown the seeds for the full-blown reunion that took place in 1997, when Black Sabbath were charged with the task of headlining that year’s Ozzfest tour in the US. Initially, the band were aided by Faith No More’s Mike Bordin, who stood in on drums due Bill Ward’s outstanding commitments with his own solo band.

However, the full Sabbath lineup eventually hit the stage together, fittingly enough at Birmingham’s NEC arena, for two shows in December that were recorded and released as the aptly titled Reunion album in 1998; a release that also featured two brand new but slightly underwhelming studio tracks, Psycho Man and Selling My Soul. This flurry of activity seemed to spark something within the Sabbath boys and the years that followed saw them reunite multiple times, headlining festivals on both sides of the Atlantic and even venturing into the studio with producer Rick Rubin to attempt to record a new album.

Sadly, those sessions fizzled out and as the new millennium dawned, events undoubtedly conspired to keep the band apart, not least due to Ozzy’s sudden reinvention as a reality TV celebrity via MTV’s The Osbournes.

Fast forward back to 2011 again and events were conspiring once again, but in a positive direction this time. The death of Ronnie James Dio in 2010 had put a firm full stop at the end of his Heaven And Hell project with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and drummer Vinny Appice that delighted so many and proved to be an extraordinary creative epitaph for the great man.

But when one door shuts, another one opens. On November 11, 2011, at a private press conference at Los Angeles’ famed Whisky A Go Go club, the four members of the original Black Sabbath lineup announced that they would be reuniting for both live performances and a brand new studio album; their first in 34 years. Anyone who had heard Heaven And Hell’s remarkable The Devil You Know or Ozzy’s widely lauded Scream album was more than aware that the band were individually firing on all creative cylinders and so, the sneering of a few online trolls aside, the news that new material and a live rebirth were on the cards was greeted with a universal shudder of excitement. In the UK, of course, fans nearly exploded with joy when it was revealed that Black Sabbath would be headlining this year’s Download festival at Castle Donington. Oh lord, yeah!

Nothing is ever simple in Sabbath World, though. 2012 began with two major setbacks for the band’s planned reunion. Firstly, in January it was revealed that Tony had been diagnosed with the early stages of lymphoma; an announcement that elicited an outpouring of support and heartfelt tributes from throughout the rock and metal world, as everyone send their best wishes to this living icon.

As a consequence of Tony’s battle with illness, it had also been decided that Black Sabbath’s planned world tour would be cancelled and, with the exception of Download, the dates would be fulfilled by Ozzy and a host of guest stars, performing under the banner of Ozzy And Friends. To help Tony remain near his much-needed medical facilities, Sabbath’s recording sessions were moved from California to London.

Secondly, in January Bill Ward made a statement online claiming that he would be unable to participate in the forthcoming live shows due to dissatisfaction with the contract he had been asked to sign. Amid wild and generally unfounded speculation about what exactly was going on behind the scenes, the remaining band members swiftly responded by saying that they had no choice but to continue recording their new album without him but that the door was “always open” if Bill ever changed his mind. Fans around the world duly crossed their fingers and hoped that all these obstacles could be overcome and better news would soon be forthcoming.

In March, Tony issued a statement on his official website, indicating that his ongoing treatment was going well and that he expected to be ready and able to tread the boards with his Black Sabbath brothers this summer. He also said that sessions for the new album were going well and that the band had written some “great new tracks”.

Further glad tidings came in early May when Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell announced that Black Sabbath would be headlining this year’s Lollapalooza festival in Chicago in August, thus confirming Sharon Osbourne’s previous statement that the band would now perform just one festival show in the UK and one in the US. Throw in the glorious news about Sabbath’s homecoming warm-up show at Birmingham’s O2 Academy on May 19 – tickets for which sold out in less than 10 minutes – and it seems that despite all the turmoil, the Black Sabbath reunion is gathering pace.

Meanwhile, speculation continues about who might replace Bill Ward should his contractual problems not be resolved. Many names have been thrown around, most notably Mike Bordin, Ozzy’s current drummer Tommy Clufetos and, inevitably, Vinny Appice who had been a member of Black Sabbath in the early 80s, performing on the classic Mob Rules album, and of Heaven And Hell in more recent years.

However, Vinny has since ruled himself out, stating that he is focusing on his current band, Kill Devil Hills, which also features ex-Pantera/Down bassist Rex Brown in its ranks. Curiously, Bill Ward’s name has since reappeared as part of the official lineup on Black Sabbath’s Facebook page, so although no definitive statement has been made about whether or not he will be taking part in the reunion shows, the signs seem to be pointing towards a positive outcome.

If anyone remains in any doubt about how fundamental to heavy music – and, indeed, a vast amount of music beyond it – Sabbath are or why the return of the original lineup is such a big deal, they need only read on and witness the vast number of tributes and statements of admiration and adoration from major figures in our world. In musical terms alone, the sustained impact of Black Sabbath and their music is second to none. The band themselves are immensely proud of their huge catalogue of eternal anthems and they are relishing a fresh opportunity to play them all again.

“Lyrically I’d say I’m most proud of songs like War Pigs, A National Acrobat, Spiral Architect, Hole In The Sky and After Forever,” says Geezer. “It’s very hard for me to pick a favourite because it depends on my mood. They all deal with different subjects. But musically I’d probably go with Black Sabbath. It was our first totally original song and it summed up the personality and mood of the band and set the standard for our future writing.”

“For me, it has got to be Paranoid,” says Ozzy. “Through- out my solo career and with Sabbath, I’ve always ended every show with that song. It feels as good to play it now as when we first wrote it.”

Everything worth a damn that has happened in hard rock and heavy metal since the band first emerged in the late 60s bears traces of the Sabbath sound within its DNA and that is even true of bands that have never listened to Master Of Reality or Paranoid. There have been many great masters of the art of the riff over the last 40 years, but no one has produced as many timeless classics as Tony Iommi and his comrades.

Sabbath’s influence can be heard everywhere: from the pioneering metallurgy of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, the speed-fuelled thrash revolution of Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth and the defiant underground hardcore punk of Black Flag and Discharge through to the entire grunge movement of the early 90s – Nirvana, in particular, frequently cited Black Sabbath as a primary inspiration – the dark grooves and genre-bending mischief of nu-metal and, of course, every last stoner rock or doom band ever to fire up a bong and fling on a pair of flares. Black metal, death metal, thrash metal, grindcore, metalcore, djent… you name it, it can all be traced back via one route (or root) or another to the original source of all that is heavy.

Black Sabbath’s music continues to resonate with a freshness, energy and spirit that defies the passing of time. As each new generation of fans embraces heavy metal, the flame of Iommi, Butler, Osbourne and Ward continues to burn brightly; unerring, fiercely relevant, immortal. They belong to us and we to them. Black. Fucking. Sabbath. We need them more than ever.

“I didn’t know we were the forefathers of metal!” Ozzy tells Metal Hammer. “When I used to do Ozzfest I hadn’t realised we had such an impact on the young bands. I’m proud of that alone. I wasn’t aware for a long time, I thought everyone was just taking the piss, you know? But now I feel very comfortable with the guys and the songs we are writing. The reunion’s always been on a backburner. It’s always been there.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 232, May 2012

A Dutch university is offering degrees in heavy metal.

Summa College in Eindhoven is making headlines with its faculty ‘The Metal Factory’, which lets students study singing – as well as guitar, bass, drum and keyboard performance – in ways specifically tailored for making metal music.

A journalist for Australia’s 7 News recently visited the college and reported that their three-year singing course teaches pupils to “master the art of growling”.

“According to instructors, the key to an effective heavy metal growl is simple,” she says. “You start with a sigh or a groan and you use your vocal cords to gradually transform it into a primal scream.”

Watch the full report in the video embedded below.

According to The Metal Factory’s official website, the curriculum “train[s] you to become an independent artist/entrepreneur in the music industry”.

It adds that career opportunities after graduation include composing and producing music on commission as well as “teaching and coaching”. Graduates have also gone on to further study at such prestigious music schools as the Conservatory Of Amsterdam.

“We also have alumni who eventually graduated in copyright, management, music therapy or speech therapy,” it continues. “Metal Factory offers everyone who wants to be professionally involved in music a broad foundation for the future.”

There are 14 named teachers among the faculty, including former Cynic bassist Robin Zielhorst, Textures members Bart Hennephof (guitars) and Stef Broks (drums), ex-Delain guitarist Merel Bexhtold and sound engineer Jacques De Haard.

“Our teachers are all active in the music industry, on stage and behind the scenes,” says The Metal Factory. “We try to keep our education up-to-date and relevant to the current industry. We feel it’s important to have our teaching staff reflect this philosophy.

“Many of our teachers have toured the world and [are] thus capable of sharing realistic experiences and knowledge with our students.”

If you want to earn a degree that proves how hard you rock, then The Metal Factory is hosting an open day at Dynamo Eindhoven on January 26. Get details here.

In the summer of 1994, with the encouragement of MTV, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page reunited to revisit Led Zeppelin classics and deep cuts for a TV special titled Unledded.

When interviewed about the project, the two former Led Zeppelin were at pains to emphasise that their collaboration did not equate to a Led Zeppelin reunion - the band's other surviving member John Paul Jones was not invited to participate - even though Page admitted that the idea was first presented to him with the suggestion that "it would be nice to have Led Zeppelin in an intimate situation."

"Quite honestly I for one wasn't thinking John Paul Jones," Page insisted to MOJO magazine's Mat Snow. "I was thinking about what we were getting together between the two of us."

Page and Plant were equally forthright when, in the same interview, Snow asked, Did the invention of the term 'heavy metal' and its early application to Led Zeppelin restrict how people perceived you?

"Yeah, because it hones in on just one element of what we were doing," said Page. "We were so multi-faceted it's a shame we got lumped in with any of those..."

"It's journalistic complacency and claptrap," Plant interruped. "It's a very easy thing to say: who were the most successful band around at that time? If it was us, and that period had a lot of people cavorting around using their manhood as the main weapon to sell records, then we have to be held responsible and used as a trademark for that period, when our better songs, apart from Black Dog and Rock And Roll, were more or less acoustic-based or Eastern-based anyway. But who cares? Leave it to Deep Purple. They're a nice, imaginative, original band."

Ouch.

Asked if there was a story they could share which would set straight this misconception, Plant said, "No. This is supposed to be entertainment, you know. It's not that bloody serious.

"Let people think what they like," he continued. "It doesn't really matter so long as what we've got to be proud of we're proud of; that's all that matters. Otherwise we're wasting our time. And we've only got about 40, 50 years to live, each of us. And you. Pissing about, trying to set the record straight and all that sort of thing is a waste of time. We just get on and do what we do."

The collaboration between the two men was later released as No Quarter, a Top 10 album in both the US and UK.

MOJO currently have a Led Zeppelin Essentials special on sale.

It’s less than an hour before showtime, and things are getting messy backstage for Vended. Singer Griffin Taylor is standing at the bathroom mirror, overalls hanging down from his waist, smearing a black stripe across his eye sockets. His shaved skull is painted white and he’s splashing droplets of blue make-up across his face, inevitably the hitting walls next to him. Tonight is the second of two sold-out nights here at the Intuit Dome arena in Los Angeles, where Vended are opening for Slipknot and Knocked Loose. Remnants of the band’s make-up routine are everywhere: smeared on doorknobs, in the sink, on the bright yellow couches in their dressing room, and in every handshake with visitors. Griffin refers to these stains as “the Vended Virus”, and it’s been spreading.

“I don’t ever stop hearing the complaining about leaving messes in the bathrooms,” he says, flicking more droplets into the air. “But it happens and I try my best to clean it up as much as possible.”

Vended are earning a reputation for themselves right now, and not just for the mess they inadvertently leave behind them. Partly that’s because Griffin and Vended drummer Simon Crahan happen to be the sons of Slipknot singer Corey Taylor and percussionist Shawn Crahan, aka Clown. Like the latter band, Vended’s members came out of Des Moines, Iowa, and have adopted disturbed alter-egos, albeit mostly through make-up rather than masks.

But Vended – who also include bassist Jeremiah Pugh (aka ‘JJ’) and guitarists Cole Espeland and Connor Grodzicki – are working hard to build their own audience. Their recently released self-titled debut album has gone some way to silencing the accusations that Vended have only got here because of their parental connections. And while this tour is giving them some much-needed exposure, Griffin insists it’s hardly a family road trip. They’re travelling by Sprinter van, pulling a trailer full of amps, guitars, drums, props and merch. JJ, Simon and Cole do the driving.

At the Dome, they’re in what Cole jokingly calls “the kids’ room”, on account of the rows of tiny hearts hanging like beads down the walls. Most nights, Vended haven’t had much more contact with the headliners than any other opening act would have.

“We still do see each other all the time, like passing through the hallways,” he says of encounters on tour with his father. “We then poke fun at each other, son and dad. But at the end of the day, we are on the job. This isn’t
a vacation. This is work.”

Relaxing on a couch in the dressing room before he puts on his make-up for the night’s performance, sporting ripped black jeans, black t-shirt and black nail varnish, Griffin Taylor could be any kid a few days shy of his 22nd birthday. He was born the year after Slipknot released Iowa. Along his right arm is a large tattoo of a snake, a birthday gift from his dad and stepmom when he turned 18, inked by the same artist in Las Vegas who does Corey’s tattoos. He has subsequently added a few more (a black cat, a TARDIS from Doctor Who), but he’s still clearly in the early stages of building his own grown-up persona.

Griffin first began singing at school, in the choir and even, at one point, in a barbershop quartet-style group. He learned to singing melodically long before he started screaming on top of loud guitars. When it comes to metal vocalists, Griffin cites David Gunn of King 810 as a major influence.

“When I was in high school, I listened to him all the time,” he says. “I did everything to emulate his screams and get deep and guttural and disgusting. Practising his music really helped me get that deep stuff.”

Growing up, Griffin spent many breaks in the school year on the road with his father, sleeping in bunks on a Slipknot tour bus. In his early teens, his friend Cole suggested they start a band and compete in the school talent show. Simon, 18 months younger than Griffin and a friend through Slipknot family gatherings, caught wind of it and wanted in.

“Griffin and Cole were together on this and I heard about it,” he says now. “I messaged Griff and asked, ‘Hey man, you wanna jam?’”

Like the singer, Simon grew up in a larger-than-life world of metal, but he hadn’t spent his childhood dreaming of being a musician. He was more interested in becoming an MMA fighter. Eventually, though, he gravitated to the drums and began practising obsessively.

“I definitely helped push for the band to play a little faster,” Simon explains. “At first we were playing, like, hard rock music. It was very Guns N’ Roses-esque. And then I joined and I was like, ‘No, we’re gonna play fast.’”

In 2019, a year or so after the band formed, the Crahan family was hit by tragedy when Simon’s 22-year-old sister, Gabrielle, died from an overdose.

“I was 15 when that happened and I felt like I was an adult right then and there,” says Simon, who has Gabrielle’s name tattooed on his chest. “I’m definitely different because of it. I’m a different person.”

Vended’s first live performance took place in the spring of 2020 at a small nightclub in Des Moines called the Vaudeville Mews. The show sold out the week it was announced.

“We probably packed 250 kids in there,” recalls Cole with a grin. “It felt like a flash. I think we played 22 minutes. We didn’t know what to do, but it was a great show.”

The future seemed wide open. Then, just days after that first night onstage, Covid-19 landed hard in America, and the music scene went into forced hibernation. Vended embraced the downtime as an opportunity to work on their music, spending their days in a windowless rehearsal space at a warehouse with no insulation or air conditioning.

“We shut the doors. We’d just practise six hours to eight hours a day in that sweaty box of a room,” Cole remembers. They recorded their debut EP, What Is It//Kill It, in Clown’s basement home studio. Griffin says that’s when he discovered his true screaming abilities – specifically on the track Burn My Misery.

“They ran the tape and I just went off on the first take, just guttural growling and stuff like that. And they were like, ‘Where the hell did that come from? More of that, please.’”

Predictably, Vended’s rise has been accompanied by a chorus of jeers aimed at their connections with Slipknot: that they’re ‘nepo babies’ whose career has been gift- wrapped for them. During Vended’s early days, those comments stung.

“I was a teenager with a lot of feelings and a lot of emotions and I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Griffin says now. “It would just depress the fuck out of me.”

Most of the naysayers are online, he notes, though the occasional IRL troll will “scream something from the crowd or just make a joke, like ‘Play Duality!’ And I go up to the mic and be, like, ‘Wrong band, dude.’”

Of course, stardom and success aren’t genetic traits that get passed down from one generation to another. The history of music is littered with the shattered dreams of rock stars’ kids who never even came close to matching their parents’ success. Vended’s connections to one of the biggest metal bands of all time is no guarantee that they’ll follow in their footsteps. They know hard work and great songs are basic requirements for survival in this business, let alone success.

“My dad told me, ‘I would not put you on a tour if you weren’t good’,” says Simon. “We wouldn’t be playing festivals the way we do if we weren’t good. We’re a good band. We play good music. That’s why we’re here. We’ve discovered that talent ourselves. And everyone thinks it’s just been handed to us.”

Their debut album – being self-released by the band – is the perfect rejoinder to the haters. The band spent two months recording it with producer Chris Collier at Korn frontman Jonathan Davis’s studio in Bakersfield, California (Chris produced Korn’s Requiem album and Jonathan stopped by at the sessions to get a preview of the tracks). While songs such as the speedy, growling Nihilism and the jackhammer roar of The Far Side draw some inspiration from Slipknot, Griffin insists his tastes are not limited to metal. As a lyricist, he points to non-metal influences like Green Day, Paul Simon, Amanda Palmer, protest-folk singer Ani DiFranco and Broadway musicals. And then there’s the residual experience of being a choir kid at school...

“I try to incorporate choir techniques that I can remember and certain ranges that I know I can do,” he says. “And then hate myself for doing it because then I have to do it live.”

The clock is ticking down to showtime. Just behind the Intuit Dome stage, Griffin is preparing for his band’s set by growling at the deepest, heaviest edge of his voice: “AHHHH! YEAHHHHHHH!” A moment later, he’s practically crooning a clear melody. When he’s done, he gathers the band into their nightly huddle and shouts in their faces like the coach of some high-flying sports team: “Second fucking show in the same place! Are you boys fucking ready? Let’s go out there and show these motherfuckers a good time, goddamn it!”

A group chant goes up: “Fuck Cali!” It’s the same thing they yell every night, tailored to whichever state they’re in. Even their home state gets this treatment: “Fuck Iowa!” “That’s the place where it matters the most to say that,” says Cole with a laugh.

Their half-hour set begins with Nihilism – sweat and make-up soon dripping from Griffin’s arm – the Vended Virus spread even further. Later, Serenity is the band at their most radio-ready, the singer’s voice slipping from harsh to melodic as thrashing riffs give way to a killer chorus. After they finish, Griffin walks offstage and spots Slipknot DJ Sid Wilson practising at a turntable. The latter is clad in a shiny dark tux. It turns out he’s just come from a wedding. “What’s up, Sid,” Griffin says with a nod, and fist-bumps the older man. Back in Vended’s dressing room, Simon has a shower to rinse off his make-up, then grabs a plate of food. Outside, the hallway is filling up with random visitors. That’s a bad place to be when the members of Slipknot are steamrolling their way to the stage, as the drummer learned as a boy.

“I was being a dumb 12-year-old and I should have stayed out of the way. But I was in the hallway with Slipknot and I got screamed at and reprimanded that night,” he recalls. “You never get in the way.”

Their own work might be done here, but there’s no post- show partying or even an early departure to get a head start on the overnight trip to the tour’s next stop-off in Phoenix, Arizona. Instead, the members of Vended stick around to watch Knocked Loose and Slipknot, the latter celebrating the 25th anniversary of their debut album. Leaving his bandmates to watch the headliners from the soundboard, Simon makes his way to the side of the stage, next to his dad’s metal keg-drum set-up. As Slipknot’s main set finishes and they troop off ahead of the encore, Clown spots his son and gives him a quick thumbs-up before stepping behind the stage.

A moment later, Simon runs up the steps to join him there, no longer merely father and son, but as genuine colleagues in metal. Vended are still just getting started, many years after Slipknot first made a mark around the world, but they seem anxious to add something of their own to that legacy. With years of hard work and many miles of tour dates still ahead, Vended know that family connections can only take them so far.

Slayer guitarist Kerry King says the heavy metal scene is "more of a brotherhood" than any other music genre.

Speaking to Blunt Magazine while touring Australia with his solo band, King heaped praise on the inclusivity of metal fans when asked if he thought Slayer's music appealed to different generations.

He says: "Metal is more of a brotherhood than any kind of music that I can think of.

"I thought that 20 years ago. You would see older brothers bringing younger siblings or even parents bringing their kids because this kind of music isn't alienating in a family environment. You know what I mean?

"Like, it's not uncool if you like the same music your parents do. It's like, that's really cool. And this is one of the odd types of music that that is allowed.

"Like, the first show we did 'Kerry King', we did a small club outside of Chicago, and I saw a lot of older fans because they knew to go buy the tickets so fast because they're gonna go.

"It was a 400-seater, it was tiny. So there was a lot of our probably first-generation fans. But, yeah, all the time I see kids in Slayer shirts, kids in Kerry King shirts. You know – Metallica, Megadeth.

"It's just the type of music – metal."

King released his debut solo album From Hell I Rise earlier this year.

Metal Hammer's review of the album describes it as "the sound of a man with absolutely zero interest in fading into the background."

The review continues: "It is also the most pissed off and aggressive thing Kerry King has produced since God Hates Us All more than two decades ago."

Tonight, Mancunian maggots are squirming their way back to 1999 – and they’re doing it in style. From mobs clad in red boiler suits to children skipping along in grotesque, hand-made masks, everyone has put the effort into honour Slipknot’s landmark anniversary. Over the last 25 years, the Iowa gang’s self-titled record has only ripened with age – and punters are hoping to experience every inch of its nauseating, bile-spattered noise as viscerally and authentically as grotty basement crowds did all those moons ago.

Before being treated to an evening of laceratingly deep cuts, crowds are treated to some of Glasgow’s finest, Bleed From Within, immersing the Co-Op Live arena in a wave of rumbling metalcore and overwhelming grooves. Frontman Scott Kennedy handles the pressure like a pro, confidently commanding crowds to move, even garnering a sly wall of death. And, if his intimidating growls weren’t already convincing, the bagpipes featured on new track In Place Of Your Halo certainly win the masses over.

Soon, however, comes the pain. As the arena is plunged into darkness, the infernal whirring of 742617000027 and unnerving calls of “come play with us…” scratching at people’s eardrums, Slipknot tease the crowd of delinquents, drawing out the tension before everything crashes into action. (sic) kicks the set off, the nefarious clash of whiplash-quick drums and tormented vocals instantly raw and nostalgic. By Eyeless, fans are swarming, revelling in the chaos of 99 – and Iowa's finest are too, decked out in classic red boiler suits and feasting on the nu metal carnage unfolding.

When Corey Taylor finally addresses the crowd, it slightly bursts the nostalgic bubble. And that’s because he’s not deranged in the slightest; the warmth in his voice is far removed from the rabble of rascals that would drink their own vomit and huff roadkill in a jar before going onstage. “This country was the first to really fucking embrace Slipknot as a family,” he says. “For one night only...welcome back to 1999 motherfuckers!”

But that’s just a fact of life – you can’t truly go back in time. While Slipknot is a record designed for dank little clubs, sweat dripping from the ceiling as eager maggots climb up the walls, that’s just not going to contain the magnitude of what the record has since become. Right now, we’re in a rather impressive arena – the largest in the UK, in fact. While it’s a step-up to be proud of, it does leave things feeling a touch sanitised: the set is a little too clean, the guitar chugs aren’t low enough, tone not quite rumbling in your guts as you’d want them to.

But, all things considered, the show is still a mighty celebration. From the ferocious Eeyore to Taylor’s maniacal, guttural rampage throughout Me Inside, to the maggot national anthem Surfacing, fans are delighted. And additions to the band since 99 also help amp up the chaos, Michael Pfaff’s percussive energy electric as his devil horned head darts back and forth, climbing onto his drums and rolling around on the floor.

As we draw towards a close, Taylor leaves us with on final dose of that 90s nightmare lingering within him. Donning the psyche of a madman for closer Scissors, his scarily calm demeanour and unsettling performance is still unhinged and as sharp as ever. It’s a perfect end note, reminding people that, no matter what, Slipknot can never entirely be tamed. Maybe the whole thing is still as sick as ever.

A new documentary series that explores the history of heavy metal music is set to stream on Hulu next year.

The series, with the working title Into the Void is being created by Vice Studios Canada, with Evan Husney and Jason Eisener involved in the project.

Husney and Eisener perviously co-created pro wrestling documentary series Dark Side Of The Ring, which covered the scandals, mysteries, and tragedies from the history of professional wrestling.

Husney says in an Instagram post: "New project alert. Super stoked to finally share what Jason Eisener and I have been working on for the past few years. Coming to Hulu in 2025.

"We both grew up as diehard fans of metal and have always been fascinated by the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

"The sonic worlds created by the genre’s boldest icons are rich with untold history and unimaginable trials and tribulations, and we’re excited to team up with Hulu to look beyond the mystique and show these legends as real people.

"A full episode lineup of the stories we'll be delving into will be announced closer to the show's release next year – we cant wait to share it with everyone."

The CEO of Metal Blade Records, Brian Slagel, is also part of the team behind the new series.

He says: "Excited this has been announced now! I’m part of the team creating this new series."

According to Deadline, the series will "chronicle the emotional sagas behind the most towering legends and unforgettable artists in heavy metal" and it will "go behind the stage into the real lives of heavy metal icons."

Ice-T has named the one thing he’d change about heavy metal given the chance.

Talking exclusively in the new issue of Metal Hammer, the acclaimed rapper and Body Count frontman says he’d get rid of all the subgenres in metal if he could.

“I’d get rid of all the categories they’ve decided to split rock into,” Ice says. “I got so tired of all these different hybrid categories, I created my own for Body Count: grindhouse. That’s what we do. Other than that, I wouldn’t change much.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the rap and metal figurehead names his favourite album to come from each of the two genres he works in.

“My favourite metal album is the first Black Sabbath album – it’s the one I probably listened to the most growing up,” he reveals. “I’ve actually sampled songs from Sabbath on my rap albums – and rock, too. I used Black Sabbath for [solo rap track] Midnight.”

Ice continues: “So far as my favourite rap album… probably Paid In Full by Eric B & Rakim which came out around the same time I was doing [1987 debut] Rhyme Pays. Or maybe Yo! Bum Rush The Show by Public Enemy. Those records were very important to me, particularly in the creation of the Ice-T records.”

Body Count released latest album Merciless via Century Media on November 22. The album included a cover of the Pink Floyd classic Comfortable Numb, which the band recently performed on national TV during The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Body Count released their self-titled debut album in 1992 and incited international controversy with their single Cop Killer the same year. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Ice said that that controversy did not translate to fatter wallets for he and his bandmates.

“Anybody that thinks controversy is a way to make money, it’s not,” he said. “You get a lot of buzz, but now you need lawyers. So don’t just say something stupid and then back-pedal – if you’re going to say something, stand on it.”

As well as the interview with Ice, the new issue of Metal Hammer offers the essential breakdown of the year in metal. As well as the albums of the year, the magazine revisits Slipknot’s blockbuster anniversary tour, Gojira’s show-stealing Olympic Games performance, Lzzy Hale joining Skid Row, Ghost going Hollywood and so much more. Order now and get your copy delivered directly to your doorstep.

The year's already over! Boo! But that means we get a spectacular new issue of Metal Hammer celebrating all the amazing things that happened in metal this year! Woo! From the best albums and gigs to the comebacks and all the chaos, we dig into it all in our special look back at the last twelve months.

But there's more! The magazine also comes with three official gifts: a Nightwish notebook for your scribbles and secrets, an Iron Maiden Eddie patch to commemorate 40 years of Powerslave, and a 2025 calendar featuring Sleep Token, Ghost, Bad Omens, Slipknot, Metallica and other metal heavyweights.Inside the issue itself, there are new interviews with Gojira, Slipknot, Nightwish, Ghost and more. What can we say? It's been a busy 2024...

This was the year Gojira performed at the Paris Olympics Games Opening Ceremony, atop a former prison, accompanied by an orchestra and an opera singer." For three minutes, Paris was vibrating with our sound,” says Joe Duplantier. “We’ve never blasted across a whole city before. That alone was incredible.

It was also the year Ghost released an actual movie, Rite Here Rite Now, with mastermind Tobias Forge revealing that he’d love to act again.“It would be amazing,” he says. “After doing this film, I really got a blooded tooth, as we say here in Sweden.”

Plus, we take you inside the other big stories of the last 12 months, including Slayer making a surprise comeback, Linkin Park returning with a new singer, Metallica taking over Fortnite, Lzzy Hale fronting Skid Row and much, much more – killer clowns, anyone?

And our end of year issue wouldn’t be complete without our annual countdown of the best albums of 2024, as chosen by our esteemed scribes. But who’s No.1? That would be telling…

All this, plus Ice-T, Brat, Mastodon, Kalandra, Big Brave, Devin Townsend, Julie Christmas, Gatecreeper, Knocked Loose, Patriarkh, Mimi Barks, Cradle Of Filth and a ton more.Only in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.

Living heavy metal legends Saxon will be heading back on the road next year for a ten-date tour of the UK and Ireland. The tour will see Yorkshire's finest play their seminal 1980 album Wheels Of Steel in full, alongside tracks from this year's well-received Hell, Fire And Damnation LP. Saxon will hit up dates in Belfast, Dublin, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, Newcastle, Bristol, Wolverhampton, London and Cardiff, bringing former Accept frontman Udo Dirkschneider with them. Dirkschneider will also be performing a classic album in full - Accept's excellent 1983 breakthrough, Balls To The Wall.

“We first toured with UDO and Accept in the U.S.A on our Crusader tour and have done lots of stuff together since, but we have never toured the UK together so this is gonna be epic," says Saxon frontman Biff Byford. "Balls to the Wall and Wheels of Steel under the same roof… it’ going to be something really special to witness. Bring it on!”

See the full list of tourdates below. For ticket info, head to the official Saxon website. Reviewing for Metal Hammer, Paul Travers said of Hell, Fire And Damnation: "It won’t change the face of music or knock the world off its axis, but Hell, Fire And Damnation is yet another damned fine addition to Saxon’s ever- expanding catalogue."

Saxon UK and Ireland tour dates 2024

Nov 04: Belfast, Ulster Hall
Nov 05: Dublin, Olympia
Nov 07: Manchester, O2 Appollo
Nov 08: Sheffield, Octagon
Nov 09: Glasgow, O2 Academy
Nov 11: Newcastle, O2 City Hall
Nov 13: Bristol, Beacon
Nov 14: Wolverhampton, Civic Hall
Nov 15: London, Eventim Apollo Hammersmith
Nov 16: Cardiff, The Great Hall

You can’t walk through Camden nowadays without some shady dude offering you drugs on the street. You should never, ever take him up on it, but the good news is that tonight you won’t have any need to. That’s because, just 10 minutes up the road in Kentish Town, three mind-expanding rock bands have gathered to take you on the most psychedelic trip you’ll ever have sober.

Burdened with a 7:15 start time, PALLBEARER don’t get half the turnout that their doom metal majesty deserves. Whether the thin crowd has soured the Arkansas troupe’s mood is impossible to tell, however: they’ve sounded sad as fuck for 12 years now. Tonight’s set pulls heavily from this year’s Mind Burns Alive album, its vast, immersive songs stilling everyone in emotion and awe. Only finale Worlds Apart, with its series of hulking riffs, offers glimpses of joy in what’s otherwise a labyrinth of sorrow.

Just in time, GRAVEYARD arrive with a pocket full of uppers. The psych-rockers get a now-fuller O2 Forum boogying fast, hopping between fizzy acid riffs and grooving Led Zeppelin callbacks. It’s a soundscape countless younger bands have tried, desperately pursuing the demographic of “grandads who think good music died around the same time as John Bonham”, but these Swedes present it without cynicism. With the thrashy From A Hole In The Wall and the fiercely technical drums of Ain’t Fit To Live Here, they straddle the fence between nostalgic and refreshing.

On 2023’s Stone, BARONESS abandoned the colour-themed album titles they’d used their entire career. However, the Savannah sludge/prog explorers rock up to their first London headliner in eight years looking more vibrant than ever. They bathe in technicolour spotlights as they burst into Last Word, which declares the band’s M.O. of revelling in contrast. Hammer-headed riffs give way to wobbling interludes. Frontman John Dyer Baizley’s Southern bark is underlined by guitarist Gina Gleason’s silken backing vocals. And prog drums scramble beneath the intensely listenable pop-metal chorus.

The grandeur’s initially, annoyingly short-lived. Baizley’s microphone overdoses on the mind-melting maximalism and packs in, leaving the band to improvise an instrumental and then just twiddle their thumbs for a bit. Thankfully, when the show kicks off again, it does so with gusto: galloping favourite March To The Sea gets the masses jumping and singing in a heartbeat.

The evening reaches its apex with a mini-tour through 2015 opus Purple. Woozy ballad If I Have To Wake Up (Would You Stop The Rain?) proves even more moving now that Gleason’s joining Baizley at the mic, their voices intertwining to strengthen the bittersweetness. In typical Baroness fashion, that quietness gets juxtaposed against the irrepressible energy of Shock Me. That hardy riff, that unforgettable chorus, that thundering bassline – it’s easy to hear how this anthem earned a surprise Grammy nod in 2017.

By the time Isak and Take My Bones Away end the night with its two most victorious singalongs, the fleeting troubles (the tech issues and the venue’s early emptiness) are long since forgotten. Baroness, Graveyard and Pallbearer have lifted London to new planes of intoxicating sound. No way can any weirdo Camden drug dealer offer you better than that.

Baroness setlist: O2 Forum Kentish Town, London – November 20, 2024

Last Word
March To The Sea
Beneath The Rose
Green Theme
If I Have To Wake Up (Would You Stop The Rain?)
Fugue
Shock Me
Swollen And Halo
Isak
Take My Bones Away

Co-founded by Iron Maiden's legendary manager Rod Smallwood and former Metal Hammer editor Alexander Milas, the Heavy Metal Truants have raised an astonishing £1.6 million for charity since launching in 2013.

The organisation's annual Monster Rock Auction, benefiting The Teenage Cancer Trust, Nordoff & Robbins, Childline, and Save The Children, is currently open online, offering rare, signed ultra-collectable items donated by Iron Maiden, AC/DC, The Cure, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and more, but it's closing tonight, October 16, at 23:59 UK time, so don't delay with your bids!

One item in particular listed in this year's auction falls squarely into the 'one of a kind' bracket. For just £20 you can have a chance to own a window pane from Iron Maiden's iconic Ed Force One plane, the Boeing 747 flown by vocalist Bruce Dickinson during the Book of Souls World Tour.

Also up for grabs are signed and framed handwritten lyrics penned by Maiden bandleader Steve Harris, a stunning AC/DC signed by frontman Brian Johnson, Black Sabbath vinyl signed by guitarist Tony Iommi, a Glenn Tipton ESP signature guitar signed by Judas Priest, signed ZZ Top album's from Billy Gibbons' personal collection, and a Thunderbird bass guitar donated and signed by The Cure's Simon Gallup.

You can check out the full range of items up for auction here.

“This is a chance to own a piece of history and help four amazing causes in the process,” says Alexander Milas. “There’s an unbelievable feel-good factor in seeing the music world coming together to support what we do each year, and it’s emblematic of the fact that Heavy Metal Truants is more than a cause – it’s a community.”

“The Heavy Metal Truants is a great way for the rock and metal community to come together and help disadvantaged children,” adds Smallwood. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan, if you’re in the industry or in a band: you can make a difference by helping to improve the lives of kids and young people by joining us or supporting these activities, and that counts for a lot!”

Once again, entries close tonight, on Wednesday October 16 at 23:59 UK time.

Winners will be announced and contacted after October 17.

Good luck!

Under cover of the cool night air, the mighty Judas Priest hit the Shockwave stage on Day three of Aftershock with unmistakable swagger and fire in their bellies. Kicking off with Invincible Shield’s Panic Attack, the British metal icons remind us that their fifty-year reign has been built on more than just nostalgia - it’s been forged in the fires of riffs, attitude and an endless supply of stadium-shaking anthems.

Rob Halford, the Metal God himself, stands front and center, looking every bit the part in his studded black leathers and gleaming nose ring. He strides across the stage, eyes blazing as he screams, “The Priest is back! Are you ready? Are you ready? Let’s go!!” And with that, they launch into You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’. 

Right from the start, it’s obvious that Priest are firing on all cylinders - a feat that’s far from guaranteed after fifty years in the trenches and with two guitarists who don’t predate 2010. But Richie Faulkner and Andy Sneap absolutely crush it from the word go, nailing everything from the lightning-fast solos to the locked-in, twin-fretted assault on tracks like Turbo Lover and Electric Eye. By the time they hit the tail end of Sinner, they’ve morphed into a two-headed beast, feeding off each other’s energy and syncing perfectly on both the blistering leads and bone-crushing riffs.

Halford doesn’t waste much time on pleasantries. With Iron Maiden looming just minutes away on a neighbouring stage, this set is all killer, no filler. Breaking the Law sends the crowd into full riot mode, and by the time Scott Travis uncorks the iconic opening to Painkiller, the thousands of fans waiting in front of the Maiden stage watching Priest on the monitors are craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the band’s unstoppable energy.

Checking all of the boxes, Halford mounts his Harley for Hell Bent for Leather - a beloved spectacle of pure heavy metal theater. They close with Living After Midnight and as Halford and the lads give their final waves to the crowd, it’s clear that Iron Maiden have their work cut out for them. But it’s also a reminder: Judas Priest are the godfathers of this entire scene. Their DNA runs through every band that’s taken the stage this weekend. Fifty years in, they still set the bar, still break the rules and still know how to deliver the goods.

Judas Priest Aftershock 2024 setlist

1. Panic Attack
2. You've Got Another Thing Comin'
3. Rapid Fire
4. Breaking the Law
5. Riding on the Wind
6. Devil's Child
7. Sinner
8. Turbo Lover
9. Invincible Shield
10. Hell Bent for Leather
11. Painkiller
12. Electric Eye
13. Living After Midnight

"We've got a smorgasbord of Swedish metal for you right here," beams Björn 'Speed' Strid, Soilwork's imposing but ever-affable frontman. He's not kidding; tonight, his band are opening up an absolute dream bill of all things melodeath at Hammersmith's iconic Apollo, and the singer looks genuinely floored to be overseeing such a historic (and, it should be said, pretty rammed) auditorium. Soilwork never quite made the same breakthroughs as tonight's two co-headliners, but they've maintained a remarkably consistent hit rate across their near-thirty year career, steadily evolving from grooving, hooky death metal towards the hyper-polished melodeath with which they made their name. The six-piece will never win any awards for dynamism on stage - Speed's casual swagger bearing the mark of a man who looks more like he's soundchecking rather than playing one of his band's biggest ever UK shows - but when you're armed with choruses as big as Distortion Sleep and Stålfågel, who cares?

In Flames know this venue all too well having first played here all the way back in 2004, but that doesn't stop this feeling like a special occasion for band and fans alike. An outrageous opening one-two of Cloud Connected and Take This Life sets the tone for a joyous, career-spanning set that underlines exactly why they remain death metal's biggest success story. The likes of Trigger and Only For The Weak still sound absolutely colossal decades on, while some welcome deeper cuts in the form of Food For The Gods and Coerced Existence serve as a reminder of just how vital and powerful this band were in their metal pomp. 

In Flames were never ones to stand still, though, and there can be little doubting that as divisive as their 2010s material has been for old school fans, songs like Deliver Us and I Am Above are tailor-made for environments like these, the latter eliciting one of the biggest singalongs of the whole night. That State Of Slow Decay, taken from last year's excellent Forgone album, sparks a particularly enthusiastic pit also highlights how In Flames have lost none of their ability to produce urgent, heavy music that can (quite literally!) still move people. "I fucking love you guys," smiles the always humble Anders Fridén, and you can believe it; this set feels like a true celebration of heavy metal greatness for one of our scene's most important and enduring bands.

It leaves a high bar for Arch Enemy to try and clear, but their imperious brand of battering melodeath has always held a different flavour to the anthemic, introspective stylings of their Gothenburg chums. Not that Arch Enemy aren't packing bangers: Deceiver, Deceiver, The World Is Yours and House Of Mirrors cram more hooks into the opening fifteen minutes than many bands manage in a career, Alissa White-Gluz striding around the stage with the kind of chest-beating confidence that befits their status as closers for the evening. That opening triad sets the tone for a setlist that displays plenty of confidence in Arch Enemy's ongoing third arc, with only two tracks from the Angela Gossow era aired tonight.

Leaving fan favourites like We Will Rise and Ravenous on the shelf is a bold choice given the generational feel to tonight's bill, but they pull it off: War Eternal and As The Pages Burn (complete with billowing smoke cannons) are classics in themselves at this point, while the songs from 2022's Deceivers underline how in-form Arch Enemy are as a creative unit. Most promisingly, the two brand new songs played, Dream Stealer and Liars & Thieves, are iron-clad ragers, pointing to great things for the band's upcoming new album. 

As a pulsating Nemesis brings the curtain down with a floor-wide circle pit and giant balloons bouncing around the crowd (hey, it's rock 'n' roll!), two things are immediately clear. Firstly: these bands and this movement remain utterly foundational to the DNA of modern metal. Secondly: they are far from done with us.

Few real-life metal bands have inspired a multi-million dollar Hollywood movie, but Judas Priest are one of them. 2001’s Rock Star was based on the true story of Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens, who swapped a Priest covers for band for the real thing after the departure of Rob Halford. In 2002 – only for the movie to receive a critical and commercial mauling. But did it deserve the hate? In 2007, Ripper plus cast  members Zakk Wyle and Jeff Pilson took Classic Rock inside the making of a big screen misfire.

What’s the difference between typing 58 books backwards, eating a 12-inch pizza in 19.91 seconds and making a credible dramatic rock’n’roll movie? The answer is the first two have actually been done. There have been some classic rock comedies and documentaries, but an authentic, powerful drama remains elusive, even when it’s based on true events. 

In August 1997 film producer Robert Lawrence read Andrew C Revkin’s New York Times article about Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens. Owens, from Akron, Ohio, was the singer in British Steel, a Judas Priest covers band. When two friends of Priest drummer Scott Travis saw Owens performing, they were so impressed that they contacted Travis. With Priest singer Rob Halford having left several years earlier to pursue a solo career, Priest were looking for a replacement. Owens flew to England, auditioned, and almost overnight found himself going from being the singer in a Judas Priest tribute band to fronting the very group he idolised and one of the most iconic bands in the history of heavy metal. 

It’s the stuff that dreams, and Hollywood films, are made of. And so it was that the movie Rock Star was born. 

The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Chris ‘Izzy’ Cole, singer with Blood Pollution, a tribute band for his heavy metal heroes Steel Dragon. When Dragon’s singer Bobby Beers (Jason Flemyng) quits, Cole auditions and becomes Steel Dragon’s singer. But he comes to realise that having your dreams come true isn’t everything. 

Rock Star, which also stars Jennifer Aniston, Dominic West, Timothy Olyphant,  Timothy Spall and Ozzy Osbourne/Black Label Society guitarist Zakk Wylde, who plyas Ghode, the guitarist with Steel Dragon, the group loosely based on Judas Priest, prompts a variety of opinions from those involved.

“It had kind of the cheese factor a little too much,” is Owens’s verdict of the film he inspired. “I think it would have been better if it was a little bit more on the serious side instead of the Spinal Tap side. Still, pretty funny movie,” he adds. 

Jeff Pilson is a little more generous. Pilson, whose resume as a bassist includes stints with Dokken, Dio and MSG, and who is now with Foreigner, plays Steel Dragon’s bass player Jorgen. “I was more entertained than I thought I was going to be,” he says. “Is it exactly like the 80s? No. They did it in a nice way where it’s a little bit of a parody, a little bit of a tribute. They took some liberties with it, but all in all I think they did a great job.”

Making up Steel Dragon’s line-up on drums is Pilson’s Foreigner bandmate Jason Bonham. The long list of musicians appearing in the film also includes Third Eye Blind singer Stephan Jenkins, Slaughter drummer Blas Elias, The Verve Pipe’s Brian Vander Ark, Black Label Society guitarist Nick Catanese, and Myles Kennedy, singer with Alter Bridge. That Rock Star features so many legitimate, recognised musicians certainly lends it a degree of credibility. It also helped director Stephen Herek, who was able to pick their brains. 

“He was always tremendously open and came to us all the time,” Pilson says of Herek. “They asked for suggestions; they asked how things would go down. I was so impressed how Stephen listened to what we had to say.” However, Pilson says the scene in which Wahlberg’s character Izzy wakes up in a hotel bedroom strewn with naked bodies was overdone. “The orgy scene was definitely an exaggeration,” he laughs. “But, hey, it’s Hollywood, you gotta make it entertaining. Any chance to parade around topless, you got to do it.”

Striking a successful balance between realism and entertainment has been notoriously difficult with rock movies. When the film centres on an 80s metal band, the dangers are even more apparent. 

“I think it’s very hard because there’s such a tendency to do Spinal Tap,” concedes Rock Star’s screenwriter John Stockwell. “Yes, it’s a parody, but there were some aspects that were very honest and real. So there’s this fine line where movies can seem like they’re being kind of satirical, but to me they’re kind of comical, and I think that’s the danger of rock’n’roll movies.”

Stockwell was well aware of the spectre of Spinal Tap when he was hired by Warner Bros to write the script: “I loved Spinal Tap, but I was hoping there was a way to find a grittier, raw version of the real world.” 

To get a first-hand taste of the debauched and crazed world he was writing about, Stockwell went on the road with Pantera. “It was the longest three days of my life,” he quips. “It took me three months to recover.” It was more this kind of experience Stockwell was striving for, “more a version of what it was like to be around the guys from Pantera. I didn’t want it to be goofy, and that’s what rock movies can be often be.” When asked how he views Rock Star now, he concedes: “Kind of goofy.” 

Jayne Andrews, a representative from Judas Priest’s management company, was rather more critical: “It was a rubbish film. I found it insulting.” 

During Rock Star’s embryonic development, the producers approached Judas Priest. “They actually asked us to write music for it,” recalled Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton. “We saw some of the roughs for it and we decided to avoid it like the plague.” 

In a nod to the film’s origins, it was provisionally titled Metal God after the Priest track Metal Gods, but when it was clear the group would have no artistic input Priest pulled out of the project.” We’d be giving them permission and wouldn’t have any control,” Andrews explains.

In the end, the group’s fears were realised. “It’s a terrible case of Hollywood taking a very good idea and really just blowing it with nonsense,” Tipton bemoans. Rob Halford was equally disappointed: “I think it would have been  a great opportunity to make something a bit more realistic. But that’s Hollywood isn’t it? Clueless.” 

Despite the threat of legal action if Judas Priest were referenced in the film, there’s a scene involving what director Stephen Herek describes as a “tribute to Judas Priest”. When a star-struck Izzy attends the Steel Dragon audition at the home of the group’s guitarist Kirk Cuddy (Dominic West), he admires a mannequin clothed in a metal-studded waistcoat and leather hat. “That was a little bit of an homage to the Judas Priest costumes,” Herek reveals on the DVD of the movie. One obvious parallel between Priest and Steel Dragon is that both bands have a gay singer, although Beers’s revelation comes only when he quits the band, unlike the situation with Priest. “We knew from day one Rob was gay,” says Andrews. 

While the musicians who inspired the film wanted nothing to do with it, there were others who were only too happy to take part. Zakk Wylde recounts being approached by the filmmakers: “They said: ‘Zakk, do you want to be in a movie?’ I’m like: ‘What is it you want me to do?’ They were like: ‘Well, basically you can drink beer all day, lift weights, play guitar, do some shotguns.’ I’m like: ‘You’re going to pay me for this?’ I said: ‘Can you include the gay brothel? Because then I’m definitely in – no pun intended.’” 

Several weeks before the cameras began to roll, Wylde, Jeff Pilson and Jason Bonham entered a studio to work over a selection of songs written by various artists including Sammy Hagar, Desmond Child and Twiggy Ramirez, one-time bassist for Marilyn Manson and now with Nine Inch Nails. “Our job was to arrange the stuff that was there to be like one band,” Pilson explains, “because it was coming from numerous different writers and their demos were all scattered.” 

With multiple scenes showing the band performing, including one concert filmed in front of 11,000 paying extras, it was essential to create a sense of unity. “They wanted the band to feel as much like a real band as possible,” says Pilson. “They wanted us to go in and record songs like a band does and rehearse songs like a band does and write songs like a band does.” 

And, just like bands do, they had some prickly moments. “Zakk and Jason at first really didn’t get along,” Herek reveals. “Jeff was really helpful at keeping a certain peace between the two.” But this is Hollywood, so inevitably there’s a happy ending. “They eventually became good friends.”

The three did write some songs together, although in the end they weren’t included in either the film or on the soundtrack which, along with the tracks performed by Steel Dragon, features some classic 80s rock including Bon Jovi’s Livin’ On A Prayer, Mötley Crüe’s Wild Side and Lick It Up from Kiss. 

Despite emerging in the early 90s as the singer with Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch, Mark Wahlberg’s voice wasn’t deemed to be up to the task of belting out paint-peeling rock, and the majority of Steel Dragon’s vocals are by Steelheart’s Mike Matijevic and former Yngwie Malmsteen and Journey vocalist Jeff Scott Soto. 

For rock’n’roll musicians whose lifestyle and hours tend to be, well, irregular, adjusting to the more disciplined regimen of film acting was something of a shock. “It’s almost like taking a rugby player and taking a figure skater,” explains Wylde. “They’re both athletes, but a rugby player can’t do what a figure skater does; and if you take a figure skater and put them out on a pitch with a bunch of rugby motherfuckers…” No prizes for guessing who are the rugby players in that analogy. 

Once Wylde and Pilson adjusted to starting work at 5.30am instead of going to bed at that time, both enjoyed the experience. “We all had a great time,” says Pilson. The cast got along great. “All sweethearts,” adds Wylde. 

The only slight problem Wylde had was with his hair. “They were like: ‘Zakk, would you mind layering your hair for the movie?’ ‘I’d be like: ‘Excuse me? Let me explain something to you. When this fuckin’ movie’s done, reality sets back in, baby. I’ve gone through the gay, poofy hair [phase], and if you think I’m going back there again you are out of your fuckin’ mind.’ I said: ‘You’re making wigs for everybody else on this fuckin’ set, make me a fuckin’ gay, poofy layered hair thing. Coz when I’m finished with this thing, I’ve got to get back out on the road.  I already look gay enough when I get up on stage. I said: ‘Fuck you.’ 

“They were like: ‘Well, you don’t have to get so offended.’ I go: ‘Yeah I do, because this is what I do for a living; I’m not a fuckin’ movie star.’”

Wylde isn’t the only one who had coiffure concerns. “I think Mark Wahlberg’s a genius,” says Stockwell. “But the hair was always an issue for me,” he says of Wahlberg’s long locks. “I wish he had had the shaved head like Rob Halford, because the extensions and that hair were always a little cartoonish.” 

Wahlberg didn’t have so much of a problem, and in fact found it helped. “The hair is almost like a licence to do what you want,” he says. 

Universally praised for his performance, Wahlberg was in fact the second choice for the part of Izzy, with Brad Pitt initially being linked with the role. So what did Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens, who Wahlberg was playing the part of, think of Wahlberg’s portrayal?  “I think he did a good job.” 

The two of them never actually met, although had they done so Owens thinks Wahlberg “would have changed things a little,” adding: “I think we’re more similar than further apart.” One area in which the two aren’t similar, however, was physiologically. “I definitely don’t have abs like him,” Owens laughs. 

Another key element in capturing the look of the times was the figure-hugging trousers. But for many of the actors, discomfort was a high price to pay for the authenticity. “All the guys were having a hard time with the tight pants,” says Herek. “They would rip.” Wahlberg, for one, was certainly glad when he no longer had to struggle with his sartorial sensibilities and his trousers. “I just hope tight pants don’t come back.”

One of the criticisms levelled at the film is that it offers a sanitised version of the realm it is depicting. Even so, it received an R (Restricted) rating in America, preventing anyone under 17 attending without being accompanied by an adult. 

“It’s pretty hard to not be a hard R if you’re accurately portraying the antics and the backstage world of heavy metal,” says Stockwell. “I would have understood it if they were going for a PG 13, but it got an R, though it was a very soft R.” 

An indication of the film’s wholesome approach was clear during filming. Renowned photographer (and Classic Rock contributor) Neil Zlozower played a photographer shooting Steel Dragon. The scene is one of many filmed at the legendary Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, famous for being where Robert F Kennedy was assassination in 1968. When the effusive Zlozower arrived on set, having not been bothered to read the script (“I’ve got better things to do with my time” ), he offered them a choice: “I asked them if they wanted the good, X-rated version of Zloz or the tamed-down version, and they wanted the tamed-down version.” 

The unfortunate timing of the release of Rock Star had little to do with the competition it faced from other films. The film premiered on September 7, 2001. Playing on 2,525 screens nationwide on its opening weekend, it was No.4 at the box office and made $6m. Then two aeroplanes crashed into New York’s Twin Towers and altered the future of the US – and of Rock Star and a lot more. 

“The movie just stopped. Everything just stopped,” Owens remembers. “I didn’t do any more promotion on it after 9/11.” 

“By Tuesday nobody’s even leaving their house. LA, America, was a ghost town,” says Zlozower. 

Even though writer John Stockwell had a vested interest in the film’s fortunes, he was able to maintain a sense of perspective. “However sorry any of us were feeling about its performance was suddenly unimportant on September 11.” 

In the end the film went on to make a little under $17m, less than half its $38m price tag.

Although both a critical and financial failure, Rock Star offers an affectionate and nostalgic look at a notoriously hedonistic and extravagant period in rock history, and has gone on to acquire a place in the hearts of many, not to mention having frequent airings on cable TV. 

“I talk to a lot of people that tell me Rock Star’s their favourite movie,” says Zlozower. 

For Pilson the outcome was a pleasant surprise. “My first reaction when I saw it was: ‘Wow, this is actually better than I thought it was going to be.’ You always assume music movies are going to be cheesy, and it wasn’t as bad as most.” 

Stockwell, too, despite some reservations, admits to being “completely proud of it”. Even Zakk Wylde, who walked out of the premiere after announcing: “This is gay. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” was more forgiving when he finally watched the film on a flight: “Actually, I think Stephen and the guys did a great job.’

And what of Tim ‘Ripper” Owens, who, despite having his life depicted on screen, received no acknowledgement or money? “Not a dime.” But he harbours no bitterness or regrets. “I’m still honoured. And hopefully one day they’ll make a movie about them making a movie about me,” he laughs. 

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 111, September 2007

As Judas Priest gets ready to kick off the North American leg of their Invincible Shield tour, Rob Halford says he's been left speechless by the worship the Metal Gods have been greeted with this year. 

"The European leg we did, they were going nuts in Europe for Priest, for Invincible Shield," Halford tells Classic Rock from his home in Arizona. "It's worldwide, isn't it, this renaissance of heavy metal, culturally – to the point where Gojira are at the Olympic Games. Everybody's exploring everything metal. There's this great vibe out there that everybody wants to check out all these different bands."

And, Halford continues, that includes looking into what he calls "the source." 

"They want to check out Priest," he says. "They want to check out Saxon. They want to check out Maiden. They want to check out these guys that are part of the first wave of metal. I'll tell you, when you walk out on stage in Athens and it's about 110 degrees at 10 o'clock at night and the place is packed and people are losing their minds for all of the songs that we're playing. And a lot of them are in their 20s; some of them are barely into their teens, and they're rammed up against the rail at the front going crazy. It just makes this old metal heart beat faster."

Taking a step back to consider why that is, Halford says metal is simply a great escape from troubled times in the world right now. 

"It's an antidote to a lot of the divisiveness and angriness that people are subjected to, particularly in the political spectrum. You're constantly bombarded with stuff. It's inescapable, particularly as we go through this election cycle. I think that metal now, and has always, served as a catalyst for people to go somewhere and scream their heads off and let go of all this stuff that's been building up during the day or the weeks before you see your favourite metal band. 

"More than ever I think that metal, maybe all music, serves a purpose to give people the opportunity to let loose. That's the very important role that music has played, starting from the 60s in the cultural revolution that happened there, wrapped around the Vietnam War, and that seems to have persisted. And in this moment in 2024, when you see all the horrible, terrible things that are happening in certain parts of the world, God, you need to grab hold of some metal and embrace it and take it and let it do good things to your mind, body and spirit."

Halford and company will be doing that for North America starting Friday. Sept. 13, in Montreal, with dates running through Oct. 26 in Irving, Texas. The quintet hits Japan for a four-date run during December, with additional tour dates expected during 2025. Full dates below.

The latest run coincides with the digital release of a 50th anniversary edition of Priest's debut album, remastered by Tom Allom, who Halford says "did a wonderful job. It still works; in 2024 I'm still getting the same vibes with those songs from all those years ago as I am when I go and play a track from Invincible Shield. It's the same band. It's the same textures. It's the same identity. It's the roots of who Judas Priest is."

The new edition does not include any unreleased material, however, which Halford said the band "had debates about. I think there was a slightly different arrangement of the title track. I think we also had a live version of the title track from somewhere. But we it's that thing where if it's not broke, don't fix it. Rocka Rolla represents perfectly just as it is."

Rocka Rolla is out on Friday, with physical copies due on November 22.

Judas Priest: Invincible Shield tour 2024 

Sep 13: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 14: Niagara Falls Fallsview Casino Resort, ON
Sep 17: Sterling Heights Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill, MI
Sep 19: Milwaukee Miller High Life Theatre, WI
Sep 21: Cedar Rapids Alliant Energy PowerHouse, IA
Sep 22: Sioux Falls Denny Sanford Premier Center, SD
Sep 24: Rochester Mayo Civic Center Arena, MN
Sep 25: Omaha Baxter Arena, NE
Sep 27: Rockford BMO Center, IL
Sep 29: Louisville Louder Than Life Festival, KY^
Oct 01: Independence, MO: Cable Dahmer Arena
Oct 03: Billings First Interstate Arena at MetraPark, MT
Oct 05: Idaho Falls Mountain America Center, ID
Oct 06: Spokane Spokane Arena, WA
Oct 09: Everett Angel of the Winds Arena, WA
Oct 10: Portland Alaska Airlines’ Theater of the Clouds, OR
Oct 12: Sacramento After Shock Festival, CA^
Oct 13: Reno Grand Sierra Resort and Casino, NV
Oct 15: Los Angeles YouTube Theater, CA
Oct 16: Las Vegas Bakkt Theater at Planet Hollywood, NV
Oct 18: Phoenix Arizona Financial Theatre, AZ
Oct 20: Loveland Blue Arena, CO
Oct 22: Houston Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land, TX
Oct 24: Austin Germania Insurance Amphitheater, TX
Oct 26: Irving The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory, TX

Dec 05: Nagoya Aichi Prefectural Art Theater Large Hall, Japan
Dec 06: Amagasaki Amashin Archaic Hall, Japan
Dec 09: Okayama Performing Arts Theatre, Japan
Dec 12: Yokohama Pia Arena, Japan

^Festival Date
Tickets are on sale now. 

Megadeth drummer Dirk Verbeuren has taken aim at a fashion brand for apparently "stealing" artwork from Soilwork's 2005 album Stabbing the Drama.

The garment, which is pictured in Verbeuren's Instagram post below, is an astonishingly expensive hoodie manufactured by Vetements. It features some familiar-looking heavy metal imagery, including the cover art from Stabbing the Drama – on which Verbeuren played drums.

Verbeuren, who left Soilwork and joined Megadeth in 2016, says: "Metalheads, I'd love to hear your opinion about this Vetements garment including Soilwork's Stabbing the Drama cover art, created by Mircea Gabriel Eftemie, as well as a bunch of other (sometimes slightly modified) band logos and art.

"Price tag: $1600. Most of you have probably noticed this fashion trend of recycling/stealing metal imagery. So...designer fashion or total rip-off? What do you think?

"To my knowledge, none of this art was licensed. Super Bad?!"

The "other" logos and art he mentions seem to include Ensiferum's logo and Eyehategod's Southern Discomfort album.

Verbeurne's post attracted a lot of comments, notably from Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe who agreed that the fashion brand had overstepped.

Blythe says: "Isn’t this always the way with 'fashion' though? Bunch of whack-ass motherfuckers who wanna briefly play tourist in whatever subculture happens to aesthetically 'hot' at the moment, a subculture they are too terrified to actually experience in real life.

"I’d like to drop one of these motherfuckers into the middle of the pit at a Lamb of God show wearing their $1600 costume and watch them shit their overpriced pre-distressed designer pants.

"It’s happened with punk, it’s happened with hip-hop, it happens with any underground scene that develops a distinct aesthetic. Such is the way of 'fashion'.

"Sorry they ripped you and Eyehategod off though. Two of my friends on one shitty over-priced hoodie."

Trivium’s Matt Heafy has looked back on being bullied by his heavy metal heroes.

The hazing, which came from both veteran bands and fans, was during the metal star’s rapid ascent in the mid-2000s. Heafy gave quotes to magazines deeming Trivium the next Metallica, and following lauded performances at the 2005 and 2006 Download festivals they supported Iron Maiden on a European arena tour.

“I used to get bullied by some of the bands that I grew up with their posters on my walls,” Heafy says of the fallout at the time in a new interview with Nik Nocturnal (per Ultimate Guitar).

“I remember there was a show I had once, my voice squeaked. I had to walk through their dressing room to go to our dressing room. They’re all making that squeak at my face, pointing at me, cracking up. I’m like 18, 19 years old. Like I said, growing up, loving this band. I won’t quote them. I won’t say which band it was.”

He remembers another instance of bullying: “I remember reading a live review once of one of my other favourite bands. I used to buy their VHS’s off eBay. Their singer, in a live review, was saying something like, ‘I don't want to see a Trivium shirt in my show. Someone get him my band shirt.’ That was in the live review, which was crazy.”

Heafy also reflected on the hostile responses from crowds at the time, pointing to one audience in San Francisco during a tour with Amon Amarth and Children Of Bodom. “One of the first times we played San Francisco [was] at Slim’s. Our entire set, the crowd was booing us and spitting on us, the entire set.”

He highlights another difficult package that played through Canada. “Dillinger Escape Plan, The End, Read Yellow, Trivium – [we were] first of four. I don’t remember if it was Toronto, but when we were on, there was like a square dance floor. The entire crowd stayed away from that, standing on the edge of the bar, all with their backs turned with their arms crossed the entire set.”

In 2004, Trivium signed to major metal label Roadrunner. Their subsequent album, 2005’s Ascendancy, was a breakout hit, especially in the UK after Download 2005. Followup The Crusade traded the band’s metalcore style for a more traditional thrash sound and received mixed reviews, but boosted Trivium’s success in mainland Europe.

Trivium are embarking on a world tour in 2025 to celebrate 20 years of Ascendancy. They’ll be joined by co-headliners Bullet For My Valentine, celebrating 20 years of their debut The Poison. Both albums will be played in full. See dates and get tickets via the Trivium website.

Trivium will headline Bloodstock Open Air in Derbyshire, UK, in August. Also headlining the event will be Machine Head and Gojira.

"Africa is the future of metal." These are the words of Rock Ahavi, the singer, founder and chief songwriter with Arka’n Asrafokor, the electrifying metal band putting their home country of Togo on the map. Cocky? Maybe. But also a barometer for which way the wind is blowing. While all eyes have traditionally focused on Europe and America, Africa has become a hotbed of boundary-pushing bands and artists, from Kenya’s Lord Spikeheart, Morocco’s Taqbir and Zambia-born, Canada-based Backxwash to Botswana’s vibrant DIY scene, with its striking heavy metal cowboys.

Arka’n Asrafokor are in the vanguard of this New African Metal movement. Their second album, Dzikkuh, slams together groove, thrash and rap-metal with Togolese folk music. Their supercharged-tribal beats and chants give each song its own vibrant rhythm and thrilling, unique voice. “All the bands in Africa have something to say, and have their own power and message,” Rock says. “We’re just one part of the battle.”

He’s speaking to Hammer via Zoom from his home in Togo’s capital city, Lomé. He’s joined by his younger brother, Arka’n keyboardist/co-vocalist Elom ‘Enrico’ Ahavi, and their manager, Bea M-A. Rock jokes frequently but speaks with the deliberation of someone who doesn’t want his message to be misconstrued. English isn’t his first language, or even second – French is Togo’s ‘official’ language while the Ewe language is his own mother tongue. The Ewe people are Togo’s most populous ethnic group, and Rock and Enrico were raised in the culture’s traditions. “I don’t think I was even a day old when I heard my first [traditional Ewe] song!” says Rock. “It’s been with me my whole life.”

Rock’s passion for music is clear, his face lighting up even as he describes gruelling 24-hour bus trips to play gigs. The brothers grew up in a musical household, their parents playing everything from Dolly Parton to traditional Togolese folk.

“Our father would play classical music every morning at 5am!” Enrico says. “But music is everywhere in Togo. It’s rare to go somewhere you won’t hear a radio playing, people singing or drumming. It can be puzzling, going to Europe where places can be really calm and have no sound at all.”

Rock’s first instrument was keyboard, which he learned from his dad. As a child, he disliked playing the guitar – “I remember the pain I felt when I tried to play a chord” – but he had a lightbulb moment when he heard his first proper riff. “I was nine years old, washing up in the kitchen,” he recalls. “Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love came on the radio. I was just like, ‘Yes, this is my music! It did something to me physically.”

Metal wasn’t particularly popular in Togo, where the music scene was more dominated by pop, reggae and rap acts. Still, Rock got an education at the local market, listening to tapes of bands such as AC/DC and the Scorpions. When he moved to Lomé for university he graduated to nu metal and heavier music, eventually forming the first line-up of Arka’n Asrafokor in 2012. Then simply called Arka’n (a Ewe word to describe “things you see and feel outside your regular senses”, as Rock puts it), early shows would see them cover Enter Sandman and Killing In The Name, occasionally even a bit of Bob Marley.

“It was the best way to get my musician friends into rock and metal,” Rock admits. “Rock music fans were happy to listen to classic songs they knew and I was just happy to share their excitement and energy.”

At the same time, Enrico formed rap metal group H Weapons with their other brother, Tony. The latter even recruited Rock to play guitars on some of their songs. “It took years to do anything,” Enrico admits. “We didn’t have access to studios – our studio was in our bedroom, recording under the covers with the mattress pressed against a wall and the microphone secured underneath.”

The two bands fused in 2015 after the original line-up of Arka’n disbanded. Renaming themselves Arka’n Asrafokor – ‘Asrafo’ is Ewe for ‘warrior’, while ‘kor’ can mean ‘fist’ – Rock and Enrico expanded upon some of the traditional Ewe elements that had been part of their early sound, recruiting Yao Justin ‘Mass’ Aholou, a percussionist with a background in traditional Ewe folk music.

“After this part of Africa was colonised, the West decided to separate the region into all these countries like Togo, Ghana and Benin,” Rock explains. “They created artificial borders. The Ewe people can be found in all these places and what they have in common isn’t just music or culture, but a language. That’s why in almost all of Arka’n’s songs, we sing in the Ewe language.”

Ewe culture also manifests in the band’s lyrics and images. Songs like Angry God Of Earth and Walk With Us are centred around environmental concerns, spiritualism and triumphing over those who would hold us down. “It’s music for the battle!” Rock says with a grin. “It’s intense music, an expression of what you are and what you feel.”

With bassist Koffi Ametefe ‘Francis’ Amevo and drummer Komla Siko ‘Richard’ Tamakloe-Azamesu rounding out the line-up, Arka’n Asrafokor released their debut album, Zã Keli, in 2019 and celebrated with a huge release party in Lomé. “The venue was so full and we were on fire,” Rock recalls. “It felt like the audience were going to start a revolution.” 

Arka’n Asrafokor’s new album, Dzikkuh, is more fired up and pissed off than its predecessor. While the skittering drum beats are still exciting, the guitars take on a much heavier and more aggressive tone while the music feels altogether tighter and more claustrophobic.

“The first album was almost a collection of all the things we were into,” Rock explains. “This one is a lot more defiant and about us being ourselves. There’s a lot more anger – ‘Dzikkuh’ means ‘anger’, but as in bringing back the people’s anger and rallying them around causes.”

“Our goal is to make people understand life,” Enrico adds. “Life isn’t only physical but spiritual, and people have to come to terms with that. What you do to others will come back to you. What you do to Mother Earth will come back to you. We want people to see the world not with their eyes, but with their hearts.”

While Arka’n Asrafokor are currently the only metal band in Togo, they remain optimistic about the wider scene. Frequently playing packed-out gigs at home in Lomé, they’ve also ventured outside of their homeland. In 2019, they travelled to Ghana to play the Africa Conference for Collaborations, Exchange and Showcases (ACCES) music event organised by non-profit initiative Music In Africa.

“We were last on and people had started leaving the venue because they’d seen the other bands,” Rock recalls. “Arka’n started and people ran back into the venue, packing it out. They came up to us afterwards like, ‘What was that?’ Because they’d never heard anything like it before. You’d see people headbanging next to others doing traditional African dances.”

It’s not just crowds in Africa responding that way. In the summer of 2022, the band played their first shows in Europe, touring in France. At one gig, Rock recalls, the crowd refused to leave at the end of their set. “The audience demanded an encore,” he says. “We came back on and played our last song again, and people left singing it without even needing to understand the lyrics. It was beautiful.”

A week before Arka’n started that French tour, Rock also achieved a lifelong goal when he saw Korn at Hellfest, more than 3,000 miles from home. He recalls the sheer elation as Jonathan Davis and co took to the stage. “It was my dream,” he says, beaming at the memory. “I’d listened to this music since I was a child, so finally getting to see those bands felt incredible. It was intense - I felt such a strong connection - it gave me more power because I want to be like them.”

As global metal continues to thrive, Arka’n hope it shines a light on more of the African metal scene. It’s a message they’ve been helping spread themselves. When US author Edward Banchs travelled to Togo to research his book, Scream For Me, Africa!, the band arranged for Ghanian group Dark Suburb to come to Lomé for a showcase. They’ve also taken part in an online festival organised by Botswana’s Overthrust, and have connections to other bands including Skinflint (also of Botswana) and even Brazil’s Black Pantera, putting the global metal idea into action. But Arka’n aren’t interested in positioning themselves as figureheads for African metal.

“We’d like to think if you’re listening to Arka’n in Germany, Massachusetts, Osaka or Buenos Aires, you’ll still think, ‘I can relate to this’,” Enrico says. “West Africa is really making itself heard right now. There are 1.6 billion people living on this continent. Arka’n is just one of those voices.”

DZIKKUH IS OUT NOW VIA REIGNING PHOENIX

Hammerfall singer Joacim Cans has distanced the band from the ‘power metal’ tag in a new interview.

Cans, 54, says in an exclusive conversation with Metal Hammer that ‘power metal’ is simply “the American way of naming traditional heavy metal, especially if it’s not made in the 80s”.

“We are as traditional as can be,” he continues.

“I think heavy metal is enough, because within the boundaries of heavy metal, you can do so many things.”

In the same interview, Cans reflects on his higher education in Hollywood. The singer, born and raised in Sweden, moved to the US for a year to study music when he was 23.

When asked why he only stayed in the States for a year, Cans answers, “Because I hated it!”

He elaborates: “I felt that I was useless, not in school but outside of it.

“You went to [legendary Los Angeles bar] The Rainbow and met so many ‘talented’ musicians with so much going on: ‘We’re going on this tour and have this connection with this label. What do you have going on?’ ‘Nothing!’ I didn’t have the cool style with the big hair.

“Later I realised that, most people I met, they had the image down – now they only needed to learn how to play their instrument!”

Hammerfall were formed in 1993 as a New Wave Of British Heavy Metal throwback side-project for death metal musicians Oscar Dronjak (ex-Ceremonial Oath) and Jesper Strömblad (ex-Ceremonial Oath/In Flames). The band became a more full-time venture after Strömblad left to focus on In Flames and Cans joined in 1996.

Hammerfall will release their 13th studio album, Avenge The Fallen, on August 9 via Nuclear Blast.

The album features Armored Saint and former Anthrax singer John Bush on backing vocals.

Read the full interview with Cans in the new issue of Metal Hammer, which also features a celebration of 40 years of Metallica’s Ride The Lightning. Order your copy now and get it delivered to your door.

Hailey Welch, a.k.a. the Hawk Tuah Girl, one of the unlikeliest of all unlikely breakout viral stars, is now the subject of a heavy metal tribute song.

For anyone who's been lucky enough to have spent the last month visiting another galaxy, Welch shot to international fame after being interviewed in the street in early June by the Tim & Dee TV YouTube channel. Asked to pick a bedroom manoeuvre that might drive a man wild, she responded, "Oh, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang, you get me?” 

Those 16 words would change Welch's life. Five weeks later she's been able to quit her job in a spring factory, sold more than $65,000 worth of merchandise, appeared live onstage in front of 70,000 Zach Bryan fans at the Nissan Stadium in Nashville, DJed with basketball legend Shaquille O'Neill, been reportedly paid $30,000 for a pair of public appearances at venues on Long Island, and attracted more than 1.6M followers on Instagram. 

Now she has a heavy metal tribute song, which kicks off with the lines, "Met a girl named Hailey, Shy and quiet at first / But once you get to know her, she’s got that thirst." And it's quite possible that the tune has been recorded using AI, which would make Hawk Tuah the most 2024 thing that will ever happen in 2024, and we're only in July. 

"I want to do something that actually matters and make a difference," Welch told Rolling Stone last week. "That's what the world needs."

Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett has named Judas Priest as the “architects of what we now know as heavy metal”.

The 61-year-old made the comment as part of a Q&A in Munich, Germany, on May 25, where he was joined by bassist Robert Trujillo and longtime Metallica photographer Ross Halfin.

During the Q&A, a photo of Hammett and Metallica singer/co-guitarist James Hetfield watching Priest at the 2023 Indio, California festival Power Trip was projected behind them.

“We were worshipping at the altar of Judas Priest,” Hammett says when he sees the snapshot (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).

“Their music means so much to us. And the way Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing played the guitars – I mean, they are architects of what we now know as heavy metal, to put it bluntly. And James and I, we love Priest.”

Of the experience of getting to see Priest at Power Trip, Hammett continues: “We don’t really get a chance to see bands, a lot of times, when we’re playing a huge festival or something, because we’re always backstage doing press or getting ready for the show or rehearsing or whatever.

“So when we did Power Trip, we got there early – a few days early – just so that we could see all the other bands. And it was great – the anticipation of seeing [headliners Iron] Maiden, Priest, AC/DC [and] Guns ’N’ Roses, and actually seeing them. It was a wonderful time.”

Metallica are currently touring across Europe and will play their next shows at Parken Stadium in Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 14 and 16.

The dates are part of the heavy metal superstars’ ongoing ‘no repeat weekends’ format, where they play two sets at the same venue with totally different setlists.

For the full list of Metallica’s 2024 tour dates and to buy tickets, see below.

Metallica 2024 tour dates:

Jun 14: Copenhagen Parken Stadium, Denmark
Jun 16: Copenhagen Parken Stadium, Denmark
Jun 26: Oslo Tons Of Rock Festival, Norway
Jun 29: Clisson Hellfest, France
Jul 05: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland
Jul 07: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland
Jul 12: Madrid Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano, Spain
Jul 14: Madrid Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano, Spain

Aug 02: Foxborough Gillette Stadium, MA, USA
Aug 04: Foxborough Gillette Stadium, MA, USA
Aug 09: Chicago Soldier Field, IL, USA
Aug 11: Chicago Soldier Field, IL, USA
Aug 16: Minneapolis US Bank Stadium, MN, USA
Aug 18: Minneapolis US Bank Stadium, MN, USA
Aug 23: Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium, Canada
Aug 25: Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium, Canada
Aug 30: Seattle Lumen Field, WA, USA
Sep 01: Seattle Lumen Field, WA, USA
Sep 20: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico
Sep 22: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico
Sep 27: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico
Sep 29: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico

Get tickets.

After emerging from the Orange Country metalcore scene, Avenged Sevenfold rose to become one of the breakout bands of the 2000s. By the time they released their self-titled fourth album, they were ready to take the fight to the haters. Which was a good thing because, as vocalist M Shadows told Metal Hammer in this classic interview from the time, there was only going to be one winner – Avenged Sevenfold themselves. 

It’s May 2004, and M Shadows awakes groggily from a deep sleep. Though he was blissfully unaware until it was diagnosed, a blood vessel had been popping whenever he screamed onstage. To kill or cure this gradually worsening problem, the Avenged Sevenfold frontman has just undergone a new technique of laser surgery. There is no pain, just a dull, throbbing ache at the back of his throat. And, of course, the rather more serious uncertainty of whether or not he will ever be able to perform again.

“My doctor said, ‘Dude, if you keep screaming that way, you won’t be able to sing or even talk within five years’,” he recollects. “So I visited a specialist in Boston who had a technique that was used to remove scars on newborn babies. After the operation I had to stay silent as a mouse for two whole months – and we were due to appear on the Warped tour in three months. I’d heard about [Sound Of Music star] Julie Andrews losing her voice forever after surgery. I admit it, I was scared.”

By that point, Avenged Sevenfold already had two albums to their name; Sounding The Seventh Trumpet and Waking The Fallen – both had been released independently and received enthusiastic reviews in 2001 and 2003 respectively, but seemed to tell us all we needed to know about Shadows, lead guitarist Synyster Gates, guitarist Zacky Vengeance, bassist Johnny Christ and drummer The Reverend.

The resolving of Shadows’ vocal issues opened up all sorts of new and exciting challenges. Once the tissue had recovered, he began seeing vocal coach Ronnie Anderson, whose clients include Axl Rose, Chris Cornell and even Justin Timberlake. Three months and $35,000 of lessons later, all paid for from his own pocket, Shadows and Avenged Sevenfold decided the screaming had to stop.

“We didn’t even to listen to those type of bands any more,” explains the vocalist. “Suddenly everyone was screaming the verses and singing the choruses.” Embracing a raft of seemingly unlikely influences such as Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Queen and Helloween, the result was, City Of Evil, an album that Hammer hailed as “exciting, daft, brilliant and brave” when it emerged in the summer of 2005.

Well, if you considered City Of Evil an exercise in cold-hearted courageousness, its new, self-titled successor is set to shock you like few other releases before it – for better, or worse.

Meeting M Shadows for the first time, the singer appears everything you’d expect him not to be, apart from his choice of attire (jet-black from the tip of his mini-Mohawk to the bottom of his trousers). Introduced by his real first name of Matt, he’s sober, forthright and friendly, almost to the point of being quite charming. But then again, this is the first wave of real press that the band has done for the newly released Avenged Sevenfold. The knives are still being sharpened.

Hammer breaks the ice by suggesting that Avenged are returning to the fray with an extremely provocative piece of work. Not for the first time, Shadows seems to disagree.

“I guess some people might consider it wacky if they’ve not heard from us in two years,” shrugs the singer. “It seemed a little crazy to us when we were writing and recording it, but I’m used to it now. The strangest thing is that many of our friends who never liked our band before think it’s a great record. We wanted it to have melodies that you didn’t have to listen to a hundred times before they sank in. It had to be eclectic, have a pop influence and be memorable right off the bat.”

One thing is for certain: Avenged Sevenfold continues the quantum leap that City Of Evil represented over Sounding The Seventh Trumpet and Waking The Fallen.

“To us, every record we’ve put out has been different,” insists Shadows. “We left the whole hardcore thing behind with Waking The Fallen. Each time there’s been a backlash, but a whole lot more people have praised what we’d done.”

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, it’s all a question of perception. Some of their fans still persist in thinking of Avenged Sevenfold as the band that kick-started the Orange County metalcore scene, the group themselves perceiving themselves as a far grander, broader-based entity. Based on sales alone – with the clout of the Warner Brothers empire behind them, City Of Evil sold the best part of a million copies around the globe – A7X seem to hold the winning hand. It begs the question, do they even think of themselves as a metal band any more?

“With this album, no. Not really. You won’t hear much double-kick [drumming], and we’re not trying to be a heavy band,” admits Shadows. “There are still some metal elements, but maybe we’re more about rock and general craziness than metal now. 

“The truth is that not much metal inspires us today,” he continues. “We still listen to Guns N’ Roses, Metallica and Pantera, but this time we’ve gone even further back to Mr Bungle, The Residents [US weirdos who perform with huge eyeballs on their heads] and Oingo Boingo [the new wave band from the 1980s]. Our attitude was, ‘Hey, let’s write 24 experiments’. We could’ve taken 10 of those songs and made a full-on heavy record like everyone expected, because those songs were there. In the end, we just took the best 10, whatever their styles.”

Among the biggest shocks are A Little Piece Of Heaven, an extravagantly-crooned and deliberately overblown eight-minute paean to necrophilia, and the album’s swansong, Dear God, a sappy country and western-flavoured ballad that’s basically an excuse for an extended pedal-steel guitar solo (if indeed such a thing could ever be excusable).

“Along with Lost, which is also out of the ordinary, those three songs close the record,” agrees Shadows. “We could’ve finished with three slammers, but we felt the ones that we used were much better songs. And we don’t care what people say about that. We’re not here to cater for other people’s wishes – we make the music that comes from our hearts. Being in a band is art, you’ve got to stay true to that.”

Nevertheless, if someone had played Shadows a song as lightweight as Dear God when he was a 15-year-old metalhead, would he have liked it?

“I listened to stuff like that back then, but if I’d heard it on a Pantera record I’d have been confused,” he concedes. “But that’s what I love about our band. We do more than just one thing. Our focus is on being eclectic and making every record a new adventure. That can be a negative to some people, but not to us.”

Orchestral elements had been introduced to the sound on City Of Evil, but this time they went the whole nine yards, bringing in a string quartet to decorate Afterlife and Brompton Cocktail. A7X were thrilled when Marc Mann and Steve Bartek, the guitarist and keyboard player of Oingo Boingo, agreed to get involved.

“Mark and Steve do all of [former Oingo Boingo bandmate-turned-film and TV composer] Danny Elfman’s scores,” says the clearly impressed Shadows – and so he should be; Elfman is internationally renowned for working on soundtracks to movies like Batman Returns, Spider-Man and Edward Scissorhands. “On A Little Piece Of Heaven, we used a 26-piece orchestra and a full choir. It came out huge and completely off the wall.”

If you were wondering, the female voice on A Little Piece Of Heaven belongs to Juliette, one of the band’s friends from California. “She really nailed that sombre, Nightmare Before Christmas-type vibe,” comments Shadows.

The band have even claimed that hip-hop influences abound, though you need to listen out for them. “They’re there in Scream and in the chorus of Almost Easy – just the beats though, of course we’re playing metal over the top,” Shadows elaborates. “You explain these things to kids and they think we’ve gone off the deep end. Maybe we have!”

If all of this sounds self-indulgent, especially given the band’s history, the singer takes such accusations firmly on the chin.

“I suppose that’s true, but to me this album’s way less indulgent than City Of Evil, which had nine and 10 minute songs,” he affirms. “This time we stepped back and swore that we wouldn’t be showing off on our instruments. It was all about making good music and making ourselves happy.”

So the response from fans is irrelevant?

“The feedback to Almost Easy has been incredibly positive,” affirms Shadows, referring to the album’s first single. “But we’ve always been about pissing people off and getting a reaction and we don’t back down. Controversy has always followed us. Even from the start, we decided to have stage names and wear make-up. I just don’t know how to write a typical metal song any more. The whole band knows when we’re crossing the line, but we can’t help ourselves. We have to put our hands in the cookie jar. One thing I don’t understand is when we get flamed for speaking our opinions. If Axl Rose did that when I was younger, it didn’t make me want to burn my Guns N’ Roses records.”

Avenged Sevenfold’s UK fans have good cause to be pissed off with the band, who cancelled a tour in 2005, only to add a string of shows in smaller venues, then pulled the exact same trick the following year to commence work on the album that became Avenged Sevenfold. Cancelling one tour is bad enough, but it sounds worryingly like A7X consider the UK a place that can just be scratched from their itinerary at will.

“That’s definitely not true,” insists Shadows. “We felt really bad about what happened. I don’t remember what went down with that first tour, but we were at each others’ throats for the second one. If we’d have come over for those dates, there might not have been a band any more.”

Things had got that bad?

“Yeah. We’d been out on the road for 16 months. It had got to the point where we just didn’t want to be around each other, around the crew. Anyone. We wanted to be home in our beds.”

Didn’t you feel responsibility towards those that had bought tickets?

“Of course we did. Some kids promised not to buy our records any more, and we expected that and felt bad about it, but at least we knew that if we cut things short we’d continue actually making those records.”

While Shadows was taken aback by the furore the cancellation caused (“When we did the same thing in the States the fans didn’t give two shits – why was there such a stink? Everyone got refunds”), he considers the band’s just-completed club tour a thank you to those who kept the faith. “It cost us $90,000 of our own cash,” he declares proudly, “and we will keep on coming over here, even if we lose money.”

We should probably be used to hearing M Shadows running his mouth off by now. The singer has openly criticised the way his band has been promoted by the record company, and continues to do so, despite A7X remaining on its roster.

“Warner Brothers is the top dog in the States, it’s when things start to trickle down the chain to Germany and Asia or whatever that our vision becomes diluted,” he says, clearly flummoxed. “It seems completely insane that we can have the Number One selling rock song in America, but in some territories can’t even get that same record played, while the ones that are two, three and four all get aired. Dude, that’s because we’re being marketed as a full-on metal band, which we’re not.”

It also seemed churlish to have criticised the MTV awards after Avenged Sevenfold walked off with the gong for Best New Band. If they felt that way, why attend the ceremony at all? Aren’t they supposed to be a rock‘n’roll band?

“Awards don’t mean much to us, though of course we appreciate winning them,” reasons Shadows. “I’d rather play in front of 10,000 kids than win an MTV award – so many of those bands can’t do that. Avenged Sevenfold can. That award is on my mantlepiece, and it was one of the greatest days of my life, especially as we didn’t think we’d win. My point is that is means nothing if you can’t sell CDs, t-shirts and tickets and be an actual band.”

Despite claiming to have girlfriends and regular partners, Avenged Sevenfold have obtained a reputation for raking in all the prerogatives that membership of a rock band can bring. As confirmed by the regular column in Metal Hammer that the band members took turns in writing last year, they’ve notched countless bedposts, cavorted in lap-dancing clubs, consumed vast qualities of alcohol, taken drugs and smashed places up that didn’t make them feel welcome (sample quote from Shadows’ March 2006 entry: “I had been kicked out of seven casinos in two hours, started fights, cursed, drank, insulted people, walked away from the police with my pants round my ankles and ended up with a few less grand in my pocket – hey, it happens”). Such boasting must have had a negative effect upon the band’s standing as serious musicians?

“Only in the UK,” snickers Shadows. “I know that all that stuff can make us look stupid, so while we’re here we have to watch what we say. In the past we’ve been like, ‘Hey dude, we’ve just got off a plane, we’re hammered. Do an interview with us, let’s talk about dicks and balls and fucking girls’. And that’s the type of press we’ve got. So now we’re careful.”

You still do that stuff; you just don’t talk about it any more?

“Naah,” he replies sarcastically. “We’re gonna be good boys from now on.”

As if anyone doubted the popularity that brings such nocturnal privileges, the band proceeded to take London’s 100 Club by storm during their mini-tour, tickets for which sold out almost immediately. Previously occupied by Metallica, the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Rolling Stones, the stage is among the tiniest they’ve appeared on in many years, but Avenged Sevenfold face down the front rows, eyeball to eyeball, unheard new songs Critical Acclaim, Almost Easy and Scream soliciting as many cheers as old favourites Beast And The Harlot, Bat Country and Unholy Confessions.

During the afternoon before the show, Zacky Vengeance is in high spirits. The guitarist is ambivalent to the mixed reaction that Avenged Sevenfold is receiving from the British media. In its review of the album, Hammer’s sister title Classic Rock described the band as “ridiculously arrogant and impressively gormless”. Indeed, during the past year alone they’ve been called everything from moronic, fascist dickheads right up to the best band in the world.

“Which of those descriptions suits us best?” whistles Zacky, mildly amused. “That’s a question I couldn’t even begin to answer.”

Like the rest of Avenged Sevenfold, Vengeance got to hang out with Axl Rose on their last tour. Having been assured of his band’s coolness by Rose meant a lot more to the guitarist than some half-assed critique by a journalist he’s never met, and it sticks in his craw to be told what kind of music he should be making.

“With each album we’re becoming a little more fearless,” he points out. “The scene’s also stagnating. There are five million shitty, disgraceful heavy metal bands. What would be the point of being just another imitator of Iron Maiden or Metallica?

“Another thing that annoys me is people who say Avenged Sevenfold were at their best when Sounding The Seventh Trumpet was out,” he says. “Where were those fans when we couldn’t sell out a single show, let alone 2,000 copies of that CD?”

Safe in the knowledge that they had been left alone to handle City Of Evil in all but name (co-credited with Mudrock of Chimaira/Eighteen Visions fame), Vengeance doesn’t care if the consensus among the reviewers is that he and his partners should not have been allowed to completely self-produce Avenged Sevenfold. Suggestions that they should consider staying away from danger areas such as politics with a song like Critical Acclaim receive equally short shrift.

“That’s an angry track, not necessarily a political one,” he affirms. “Because of the Gulf War there’s a lot of anger in our country right now. Critical Acclaim is us telling the people who don’t make the decisions to just shut up for a minute. Their bitching really isn’t helping. Let’s make the world a more positive place.”

Despite the pockets of negativity surrounding them, Avenged Sevenfold couldn’t be any calmer. Early fan reaction suggests that the band will easily weather the storm of press hostility towards Avenged Sevenfold. For the group’s part, no one is even remotely prepared to admit that this album represents a dangerous gamble, so it’s pointless to ask whether they’ve considered what might happen if it flops. But we do so anyway…

Vengeance: “As a musician there’s nothing more exciting than taking risks. We expect this album to take us to the next level. Nobody wants to lose fans, but you’ve got to be true to your art.”

Shadows: “The only reason I’d be worrying is if we’d re-made City Of Evil, and we haven’t. People can call us sell-outs, whatever they like. Our finger is on the pulse of our fan-base – our real fan-base, not just those that like a hit song – and we know that the kids are desperate to hear this record. I honestly don’t think that will change.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 173

Less than a decade after it had been forged in the white heat of the late 60s, British rock was in trouble. Its original pioneers had either split up, lost touch with reality or were spiralling into drug-addled irrelevance, their thunder stolen by both a wave of platinum-plated American bands and the incendiary punk movement.

It may have been down, but British rock wasn’t quite out. As the 1970s hurtled towards its conclusion, a new wave of heavy bands from all corners of the United Kingdom sparked off a grass-roots revolution, rewriting the rule book on how things could be done and giving their more established counterparts a shot in the arm. Its leading lights would go on to achieve the unthinkable, but even the bands who didn’t and got left behind – the foot soldiers, also-rans and no-hopers – were heroes in their own way.

For a few glorious years in the late 70s and early 80s, these small islands were the epicentre of the most vibrant, exciting and groundbreaking scene around. This is the story of how British rock heavied up and changed the world once again…

The 1960s marked the dawn of the rock era. Pop’s simple attractions had given way to something harder, heavier and more grown up, and the branches of the musical tree began to spread wildly: blues rock, psychedelia, West Coast rock, East Coast rock, country rock, heavy metal. A generation of impressionable would-be musicians were paying avid attention.

Fast Eddie Clarke (ex-Motörhead): Playing music was always the thing for me. I started when I was twelve or thirteen, started to see Eric Clapton and just wanted to do it. Then Hendrix comes along and blew me fucking head off.

Biff Byford (Saxon): I grew up in the 1960s. I listened to all the pop groups – the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks. My mum was a pianist, and my friend was in a blues band. We’d watch him play and I decided to learn the guitar a little bit. That’s when I wanted to get involved in music.

Joe Elliott (Def Leppard): The first artist that I got into was Marc Bolan from T.Rex. Everything he did, the whole catalogue. I wanted to be Marc Bolan. David Bowie when he did Starman on Top Of The Pops – that blew me and everybody away.

Steve Harris (Iron Maiden): I used to listen to The Beatles and The Who and stuff like that. Then I started getting into more rock stuff, and that led to Wishbone Ash and then on to prog. Those early Genesis albums gave me goosebumps.

For many of these aspirant musicians, music offered an escape from the drudgery of real life, if not a direct route to fame and riches.

Rob Halford (Judas Priest): We all came from tough working-class backgrounds. Walsall and West Bromwich were pretty bleak. We could all relate to the need and the want of trying to break out of an unpleasant cycle.

Fast Eddie Clarke: I come from a working-class background. I never thought I’d make money out of music. My dream was to play my guitar and earn enough to eat and live. If I could do that I’d be happy for the rest of my life.

Biff Byford: In Barnsley, your main job choice was going down the pit. Mining was a good living, it wasn’t awful. But I wanted to see the world a bit, meet some girls.

Joe Elliott: The ambition was just to be in a rock band. It’s like: “I don’t want to work in a factory all my life.”

Rob Halford: We never really sat down as a band and said: “What’s the battle plan?” Like any great thing that comes out of Britain, it had some apprenticeship, some dedication behind it.

Fast Eddie Clarke: None of the musicians back then wanted stardom or big fucking wads of money, they just wanted to play their music and make a crust. When I joined Motörhead it was just something to do. We didn’t want to become stars, it was just a chance to play.

Brian Tatler (Diamond Head): When I started Diamond Head in 1976, the dream was just to make records and enjoy it. I had no idea how you got from forming a band with your friends to playing something huge like Wembley Stadium. It seemed impossible.

By the mid-70s, things had started to change. For some bands, the lure of America proved irresistible and they spent their time touring there, hoovering up money and whatever else was available. For others, years of success had bred complacency, arrogance or both.

Fast Eddie Clarke: I went to see Led Zeppelin at Earls Court in 1975. Fuck me, there was a forty‑five minute drum solo, and Jimmy Page was fucking about with his guitar for an hour. You’d sit there and think: “I didn’t fucking come here to see this.”

Ashley Goodall (EMI A&R man):
I don’t think there were that many great rock bands around. A lot of the big guys had run out of steam by ’76 or ’77: Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin a little bit. Queen were sort of carrying on, being quite pop, but they had gone out of favour a bit.

Fast Eddie Clarke: The prog rock lot had gone a bit over the fucking top. The Yes’s and Genesis’s had lost sight of everything. They all had servants and Rolls-Royces. I just thought: “Fuck off you silly c**ts.”

Brian Tatler: I loved Pink Floyd to death, but I couldn’t get tickets to see them, and if you did get tickets then you’d be among ten thousand other people in a great big hall. At least in the pubs or clubs there was some excitement, some sweat.

Andy Dawson (Savage): Things were getting a bit tame, and then punk came along and kicked everybody up the arse.

British punk was born in the underground clubs of London but rapidly spread outwards, lighting up the cities of Britain like a series of detonations. Its plastered-on snarl and nihilistic world view was the antithesis of everything that had gone before. Love it or hate it, punk had to happen.

Brian Tatler: I hated the Bay City Rollers and The Osmonds and all that stuff, so when the Sex Pistols appeared on TV I thought it was great. I could play like Steve Jones, whereas I couldn’t play like Ritchie Blackmore. I was like, “Let’s not hang around – these guys are doing it.”

Jess Cox (Tygers Of Pan Tang): Most of the punk bands were awful, but some were good. We were well into The Clash, the Pistols, stuff like The Tubes. But we all loved Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as well.

Biff Byford: We didn’t really get on with the fashion – the bloody safety pins through the noses. We did take on the studs, though. There were a lot of studded jackets around at the time. We nicked that and turned it into our own style, as did Motörhead.

Fast Eddie Clarke: Motörhead were accepted by all the punks. We had long hair, but we wore leather jackets and we played loud and fast. We were in the same family.

Rob Halford: The press just said: “Fuck off, heavy metal, it’s over.” We said: “No it’s not.” We saw that punk was gonna be a short-lived experience. I found it very insulting that someone would dismiss not only the bands but also the fans. So that made us even stronger.

Thunderstick (Samson): Punk came along and swept everything away. The first time I saw it, I thought: “These guys can’t play their instruments.” But then I quickly realised that it wasn’t all to do with just playing the material. It was about a lifestyle.

Fast Eddie Clarke: Punk was refreshing. Especially when they said: “Fuck off everybody.” I’d been saying that for years.

Brian Tatler: Punk brought things back down to the grass roots, didn’t it? You could go and see a band in the pub. The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal adopted the do-it-yourself attitude.

Punk may have pitched itself as the sworn enemy of the ‘dinosaur’ bands, but it had the unforeseen side effect of galvanising some of the more clued-in longhairs. Motörhead, formed in London in 1976 by former Hawkwind bassist Lemmy, were one such group. Barnsley’s Son Of A Bitch – soon to change their name to Saxon – were another.

Fast Eddie Clarke: The audiences at our early gigs were disenchanted rockers. They had long hair and leather jackets but they didn’t like the punk thing. They were into Deep Purple and Black Sabbath back in the day, but they’d fucked off to America.

Biff Byford: Motörhead were flying the flag. They were big way before us. They were the ones busting down the doors.

Fast Eddie Clarke: It was a very British form of music. The fucking Americans weren’t coming up with anything, anyway.

Andy Dawson: Saxon were going strong well before the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal kicked in.

Biff Byford: We were playing quite a few shows with a lot of youngsters in the crowd. It was quite an aggressive stage show. There was a lot running around and shouting. I think we took that from the punk bands.

Fast Eddie Clarke: I thought Saxon were fucking blinding. They were a great band, they had great tunes, and what a great bunch of guys. When they supported us on the Bomber tour I used to go out and sneak into the crowd to watch one of their tunes, See The Light Shining, every night.

Biff Byford: We were always chasing a record deal. We’d send cassette tapes off to people. If they didn’t like one lot of songs, we’d throw them in the bin and write some more songs.

Around the same time, a gang of streetwise East Londoners were making a name for themselves in the pubs and clubs of the capital, most notably the Ruskin Arms in Manor Park. Their name was Iron Maiden, and they were led with gritty ambition by bassist Steve Harris.

Rob Verschoyle (childhood friend of Steve Harris): I met Steve when I was twelve and he was ten. The difference between the rest of us and Steve was dedication. He’d be playing bass all the time. He became a trainee draughtsman, but he gave that up to concentrate on playing. His whole life was like that. Anything he did, he went at it a hundred per cent.

Steve Harris: I wouldn’t say I’m a control freak. I just like to get things done.

Neal Kay (DJ/founder, Heavy Metal Soundhouse): Since 1975 I’d been building up a small venue in Kingsbury as a heavy metal discotheque. It was known as The Bandwagon in the Prince Of Wales pub, but I rechristened it the Heavy Metal Soundhouse. The main room held about seven hundred people, and we had a fuckin’ ginormous sound system. I kept badgering Geoff Barton at Sounds to come down, because I knew it was unique, and a great press story. It took a long time to convince him but in the end he came.

Geoff Barton (writing in Sounds, August 1978): “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. 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.”

Neal Kay: After Geoff Barton’s double-page spread in Sounds, suddenly all these demo tapes started arriving from oppressed bands who couldn’t get out. Among these tapes was the Iron Maiden demo.

Steve Harris: We did a four-track demo and gave it to Neal Kay.

Neal Kay: Steve and [Maiden singer] Paul Di’Anno brought it to me on one of the week nights. Steve said: “’Ere, mate, give this a listen when you’ve got a minute.” I said: “You’ll be lucky. I’ve got millions of tapes to listen to.” But that night I put it in the player and listened to it. I thought: “Fuck me, this is going all the way.” I phoned Steve up at two am and said: “You’re going to be really rich, because what you’ve got here is nothing short of brilliant.”

Steve Harris: He played it at the club and people began voting for it as their favourite track. We started getting into these Sounds charts, which were compiled from requests there. That’s what got the ball rolling for Maiden.

Biff Byford: We played some universities with Iron Maiden, supporting a band called Nutz. The people who booked it said they’d never seen bands go down so well that sounded so crap. We quite liked that.

One hundred and fifty miles up the M1 in Sheffield, another equally ambitious group of youngsters had their eyes firmly set on rock stardom. Singer Joe Elliott, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Tony Kenning had formed the band Atomic Mass while still in their mid-teens. By the time they played their first gig, in a school canteen, they had changed the band’s name to Def Leppard.

Biff Byford: Def Leppard were very young. They were four or five years younger than we were.

Joe Elliott: We were a bunch of kids destined for factory life. We knew the opportunities we were being given. We were not going to screw this up.

Rick Savage: We were teenagers, and we had this belief that anything was possible. When that way of thinking is moulded into the group at that very early stage, it never really leaves you.

In January 1979, Def Leppard released their self-titled debut EP. With copies glued together by Joe Elliott and his mum, it was available via mail order and at gigs, costing the princely sum of £1.

Biff Byford: Def Leppard did the EP and sold it in Sounds. I like that early stuff. It was killer.

Joe Elliott: We were just a bunch of teenagers messing around, doing what we felt was right. But Getcha Rocks Off did have a vibe about it that was above and beyond what everyone else seemed to be doing. I think there was a good reason we got the deal that hundreds of other bands couldn’t seem to get at the time.

Andy Dawson: Everybody I knew went out and brought that EP. There was a rock disco on Friday, and that would be played every time.

Joe Elliott: That naiveté can really drive you. And we weren’t stupid. We learned our craft from listening to other people. We were students of Pete Townshend and Ray Davies and Plant and Page and Lennon and McCartney. We knew a good song when we heard one – and we just tried to rip off as many of ’em as we could.

Geoff Barton: After much phone-call badgering, Joe Elliott enticed me up to Sheffield in June 1979.

Joe Elliott: The first time Geoff Barton came to see us play was at Crookes Working Men’s Club in Sheffield. I picked him up at the train station in my van – a two-seater so you could throw shit in the back.

Geoff Barton: I was bowled over. They put on a hugely impressive performance for the cap-wearing, ferret-bothering audience. A subsequent double-page feature in Sounds, plus strong support from local station Radio Hallam, helped secure them a contract with Phonogram.

Fast Eddie Clarke: Def Leppard I never really got along with. I know them now, but they weren’t really my cup of tea back then. They were like a girly band, trying to appeal to girls.

The media was so enamoured with punk that it failed to notice this new movement springing up under its nose. All around the country, new bands were appearing at a weekly rate. In the north-east there were the Tygers Of Pan Tang, Raven and Fist. Scotland had Holocaust. The East Midlands had Witchfynde and Savage, while the West Midlands was represented by Diamond Head, the West Country had Jaguar. London had Samson, Angel Witch, Girlschool and, of course, Iron Maiden. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Ashley Goodall: The punk thing was starting to get boring, to be honest. I noticed there were a lot of kids going to heavy rock events. There was a bigger audience at The Bandwagon than there was at clubs like The Marquee.

Andy Dawson: Bands like Thin Lizzy, UFO and the Scorpions seemed so far away. They seemed other‑wordly. But then you’d see some of these bands playing your local venue, and you started to think: “Maybe we can do it as well.”

Jess Cox: What made us want to be in a band? I guess the answer is that it was easy to meet girls.

Biff Byford: There were tons of gigs, tons of girls.

Andy Dawson: A lot of bands were still playing covers. We used to do a set that would be half made up of songs from Live And Dangerous and half from Strangers In The Night. Then we started introducing our own songs.

Thunderstick: Samson was the first band I joined that actually had a manager. We got a retainer wage, which was pretty good. We used to rehearse in a farmer’s shed, with all these rotting vegetables in it. It had one power point that we’d run everything off.

Jess Cox: We were just out to make a glorious racket. We had no idea how the hell you structure a song. If you listen to some of our early tracks, you’ll find that there’s four bars here and seven bars there.

Biff Byford: We were playing really fast stuff – it was all Never Surrender and Stand Up And Be Counted. Just getting out on the streets, that was our message in those days.

Jess Cox: We had drainpipe jeans and fringes. I know that sounds hilarious now, but it was a big deal at the time, because flares were in and you had to have your hair parted in the middle.

Thunderstick: The mask came about because most drummers were faceless. They were hidden behind kits. So I thought: “I’ll create a faceless drummer.” I couldn’t give it a name of Barry Graham Purkis, because then it would be a bit rubbish. So that’s how Thunderstick came about.

Even the stuffed shirts at the BBC couldn’t ignore the musical shifts that were happening. In November 1978, Radio 1 launched The Friday Rock Show, presented by gravel-voiced DJ Tommy Vance. Airing at 10pm every Friday, it was essential listening for any self-regarding rock fan who wanted to hear the lastet cutting-edge band.

Tony Wilson (Friday Rock Show producer): Alan Freeman had been presenting the Saturday Rock Show on Radio 1 since 1973, but they decided that Fluff was too old for the job, and he left and went off to Capital Radio. I said: “Well, we need to find somebody else to do another rock show.” I decided that Tommy Vance was the best option, against the better judgment of Derek Chinnery, the controller of Radio 1.

Joe Elliott: At the time, there were local radio stations that had their own rock show. But this was the only one on national radio. So when you tuned in to listen to Tommy, you knew you were in for an education.

Tommy Vance (speaking in 2002): The overriding memory of the Rock Show was that I was working for an audience that appreciated it, they liked it and were grateful for the fact I liked it and wanted to play it. But it wasn’t just me, because I had a superb producer, Tony Wilson.

Tony Wilson: I had completely free rein, because nobody in the management knew or cared what we were doing. They were just happy to have someone who was interested enough to do something like that, as long as we didn’t cause any outrage.

Tony Wilson: People say it was quite influential. We did get large mailbags of post every week, and that was an indicator that people were listening. I think it was one of the ways for people to hear music and engage with the new rock movement, and they did.

Joe Elliott: He may not be regarded as an innovator in the same way as, say, John Peel, but for all rock fans in Britain at the time [Tommy Vance’s] show was massively important. He’s never been replaced, and he never can be.

Across the country, things were beginning to heat up. Aside from the release of Def Leppard’s debut EP, 1979 saw the glorious one-two of Motörhead’s Overkill and Bomber, as well as the debut album from Saxon.

Fast Eddie Clarke: We didn’t know we were making these great albums at the time, but we loved ’em to bits. Overkill was absolutely fantastic. We got a new lease of life, and it continued into Bomber. We were just fucking cooking like fuck.

Biff Byford: It really took us by surprise, how popular we became very quickly.

Neal Kay: Probably the most significant gig I did at The Music Machine was when I put Samson, Iron Maiden and Angel Witch on in May 1979.

Thunderstick: When we played The Music Machine for the very first time, I couldn’t believe the amount of people that came through the door. Some of the fans had been laying in wait, waiting for punk to run its course. Once they had done, they came up and pledged allegiance to the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.

Geoff Barton (writing in Sounds): “The band, dressed in cheesecloth shirts and loon pants, tossed their long hair, pouted, posed and punched their firsts into the air after each agonising guitar solo.”

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…’

Thunderstick: I got the front cover of Sounds, with that edition where the phrase The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was coined.

Biff Byford: We kept getting little reviews in Sounds and Melody Maker. They kept doing little reviews about us. But it really started to happen when Geoff Barton came to see us and a did a huge two-page piece on us in Sounds.

Bruce Dickinson (Samson): 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.

Brian Tatler: After the Sounds piece, you suddenly thought: “Okay, there’s other bands around the country doing what we’re doing, they’re the same age.” We end up travelling to Leeds or Newcastle or London. Suddenly our horizons were opened.

Thanks to the business acumen of their new manager, Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden were jostling with Def Leppard for the position of the NWOBHM’s top dogs.

Ashley Goodall: I think you have to differentiate between Def Leppard and Iron Maiden. Def Leppard had a more American angle; Maiden had a punk ethos about them, though the were definitely a rock band. They had that street-y, London attitude.

Paul Di’Anno (Iron Maiden, speaking in 1980): We still want to stay as close as possible to the kids who got us up here in the first place. I don’t want people to start muttering: “Oh look, there’s so-and-so from Iron Maiden there. Shall we talk to him, or shan’t we?” Bollocks. They should be able to come over and say: “Hello mate, how is it? I thought you played like a c**t the other night.”

Ashley Goodall: I first saw Maiden at the Swan in Hammersmith. It was like a football crowd. They had a hard-core following with the T-shirts. I thought: “This is a great gig. There’s something here that’s really good.”

Bruce Dickinson: It was blindingly obvious that Maiden were going to be massive. This hyper-kinetic band, it was really a force of nature. Paul Di’Anno, he was okay, but I thought: “I could really do something with that band!”

Ashley Goodall: Iron Maiden stood out because they’d taken on some of the punk ethos, which was to do your own thing, put your own record out, make your own life. Maybe they borrowed some of that from the punk bands.

Steve Harris: We decided to release The Soundhouse Tapes (in November 1979) because we’d do really well at gigs, then afterwards there’d be all these fans asking where they could buy one of our records. When we told them there wasn’t any yet they couldn’t believe it. They’d seen the charts in Sounds and assumed we must already have a record deal of some kind, but we didn’t. And I think that’s when we really got the idea of putting the demo out as an actual record.

By the end of 1979 and into 1980, the NWOBHM gathered pace. Every week, a new single appeared from some hitherto unknown band, released on an independent label such as Heavy Metal Records, Bronze or Newcastle’s Neat Records. The scene’s big guns weren’t resting on their laurels, either – Def Leppard and Iron Maiden both released their debut albums, On Through The Night and Iron Maiden, in 1980, while Saxon released two stone-cold classics in the shape of Wheels Of Steel and Strong Arm Of The Law. And then there was Metal For Muthas, a compilation-cum-lightning rod of this new wave of bands.

Joe Elliott: We had the time of our lives making On Through The Night. We were such young kids – Rick Allen was fifteen, I was nineteen – and we were recording our first album at Tittenhurst Park, where John Lennon lived before he sold it to Ringo. And I drew the long straw – I got Lennon’s old bedroom. The view was amazing.

Biff Byford: 1980 was a big year for us and for the heavy metal genre in general. Everything was just right. There was a massive groundswell and a lot of young fans were getting into metal.

Joe Elliott: On Through The Night did pretty well for us. We sold out Sheffield City Hall, it went Top 20 in the UK. But we were a work in progress. Compared to the first Boston album, the first Zeppelin album, the first Van Halen album, it’s Wycombe Wanderers to their Chelsea.

Ashley Goodall: There was a studio in EMI that wasn’t too expensive, so I thought why don’t we get everybody in there and do a good, rough-and-ready compilation of what’s going on at the moment? Basically, aggregate what’s going on and make a statement. That was Metal For Muthas.

Andy Dawson: I remember seeing Iron Maiden at our local theatre on the Metal For Muthas tour. It was the first time I remember seeing an unknown band, and they nailed it. They came on stage looking and acting like they were already successful. I’d never seen that level of confidence before.

Inevitably, the Top 20 success of Def Leppard and Iron Maiden spurred the interest of the other big labels. All around the country at the gigs, the denim-clad crowds were peppered with A&R representatives.

Jess Cox: Everybody wanted their New Wave Of British Heavy Metal band. All of a sudden these major labels started to appear. I remember playing Sunderland Mecca on a Friday night, and the head of labels from Virgin, EMI and CBS had flown up.

Andy Dawson: It wasn’t like the major labels all swept in and started pumping money. That happened for a few bands, but the rest of us were just working our arses off trying to make this happen.

Jess Cox: The guy we had managing us at the time said: “MCA want to sign you. It means you get your rent paid and six pounds a week.” We were, like: “Whoah, that sounds good. Yeah, we’ll do that.”

Andy Dawson: There were a few bands that made the jump to a major, like Saxon and Iron Maiden and Def Leppard obviously. But for the majority it felt like an independent scene. That was the beauty of it – it wasn’t contrived or controlled by a record company executive saying: “This is what you need to do.”

Bruce Dickinson: In Samson we only ever had about thirty quid a week out of the band. But we were bonkers, completely out of our gourds, and we’d signed the document.

Jess Cox: In the Tygers we didn’t have two pennies to rub together. We’d kip on floors or wherever we could find.

While the music industry turned its beady eye on the NWOBHM scene, the bands themselves were treating each other with as much suspicion as they were camaraderie.

Brian Tatler: I think there was a rivalry. Because, of course, we’re all trying to make it, and you don’t want somebody else to step on you.

Joe Elliott: We didn’t ask to be included in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, we were just told we were in it. We were happy to take the press, but the fact that it kept coming with this NWOBHM typecast, it became more of a “What the hell is this?” thing.

Jess Cox: It wasn’t this great big family. Bands were starting to go: “Hold on, there are too many other bands, we’re not getting attention.” But we did get quite friendly with Maiden.

Brian Tatler: You’d go and check the competition: Angel Witch, Samson, Maiden, the Leps, Saxon. We’d meet them occasionally, but it was a bit insular. We’d judge everything: “Are they good? Can we learn from them? Can we steal from them?”

Fast Eddie Clarke: We didn’t mix with Thin Lizzy or Judas Priest or that lot. The other bands didn’t want to talk to us. We weren’t looked on as musicians.

Biff Byford: To tell you the truth, we were so fucking busy that we didn’t have much chance to look at what everybody else was doing.

Fast Eddie Clarke: We did notice Iron Maiden. Our paths crossed, but they were a bit stand-offish. There was still this thing that Motörhead were this loud, antisocial juggernaut. And people were scared of us because of our Hells Angels contacts.

Joe Elliott: At one gig, I went on stage in a pair of bright red trousers, and a white shirt covered in hearts. That was me going: “I’m not fucking wearing a leather jacket and jeans like every other bastard band in this movement that we don’t think we’re in anyway.”

Jess Cox: We went to London to do some shows with Maiden at the Marquee, then all of a sudden bands started coming to see us. Judas Priest turned up at one gig. Gary Moore got up on stage and bloody played with us.

Unlike punk, there was no generational divide here. The new breed of metal bands viewed the bands that came before with reverence, while the original masters were curious to see what they’d inspired.

Andy Dawson: You wanted to emulate these bands, not kill them off. Bands like Rainbow were still massive. Everybody still loved then. When you went to a rock disco, you’d still hear stuff like that.

Ashley Goodall: Ozzy Osbourne turned up to see Maiden at one of the early gigs at the Music Machine, so there was a lot of interest in the new generation of bands.

Rob Halford: We went out with Iron Maiden, Def Leppard. It’s what you should do, no matter who you are or what music you play. We’re all on the same journey. We’ve all been through barely affording gas and sleeping in the van. That’s part of your apprenticeship.

KK Downing: I’d never heard of Iron Maiden until someone told me that they were going to support us on the British Steel tour. Then they started to get mouthy in the press, saying they were going to blow the bollocks off Judas Priest and all this sort of stuff. I said: “I appreciate the attitude, like, but let’s fuck ’em off and get somebody who appreciates us!” But they did it and it was fine. I’m glad that they emerged and became a force to be reckoned with, and gained their own identity, musically, visually and in every way possible.

Judas Priest themselves were the bridge between the old guard and the new wave. Their debut album, Rocka Rolla, had come out in 1974, when many of the NWOBHM musicians were still at school, and they’d survived the punk wars largely unscathed. Their sixth album, British Steel, was released in April 1980, as the movement began to broaden.

Rob Halford: The title of the album was a statement in itself. Sheffield steel was the inspiration for British Steel. And we should all be proud that British musicians are responsible for this force in music called heavy metal.

KK Downing: We’d made a few albums by then. We weren’t exactly floundering around, but everything did lock in with British Steel: the artwork, the songs, the stage clothes. Everything consolidated who we were and where we were going. It was almost like a rebel’s almanac.

Rob Halford: There was a lot of crap going down in the UK. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for quite a number of years. The recession was going on, people had no jobs and no money. Everything the government had said they were going to try to do was just a crock of shit, and people were pushing back. All of that’s in there, you know: ‘Completely wasted, out of work and down’ – no one cares, I’m going to break the law. We weren’t giving people affirmation to break the law, but we could understand their frustration.

Andy Dawson: I think a lot of energy in the NWOBHM was frustration. It was the start of the Thatcher era, which was quite destructive.

If there was one event that acted as a lightning rod for British rock – not just NWOBHM, but all of it – then it was the inaugural Monsters Of Rock festival held at the Donington Park racetrack in Castle Donington, Leicestershire on August 16, 1980. The braindchild of young promoter Paul Loasby and his business partner Maurice Jones, the first line‑up featured Rainbow as headliners, supported by Judas Priest, Scorpions, April Wine, Saxon, Riot and Touch. There had been other outdoor events before, but this was the only one dedicated solely to heavy music.

Rob Halford: We were very aware that it was the first festival of its type in the UK and was a major event in that respect. All the festivals that had happened in the UK before had had a cross-section of bands, so this was the first to go with specifically one type of music. Our reaction when we first heard about it was that we’d like to give it a crack.

Biff Byford: When they asked us to play Monsters Of Rock we had no fucking idea what it was.

Paul Loasby (Monsters Of Rock promoter): The amount of rain was unbelievable. I’d borrowed money personally to put on this show. And the night before, at four in the morning when a monsoon is coming down in Castle Donington, I’m sitting there with a bottle of Scotch in my hand thinking: “This is the ultimate, the biggest disaster in the history of rock’n’roll and I’m going to lose everything.” Not that I had anything, but I was going to lose it anyway.

Neal Kay: I compered the gig. I was nervous – I’ve never faced a crowd that big before. But when I walked out on that huge stage, the first ten rows were all Soundhouse members.

Biff Byford: When we walked on that stage we’d done a hundred thousand records. I would imagine that ninety-nine per cent of the people in that audience had got Wheels Of Steel. So it was fantastic for us. It was our first festival gig, the first time we’d played to an audience of over three thousand. The roar when we went out on stage was incredible. When I walked off I thought: “Follow that.” That was a fucking great gig.

Neal Kay: The atmosphere was fantastic. There were campfires about twilight time.

Biff Byford: This was the new generation of heavy metal. This was our music – fucking have it!

After so many years in the doldrums, British rock now seemed unstoppable. And then in 1981 the unthinkable happened when those perpetual outcasts Motörhead managed to reached No.1 in the UK chart with their steel-plated live album, No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith.

Fast Eddie Clarke: I suppose having a number one record got us a bit of respect. I can’t remember who we went to see, but David Coverdale was there and he said: “Let me buy you a drink, guys.” And I’m thinking: “Fuck me, that’s unheard of.”

Jess Cox: It was only years later that I realised how many of these bands there were.

Biff Byford: You’ve got Judas Priest, you’ve got Motörhead, you’ve got Saxon, you’ve got Maiden… it was endless.

Ashley Goodall: It became clear very quickly who the leaders were. Leppard were slightly ahead in a way, but it did kind of blow out a bit by eighty-one. Once Maiden were away it was a completely different game.

Jess Cox: Iron Maiden and Def Leppard had people behind them in the know. They knew how it was all going to pan out.

Ashley Goodall: I’m a believer that if you’re going to be huge, you’re going to be huge. No one else was actually that good.

For the NWOBHM’s leading lights, the next logical step would be to set their sights on America. Def Leppard had seemingly made their intentions clear with the track Hello America on On Through The Night– something that prompted a backlash in Sounds, and saw them bottled at the 1980 Reading Festival for their troubles. The old cliché about Britain hating success stories seemed to ring true, although the fact remained that America was there for the taking – at least for a select few.

Biff Byford: Def Leppard went off and did a different thing. They went down the American route.

Rick Savage (Def Leppard): Hello America? I swear to God, we really weren’t that intelligent. It was the lyrics of a kid fantasising. I can see how people read into it, but it was way more innocent than that, way more naive.

Joe Elliott: The legend about us getting bottled off at Reading 1980 is a myth, really. We probably had six or seven bottles of piss thrown up, and maybe a tomato, but it didn’t put us off. That ‘backlash’ was all blown out of proportion. We’re living proof that bad reviews make no difference.

Fast Eddie Clarke: We didn’t think: “We want to break America.” We didn’t have any delusions of grandeur. No fucker over there would touch us anyway.

Joe Elliott: Iron Maiden had been to America a month before us. I didn’t see them getting any flak. Nor should they have. So why the hell did we?

Steve Harris: We were never obsessed with breaking America. We always planned to come out here and give everything we’d got, and they’d either like it or they wouldn’t. Fortunately for us they liked it. In fact they bloody loved it. But it was always a challenge. We didn’t do things the normal way.

Glenn Tipton (Judas Priest): If we hadn’t gone to America we would probably only have lasted for another three or four years.

Rob Halford: We were definitely aware of what was going on with MTV [which launched in August 1981]. It was a game changer.

Joe Elliott: The fledging MTV, having nothing to play, liked the idea of this young UK rock band, so they picked up on Bringin’ On The Heartbreak [from Leppard’s second album, 1981’s High ’n’ Dry]. So six months, maybe a year after High ’n’ Dry came out, we started getting these telexes saying: “Your album is selling six thousand copies a week. Then it was ten, fifteen, twenty thousand copies a week. It was heading toward platinum by the time we had Pyromania in the bag.

Throughout 1982 and into 1983, the stream of bands releasing singles and albums didn’t abate. To the casual observer, the British rock and metal scene looked in rude health. But in reality it was starting to run on fumes. Thanks to Def Leppard and Iron Maiden’s Stateside success, America was waking up to what was happening across the Atlantic. And it wanted a piece of the action.

Andy Dawson: By 1983, when Savage finally released our first album, it seemed like the British scene was beginning to peter out.

Brian Tatler: A lot of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands had given up, split up, been dropped – including Diamond Head. The attention had gone onto the American bands. It was a tough period for a lot of British bands.

Rob Halford: Once the Americans got hold of this thing coming from Britain and took it into their own kind of style and approach, everything went global.

Fast Eddie Clarke: I remember going to LA with the first Fastway album and hearing about Mötley Crüe. They were calling them ‘the LA Motörhead’.

Biff Byford: We supported Mötley Crüe. They loved us so much they invited us out on their first tour. It was a great tour.

Andy Dawson: When we did our first Kerrang! interview, the journalist, Xavier Russell, was banging on about how much this band called Metallica loved Savage. And we were like: “Who?”

Fast Eddie Clarke: Motörhead were two years too early. I was fucking surprised when it all kicked in with Metallica and that lot. They were playing exactly what we were playing, and doing fantastic business.

Def Leppard’s Pyromania and Judas Priest’s Screaming For Vengeance were huge hits in America, but at home the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal scene was rapidly deflating. By the end of that year it was all over bar the shouting.

Nearly four decades on, the legacy of the British bands of the late 70s and early 80s remains as strong as ever. The more obvious success stories of that golden era – Maiden, Leppard, Saxon, Motörhead – speak for themselves. But the ambition, independence and energy of the period mark it out as the last time British rock and metal truly punched above its weight on the world stage.

Biff Byford: It was a hugely important era. Massively important.

Jess Cox: People look back and see the wonderful naivety and innocence of it.

Andy Dawson: I don’t think any of us realised we were part of something new. We were emulating something that we loved that was already there. But because we were young and innocent and a bit stupid, it brought something new to it.

Fast Eddie Clarke: Maybe we did change things. We certainly changed things from the way they were in the early seventies.

Ashley Goodall: Heavy rock music had been out of favour for about five years, and bands like Maiden gave it a kick. It made it cool to be into it again. It was okay to be a heavy rocker again.

Brian Tatler: I really think it was an important time for British music. It helped keep rock going. Just look at how amazingly Iron Maiden have done over the last forty years. Everything would sound different without the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.

Bruce Dickinson: Years ago, someone asked: “What’s the secret of Maiden’s success?” I said:“I wish it was complicated, but it’s just: don’t let people down.” Don’t let people down. I can live with that on my headstone.

Steve Harris: We always stuck at what we believed in. I’m proud of that.

Biff Byford: We were singing songs for that generation about motorcycles and women and having a great time. People just loved it, really.

Andy Dawson: People have kept a real love of that time, and are looking for more of it. I’m sure they’d love to see younger bands. It would be great to see a bunch of eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds coming out, doing something like that, with that kind of energy. It would be a fresh kick up the arse.

Biff Byford: It was very British, but it shot round the fucking world. It changed music.

The main players in the birth of the NWOBHM

Geoff Barton - Legendary Sounds (and current Classic Rock) journalist. The first person to use the phrase ‘New Wave Of British Heavy Metal’ in print.

Biff Byford - Barnsley-born Saxon singer. Has fronted the band since they formed as Son Of A Bitch in the mid-70s.

Fast Eddie Clarke - Former Motörhead guitarist and sole surviving member of the classic line-up. Formed Fastway after his departure in 1982.

Jess Cox - Original singer with Whitley Bay NWOBHM pioneers the Tygers Of Pan Tang. Resurrected groundbreaking label Neat Records in the early 90s.

Andy Dawson - Guitarist with Mansfield band Savage, whose track Let It Loose was covered by Metallica on an early demo.

Bruce Dickinson - Leather-lunged former Samson singer (also known as Bruce Bruce). Later replaced Paul Di’Anno in Iron Maiden.

KK Downing - Long-time Judas Priest guitarist. Left the band in 2011 and has since opened a golf course.

Joe Elliott - Singer and founder member of Def Leppard, the first of the NWOBHM bands to make it big in America.

Ashley Goodall - Former EMI Records A&R man. Signed Iron Maiden and helped put together the groundbreaking Metal For Muthas compilation.

Rob Halford - Judas Priest singer, and the man who helped give metal its iconic leather uniform.

Steve Harris - Founder and driving force behind Iron Maiden, the most successful NWOBHM band of them all.

Neal Kay - DJ, tastemaker, compere and founder of legendary north London rock mecca the Heavy Metal Soundhouse.

Rick Savage - Def Leppard bassist and founder member.

Brian Tatler - Guitarist and founder of Diamond Head, whose self-released Lightning To The Nations album was one of the NWOBHM’s early successes.

Thunderstick - Also known as Barry Graham Purkis, ski-masked former Samson (and, briefly, Iron Maiden) drummer. New album Something Wicked This Way Comes is out soon.

Tommy Vance - Late Radio 1 DJ and presenter of Radio 1’s The Friday Rock Show. AKA The Voice Of Rock.

Tony Wilson - Creator and producer of The Friday Rock Show.

Football has had more than its fair share of tragedies, and the evening of May 29, 1985 produced another. English giants Liverpool faced Italian side Juventus in the final of the European Cup at the ill-prepared Heysel stadium in Brussels, and 39 fans lost their lives after Liverpool fans rushed their Italian counterparts and a wall collapsed. 

In the wake of the disaster, as is so often the case, musicians combined their forces to record a charity record to raise funds for the victims. And, like Ronnie James Dio's Hear 'N Aid project and Swedish Metal Aid – both of which raised money for famine relief in Africa – it was heavy rock musicians who led the way. 

Italian superstar Edourdo Bennato – a blues rocker who'd headlined Milan's iconic San Siro stadium in 1980 – called the shots, corralling English musicians in a way that was as ambitious as it was conciliatory. The European Team's choir included some stellar names (members of Uriah Heep, Motörhead, Girlschool, Slade and Venom) alongside some lesser lights (Alaska, Heavy Pettin', Warlock, Rock Goddess, Robin George, Pallas, Rogue Male, Waysted, Lionheart and Shy), as well as Bad Company drummer Simon Kirke and future Bad Company vocalist Brian Howe, plus Deborah Bonham (sister of Led Zeppelin man John) and Scottish pop singer Natasha England, best known for her 1982 cover of the New Orleans classic Iko Iko. 

Sport Alive's lyrics are attributed to the entire cast, and it's probably fair to say that, while writing words that captured the full trauma of an event as dreadful as Heysel cannot have been easy, even Midge Ure (author of Band Aid's Do The Know It's Christmas?) might have baulked at Sport Alive's opening couplet. 

Early night a screen of blood / I'm feeling sad
Blinded victims of a lemmings fight

After a chorus that calls for unity and an end to football-related violence, Edourdo Bennato sings an Italian version of the lyrics. And, with the song a none-more-eighties power ballad, there's guitar solos a-plenty, especially on the seven-minute extended version. 

Sport Alive was released on 7" and 12" by Belgian heavy metal label Mausoleum. It failed to chart, which presumably limited the amount of money it was able to raise for the Fund For Brussels, set up by football's European governing body UEFA to assist the Heysel victims' families. Perhaps that's why it's been largely forgotten, unloved and uncelebrated by those involved.  

Becoming a heavy metal figurehead in your first band is exceptionally rare. Given the genre is usually rooted in bluster and teenage angst, future stars often navigate a slew of personality clashes and unsuccessful projects before settling into the collective that ‘clicks’. It’s rare… however, it isn’t impossible. Below are 10 extreme music icons who defied the odds and made it big on their very first go of it.

Lars Ulrich (Metallica)

Metallica’s displaced Dane landed in the United States with the goal of becoming a heavy metal superstar – but no history actually playing music. What he lacked in experience, though, Lars recouped in business acumen, given he’d earned himself a spot on Brian Slagel’s Metal Massacre compilation without even having a band. It was this connection that impressed future cohort James Hetfield enough to start jamming with the fledgling drummer in 1981.

Jeff Hanneman (Slayer)

Former drummer Dave Lombardo told Hammer in 2018 that Slayer were the late Jeff Hanneman’s first-ever band. Jeff and fellow guitarist Kerry King were the fulcrum of the four-piece until the blonde powerhouse’s death, co-founding them after Kerry saw his future partner in thrash playing his instrument at a reception desk. The pair, plus Dave and bassist/vocalist Tom Araya, would terrorise the mainstream together through the ’80s and beyond.

Lzzy and Arejay Hale (Halestorm)

Siblings Lzzy (vocals/guitars) and Arejay Hale (drums) started their namesake band aged 13 and 10 respectively, with their dad Roger on bass. The outfit became (slightly) less of a family affair when Josh Smith replaced the senior Hale in 2004 – then, with lead guitarist Joe Hottinger completing the lineup, they landed a major record deal in 2005. Halestorm have had their hard rock jams get broadcasted all around the world ever since.

Matt Heafy (Trivium)

One year after flunking his audition to join high-school pop-punks Freshly Squeezed aged 11, Matt Heafy dazzled Trivium’s then-members with a For Whom The Bell Tolls cover and became their lead guitarist. The four-piece have almost completely changed since: Matt’s now their frontman, surrounded by an all-new lineup. Nonetheless, it’s still technically true that the metalcore maestro has toured the globe and shipped thousands of records with his very first band.

Max and Iggor Cavalera (Sepultura)

When Metal Hammer asked Max Cavalera about the first show he ever played, the Brazilian metal icon answered by mentioning a Sepultura concert in Belo Horizonte. It’s pretty open and shut, then, that the extreme metal mavens were the first band of he and his drummer brother Iggor. The siblings left the lineup in 1996 and 2006 respectively, but have since reunited in their Cavalera Conspiracy project.

Simone Simons (Epica)

Fun fact: Simone Simons attended rehearsals for a black metal band in her early years but never actually performed with them, thus making Epica, in the singer’s own words, “my true first band”. Since that 2002 inception, the Dutch six-piece have become a symphonic metal sensation, frequently cracking the top 10 of the album charts in their home country. Simone also doesn’t need to fanny about applying corpsepaint before every show, which is another plus.

Chuck Schuldiner (Death)

The godfather of death metal began his career in a group of extreme metal nasties called Mantas when he was just 16. Chuck quickly became the fixture of the project’s revolving lineup, and he changed their name to Death in 1984. Under that moniker, the band would lead the Florida metal scene and become untouchable with their increasingly progressive tunes, before their leader’s tragic death from a brain tumour in 2001.

Mille Petrozza and Jürgen “Ventor” Reil (Kreator)

Essen-based singer/guitarist Mille Petrozza and drummer Jürgen “Ventor” Reil have been the best of friends ever since the pair were in preschool. They started their first band together in 1982, which they initially christened Metal Militia. They cycled through a few more titles before finally becoming Kreator in 1984, and under that umbrella they’ve led the German thrash metal scene and released brilliantly brutal records for 40 years.

Lewis and Henry De Jong (Alien Weaponry)

Like Halestorm, Alien Weaponry lynchpins Lewis (vocals/guitars) and Henry De Jong (drums/vocals) have kept it in the family as they climbed the ladder of success. And, considering the brothers were eight and 10 respectively when the band started, it’s a pretty safe bet that this was their first musical venture. Now joined by bassist Tūranga Morgan-Edmonds, the pair have gone from upstart kids to conscientious groove metal heroes.

Modern metalcore's true horror masters, Boston, Massachusetts' Ice Nine Kills have deservedly carved out a bloody reputation as one of the most creative and brilliantly OTT bands in the game right now. Much of their success has been masterminded by frontman and horror fanatic Spencer Charnas, who co-founded the band back in high school and hasn't looked back since. We sat down with Spencer for a conversation about cosplaying Kurt Cobain, the band's next chapter and - you guessed it - horror movies.

You’ve cosplayed a lot throughout your career, but apparently the first time you tried it was a bit different. Didn’t you basically want to be Kurt Cobain when you were a kid?

“Yeah, he was one of my absolute first idols. I saw the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV and it changed everything for me. The music, the look – it made me want to want to buy a guitar and learn how to play all of Nirvana’s songs.”

Didn’t you even dye your hair to look like Kurt?

“I did! I grew my hair long and dyed the front of it blonde, I wore flannel shirts and I bought any Nirvana shirt I could get my hands on. But I was so young – seven, eight years old – that none of the shirts fit me. They all went down to my knees.”

What’s the cosplay you’re proudest of?

“I’d say I like the deep cuts: films that aren’t as well known as, say, Friday The 13th. Last October, I had always wanted to cosplay as Devon Sawa’s character, Anton Tobias, from [1999 horror comedy] Idle Hands. I think I really nailed it, including the inhaler necklace that he wears, which is actually just a marijuana pipe.”

That film had a stacked punk and metal soundtrack. Is there a franchise or director you’d love to do a soundtrack for?

“Halloween. John Carpenter’s score is so iconic, yet so minimal. I think it would be really fun to tackle that. From what I understand, John Carpenter scored that film in three days with one synthesiser.”

Horror films notwithstanding, what scares you the most?

“I guess it’s the things that scare everybody, you know? Death of family members, losing anyone you love. But, to be honest, nothing in the horror world really scares me that much. I miss the feeling that I got when I was a little kid, when I would be so scared that I would think Jason [Voorhees] or Michael [Myers] was in my closet or under the bed.”

When was the last time a film truly got under your skin in that way?

“Some of those Paranormal Activity movies were very scary, especially the first one, just because it seemed so real. I really respect a movie like that for being able to do so much with such a limited budget.”

You’ve made two Silver Scream albums now. Can we expect a third?

“At some point, it will probably be on the horizon. We’ll see. I can’t talk too much about what we’re doing right now.”

Whatever Ice Nine Kills do next, do you think it’s going to be The Silver Scream 3? Or would you do something else first?

“I don’t know yet; time will tell, man! But we are working on new music and it’s turning out incredible. We’re sort of in the demo stage now, but everything is really exciting. I think people are going to be very, very excited about what comes next.”

What does what you’re demoing sound like?

“You’re not gonna get an answer out of me, dude. Ha ha ha!”

It’s only spring but, a horror fanatic such as yourself, you must already have plans for Halloween this year…

“Yeah, I actually do! It’s funny because, last year, I’d just moved into a new house and I wanted to throw a Halloween party. I brainstormed this idea of renting out this big, outdoor-screen theatre, and we put it on the lawn! The company brought a popcorn machine and we hired a taco truck, so we had this really cool Halloween outside my house and invited a bunch of friends and some of my favourite actors. It was just a great experience! I’m going to try and keep up that tradition for as long as I can: hosting a party at my house.”

Will cosplays be mandatory?

“No, but if you want to wear a costume, that’s great! Come as you are.”

It’s great that we opened the interview with a Kurt Cobain question and finished by name- dropping a Nirvana song.

“I didn’t even realise I did that! Ha ha ha!”

By the early 80s, a sea change began unfolding in mainstream music, with the radio-friendly New Wave acts finding themselves in competition for airplay with the emergent siege of metal bands from both sides of the Atlantic. 

By 1983, the metal revolution was well underway and, powered by heatseeking new releases from the likes of Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Dio and Ozzy Osbourne, it showed little sign of abating. The deciding battle, both literal and figurative, would occur at the 1983 US festival.

With a budget of $12.5 million, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak put on the first US Festival on Labor Day weekend in 1982. The festival drew over 400,000 people to the dusty Southern California town of Devore to hear bands like the Grateful Dead, Talking Heads and Tom Petty.

Approximately nine months later, over Memorial Day weekend, Woz put on the 1983 US Festival at the same site, attracting even bigger names such as David Bowie, U2, The Clash and Van Halen. 

This time around, the festival was carved up into three genre-specific days: New Wave Day on May 28, Metal Day on May 29 and Rock Day on May 30. A fourth day, Country Day, was scheduled for the following weekend. Early trouble emerged when the Clash – the New Wave Day headliners – threatened not to play after learning that Metal Day headliners Van Halen were being paid a cool $1 million for their appearance, twice as much as their own fee. 

Ultimately the Clash did play – behind a banner that said “The Clash Not For Sale.” Festival organisers responded by flashing an image of their $500,000 pay cheque on the giant video screens during a portion of their set. The band looked worn out, and Mick Jones left four months later.

Ironically, when Van Halen, headlining Metal Night, learned that David Bowie was promised the same $1 million fee as they were, they pointed to a clause in their contract that stipulated they would be the highest paid act at the event. Woz thus shelled out an extra $500,000 to the band, which resulted in the Guinness Book of World Records creating a new category for Highest Amount Paid to an Act for a Single Performance.

To open Metal Day, the relatively-unknown Mötley Crüe were air-lifted to the festival via helicopter, with frontman Vince Neil reportedly amped on Jack Daniels and pills, and “a blonde head bobbing up and down in [his] lap.” The highly-energetic, 45-minute set showcased the band at the top of their game and on the heels of the performance, the release of Shout At The Devil just four months later would catapult them into platinum-certified superstardom.

The second day’s attendance eclipsed that of New Wave Day. It was later reported that out of a total 670,000 tickets sold for all four days, 375,000 were sold to fans of the metal bands and Metal Day went on to set a new single-day concert attendance record. 

Surrounded by the dry, crumbling mountains of San Bernardino, the sporadic winds kicked up swirling cyclones of dust, covering fans and bands alike. A 300-yard long pit stretched back from the front of the stage and as the crowd surged forward, one official compared the scene to “The Fall of Saigon,” as security pulled one sweat and dust-covered punter after another over the barrier and into safety.

Riding high on momentum from their third album, Metal Health, fan favourites Quiet Riot plowed through a nine-song set that included Come On Feel The Noize, ending with the exceedingly-appropriate Metal Health (Bang Your Head). They would soon become the first ever metal band to reach number 1 on the Billboard chart. Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest rounded out the early sets with the latter band riding high on the bottomless US thirst for You’ve Got Another Thing Coming, Priest’s first (and only) track to hit the US charts.

By the time Triumph took the stage, the mayhem of the pit reached frightening new levels. Triumph bassist Michael Levine said of the crowd, "They've taken every drug they had, drunk all the liquor they could grab and are busy frying in the sun. I guess they're having a good time."

Next came the Scorpions who whipped the California crowd into a dusty, fist-pumping frenzy. Still supporting the Blackout album, they delivered a dynamic set featuring a glitzy light show and stadium-shaking bangers like No One Like You, Dynamite and The Zoo.

Backstage, Van Halen were celebrating like a band getting $1.5 million for a single performance. On the pathway leading to their half-acre compound, a sign read, “No virgins, Journey fans or sheep allowed on trail.” Four bartenders stood ready to serve the expected party crowd of 500.

Van Halen eventually took the stage, albeit late, with Roth, looking seriously impaired. According to Wozniak in his memoir iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon, Roth was “practically falling down onstage. He was so drunk, slurring and forgetting lyrics and everything.”

Playing up to the fans, Roth shouted, “More people have been arrested today alone than the entire weekend last year! You a bunch of rowdy motherfuckers!” He also paused to put the boot into the Clash, swilling from a bottle of Jack and telling the crowd, “I wanna take the time to say that this is real whiskey here. The only people who put iced tea in Jack Daniels bottles is The Clash, baby!” 

Onstage, Eddie Van Halen cemented his status as the preeminent guitarist of his generation with his jaw dropping fretboard dexterity on anthems like Unchained, Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love and You Really Got Me. Across twenty-four crowd-thrilling belters, Van Halen removed any doubt as to who sat atop the rock pantheon and put the world on notice that heavy music had set its sights on the mainstream.

In the end, 1600 people were treated for primarily minor injuries and there were 87 arrests. Two fatalities also occurred: one man fatally overdosed and another was beaten to death in the parking lot as the result of a drug deal gone horribly wrong. Two people were arrested in connection with the murder.

Over the span of both festivals, Woz reportedly lost around $20 million and soon returned to working at Apple. Although the ensuing headlines would largely feed the negative stereotypes for metalheads, in the final balance, the biggest winner of the festival was heavy metal, exposing the public’s heroic appetite for heavy, guitar-powered music. 

All of the Metal Day bands would proceed to reach new commercial heights (Triumph would release their biggest all-time hit three years later), leaving little doubt as to where the direction of the mainstream now pointed. 

As Vince Neil would famously say, “It was the day new wave died and rock'n'roll took over."

Widely earmarked for greatness after the release of their Sonoran Deprivation debut in 2016, Arizona residents Gatecreeper have spent their first decade establishing themselves as the modern era’s most potent purveyors of Stockholm-meets-the-desert death metal. They may have taken their sweet time to produce a full-length follow-up to 2019’s rapturously received Deserted (the brutal snapshots of 2021’s An Unexpected Reality EP notwithstanding), but Dark Superstition is every inch the strident, big label debut. Produced by Converge’s Kurt Ballou, this is a more diverse and daring record than Gatecreeper’s old school reputation might suggest. The mid-paced pummelling of The Black Curtain is gritty and melancholic like old school Paradise Lost; Superstitious Visions is doomy rock ‘n’ roll with a brittle, hardcore heart; Caught In The Treads’ thunderous, folk-tinged call-to-arms is crushing and uplifting in equal measure. 

There will doubtless be some Gatecreeper fans that object to some of the more overtly melodic moments on Dark Superstition. Those people are being a bit silly. Full of big songs with classy, melodeath hooks and sturdy, mid-paced grooves, the Arizonans’ third full-length is their most accessible by far, but this not-that-huge stylistic shift never feels like a compromise. The opening Dead Star may be slow and touched by the hand of goth, but it packs a jarring, razor-edged punch; Masterpiece Of Chaos is as gnarly and belligerent as anything from those revered, early Entombed albums. But in its entirety, Dark Superstition is simply the moment where Gatecreeper become a more well-rounded and versatile heavy metal band. 

The closing Tears Fall From The Sky sums it all up: a merciless, slow-stomping doom colossus, it is brutally, unnervingly heavy and yet vibrant with classic metal melodies and a real atmosphere of menacing portentousness. That kind of flesh-flaying finesse cannot be faked. Gatecreeper have perfected the old school revivalism thing and moved on to something more measured and approachable, but without losing a shred of their original deathly intent. Dark Superstition should be regarded as a great leap forward for a great band, but one that will still slit you open for fun. Next level of death, effortlessly achieved.

Dark Superstition is out Friday May 17

Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott says he has "an issue with the term heavy metal" which he describes as "silly".

Despite being one of the leading lights of the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) movement, Elliott doesn't think his band fall into the heavy metal category at all.

Elliott, 64, tells the Rockonteurs With Gary Kemp And Guy Pratt podcast: "I have an issue with the term 'heavy metal' because everybody outside of rock always thinks if you're a heavy metal band, it's like bad news. You get this impression that everybody's a moron.

"If we're heavy metal, then so are The Rolling Stones because it's two guitars, bass, drums and a singer. 

"It's a silly, silly term. I like 'rock'. When you start pigeonholing, it gets on my tits, to be quite honest, because can't we just all be just a rock band or a pop band or be both?

"AC/DC are a blues rock band. UFO and Thin Lizzy were not heavy metal. Motorhead – even they had a blues influence to them. Queen were never a heavy metal band, but they had a couple of heavy metal songs, thanks to Brian May.

"I think we were pretty much the same way. It was rock. Absolutely heavy rock, for sure."

In July Def Leppard hit the road for a run of North American stadium shows with Journey. Support at each of the stadium shows will be supplied by either Cheap Trick, the Steve Miller Band or Heart. Full dates below.

Def Leppard x Journey tour 2024

Jul 06: St Louis Busch Stadium, MO*                           
Jul 10: Orlando Camping World Stadium, FL*
Jul 13: Atlanta Truist Park, GA^                                   
Jul 15: Chicago Wrigley Field , IL^                                
Jul 18: Detroit Comerica Park , MI^                                
Jul 20: Nashville Nissan Stadium, TN^                         
Jul 23: Philadelphia Citizens Bank Park, PA^                 
Jul 25: Hershey Hersheypark Stadium, PA^                 
Jul 27: Pittsburgh PNC Park, PA^                               
Jul 30: Cleveland  Progressive Field, OH$                    
Aug 02: Toronto Rogers Centre, ON$                            
Aug 05: Boston Fenway Park, MA$                            
Aug 07: Flushing Citi Field, NY^                                     
Aug 12: Arlington Globe Life Field, TX^                      
Aug 14: Houston Minute Maid Park, TX^                     
Aug 16: San Antonio Alamodome, TX^                             
Aug 19: Minneapolis Target Field, MN^                             
Aug 23: Phoenix Chase Field^                            
Aug 25: Los Angeles SoFi Stadium, CA^                           
Aug 28: San Francisco Oracle Park, CA^                           
Aug 30: San Diego Petco Park, CA                               
Sep 04: Seattle T-Mobile Park, WA*                           
Sep 08: Denver Coors Field, CO*

* with Journey and Cheap Trick
^ with Journey and Steve Miller Band
$ with Journey and Heart     

Tickets are on sale now.

In 1979, heavy metal was still in its infancy. Subgenres that define the scene today – like death metal, black metal and nu metal – were years away from existing, and such generation-defining masters as Metallica, Slayer and Megadeth were yet to even form. However, in an interview with legendary UK magazine Sounds that year, Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford was able to predict that heavy music would blow up in the decade to come.

The Metal God was interviewed by future Kerrang! founder and Classic Rock journalist Geoff Barton as the ’70s came to an end, and Barton closed the chat by asking Halford for his take on 1979 being hailed at the time as ‘the year of heavy metal’. The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was in an upswing thanks to then-newcomers Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and more, so it’s easy to see why the press was so amped up. And Priest’s vocalist agreed about the genre being in rude health.

“As things stand at the moment I see a total re-emergence for heavy metal, absolutely,” Halford said (via Rock’s Backpages).

He continued: “The great thing is that our British tour is practically sold out… that comes as a reaffirmation to me of the music’s permanence. It’s been around for Christ knows how many years… What other form of music has had so much consistency and has attracted the attention of so many people?”

Halford further explained his optimism by offering an inspiring monologue on the appeal of heavy metal music. The reasons he gave for the style’s popularity, including the lyrical escapism and the sheer noise, still hold up 45 years later, reaffirming that the singer has always been a top-notch champion for the louder end of the sonic spectrum.

“I also think that heavy metal has a therapeutic quality for people, because of the volume, the intensity, the whole crazy escapism,” he stated.

“A metal concert is a unique event, there’s nothing like it. I’ve been to see other bands playing other types of music, but I’ve never seen a reaction that matches the sort seen at a heavy metal show. You could write a thesis about it, go into its psychological effects, but that’s not needed. All that it is is a raw, primitive, basic human requirement. Don’t analyse it, enjoy it.”

Halford ended the conversation with another astute observation: “I genuinely see a total upsurge. I think as far as the ’80s are concerned, we’re in for some very good heavy metal years.”

It wouldn’t take long for the singer’s prediction of an ’80s golden age to come true. Just a year after this interview, Iron Maiden debuted. Three quarters of thrash metal’s Big Four formed the year after that. The remainder of the decade would see a multitude of subcultures and subgenres proliferate, while the big guns reached arena-cramming status.

Priest themselves would start the ’80s magnificently, putting out their classic British Steel album and breakout single Breaking The Law. Four-and-a-half decades later, the Brummies are still recording and touring, with 19th album Invincible Shield recently released and the band currently trekking through North America. Get tickets to see them, and their Nostradamus-like frontman, via their website.

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine doesn't have any concerns about the future of heavy metal – so long as bands keep making great music.

Like most genres, the wider metal genre has had periods of fluctuating popularity – and not too long ago Kiss star Gene Simmons even went so far as to say rock is dead.

But despite what he saw as a rough patch in the 1990s, thrash metal icon Mustaine is more upbeat about where metal is headed.

Asked for his thoughts on the future of heavy metal, Mustaine tells Diario El Salvador: "I think as long as people make good records, there's nothing to worry about.

"It went through a period in the 90s when a lot of musicians tried to jump into the metal community and say they were metal players and they weren't really. They were just kind of normal players, and you could tell, and it really hurt our community.

"But these things correct themselves all the time and I'm glad to see the community's looking strong right now."

Megadeth are one of the old guard still touring and making new music, having released their 16th album The Sick, the Dying... and the Dead! less than two years ago to a warm reception.

They recently announced a 33-date US tour set to take place later this year.

Fellow thrash heroes Metallica are also firmly in the spotlight, touring the worlsd in support of their latest record, 2023's 72 Seasons.

Megadeth Destroy All Enemies US tour dates 2024

Aug 2: Rogers, AR Walmart AMP
Aug 3: Houston, TX 713 Music Hall
Aug 5: Albuquerque, NM Isleta Amphitheatre
Aug 6: Denver, CO Ball Arena
Aug 8: Phoenix, AZ Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre
Aug 9: Los Angeles, CA YouTube Theater
Aug 10: Concord, CA Toyota Pavilion at Concord
Aug 12: Auburn, WA White River Amphitheatre
Aug 13: Bend, OR Hayden Homes Amphitheater
Aug 16: Las Vegas, NV Bakkt Theatre at Planet Hollywood
Aug 17: Salt Lake City, UT Maverick Arena
Aug 20: Irving, TX The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory
Aug 21: Austin, TX Germania Insurance Amphitheater
Aug 23: Macon, GA Atrium Health Macon Amphitheater
Aug 24: West Palm Beach, FL IThink Financial Amphitheatre
Sept 3: Tinley Park, IL Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre
Sept 5: Huntington, WV Marshall Health Network Arena
Sept 6: Charlotte, NC PNC Music Pavilion
Sept 7: Raleigh, NC Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek
Sept 9: Reading, PA Santander Arena
Sept 10: Albany, NY MVP Arena
Sept 11: Boston, MA Leader Bank
Sept 13:  Bethel, MY Bethel Woods Center For The Arts
Sept 14: Wantagh, NY Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater
Sept 15: Richmond, VA Virginia Credit Union Live!
Sept 17: Cincinnati, OH Riverbend Music Center
Sept 18: Pittsburgh, PA Stage AE
Sept 20: Noblesville, IN Ruoff Music Center
Sept 21: Clarkston, MI Pine Knob Music Theatre
Sept 24: Minneapolis, MN The Armory
Sept 26: St Louis, MO Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre STL
Sept 27:  Southaven, MS Bankplus Amphitheater at Snowden Grove
Sept 28: Nashville, TN Nashville Municipal Auditorium  

In the Spring of 2002, one of the most unlikely rock crossover events in history took place as puerile Canadian pop punk heroes Sum 41 managed to somehow wing a guest appearance on one of their tracks from a revered thrash metal icon. The song in question, titled What We're All About and reworked from one of the band's older cuts, was recorded for the soundtrack of that year's blockbuster, Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movie. 

A goofy rap-rock bop that owed more than a little to the Beastie Boys, the song's video featured clips of Spider-Man spliced in with shots of Sum 41 playing a gig on a ceiling as their jubilant fans watch from below. Just under two minutes in, however, viewers were greeted with an almighty shock: Slayer guitarist Kerry King striding into shot and nailing a solo as the song suddenly lurches into galloping heavy metal. 

"I remember my record representative, he must have been working on both bands, but he kept asking me to play a lead in the Sum 41 song," King tells us today. "And I went, 'Man, I don't know.' It wasn't because of Sum 41, it's because 'I just don't know if my fans are going to get it.' And he kept asking, I kept saying 'I don't know...'

"And then one day one fateful day," King continues, "he came to me and he said, 'You played on the Beastie Boys [1986 classic No Sleep till BrooklynI]! I went, 'Motherfucker, now you got me. How can I not do it? So then I got on board to do it."

That explains the how, but what about the why? Namely: why would King risk the wrath of metal gatekeepers the world over by mixing it up with a pop punk band? "Any time I do something like that I'm hoping to better Slayer in a world perspective," the guitarist explains. "Maybe kids seeing Sum 41, you know, can see me play and say, 'Hey, who's that guy? Where'd he come from?' and maybe they'll check us out for the first time. So that's why I do stuff like that."

Not only did the experience give King the chance to push Slayer onto a whole new audience, but he also had a merry old time shooting the video itself. "That was cool," he confirms. "I'd never been in a video at that time with that kind of production. Meeting the [Sum 41] guys, i remember they were fans - I don't think to the point of fanboying out like maybe I would over Tony Iommi or something, because that was that's a whole other story - but they were obviously fans and and stoked that I came to be in the video. At the end of the day I think it's pretty cool video!"

Watch Kerry discuss the video below. The Slayer man has a busy summer ahead, with his first solo album, From Hell I Rise, landing on May 17, and solo and Slayer live dates planned throughout festival season.

Earlier this month, WWE superstar Damian Priest made headlines by cashing in his Money In The Bank contract to win the World Heavyweight Championship in a memorable moment at night two of Wrestlemania. A lifelong metalhead, Priest has made no secret of the impact heavy music has had on his life and career, so when the champ was in town for WWE's show at the London O2 on Friday night (April 19), we sat down with the man himself to talk about some of his favourite bands, singing his own theme tune and why metal and wrestling will always be comfortable bedfellows.

You've said that heavy metal had a huge impact on your life. In what way?

"Music in general, it moulds your character. How you dress, how you talk, your vibe. For me, heavy metal is everything I like, because I've always been into the weird, the odd, things that aren't normal. I love that vibe. I've always loved that idea of being different, and [metal] just made me feel alive."

What was your first exposure to metal?

"I grew up in an area that was 100% hip hop [The Bronx, New York], and then moving to a different town and making new friends, my buddy would always play Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer, very thrash metal, but also Swedish influences like In Flames and Soilwork. And I just remember him playing Children Of Bodom, and I was like, 'OK, some of this stuff is like Undertaker music!' As a wrestler I was like, 'Yeah, play Undertaker-style music! Play that stuff that makes me feel something!' But I would say that Metallica and Ozzy were my first [bands] where I was like, 'Oh, I love this.' That's what really got me hooked on heavy metal."

What was it about Metallica and Ozzy that hit you a bit more deeply?

"The sound! It was just more powerful to me. And the lyrics in their songs just really resonated with me and how I felt, my attitude. I just felt the power run through me: the music, the guitar chords, all of it."

Did you get the chance to go to any metal shows when you were younger? What was your first?

"My first concert that my buddies took me to was In Flames and Opeth. It was wild. I'd never seen a mosh pit. Did I go straight in? Yeah, I got in there! I was like, 'Yeah, I can beat everybody up!' Haha! I have a horrible memory, but that one lives with me and was one of the coolest things I'd ever experienced. L'Amour in Brooklyn, at the time, was a big heavy metal place."

I've seen footage of you screaming into a mic. Have you ever sung or played in your own band?

"I love the rock star vibe - that's what Damian Priest is - but I used to guest sing a lot. I would just jump on stage and cover some songs, mainly Pantera or Metallica. Most recently, I was at Kid Rock's bar in Nashville and the band asked me if I wanted to sing a song. I was like, 'Sure!', they were like, 'What do you want?' and I said, 'Give me a Metallica song.' Can I remember which song it was? Enter Sandman. So it's simple, every band knows how to play it, you know how to sing it and get the crowd into it, so that was cool. And then just recently I did the vocals for my own theme song, which is pretty neat."

What was that like?

"That was cool. That was a different experience, going into a studio and recording, having the guys kinda coach me. I was outta my element, obviously, I'd never recorded anything like this, but everybody treated me good there."

Metal and wrestling, it's always felt like there's a connection there. Both are 'niche' but both can fill stadiums. Do you feel there's a duality there?

"Ah, absolutely. I feel like they go hand-in-hand. I mean, you see a wrestling show, you see a sea of black t-shirts, you go to a metal show, you see a sea of black t-shirts, you know? It's one of those things that's the same kind of character or personality. It's something that, to your point, wrestling and metal aren't normal. It's not the norm. Our fanbases are so passionate. I'm a fan of sports and movies and all types of stuff, but when it comes to both those industries, the passion for a fan to be so immersed in it, I think is a special feeling, and you can't compare it to anything else"

Do you have a dream band that could play you to the ring at Wrestlemania? 

"The mighty Metallica! You know what I mean? Can you imagine Metallica playing me to the ring? It'd be wild!"

It feels weird that they've never played Wrestlemania! 

"Yeah. Hey, maybe I've gotta talk to the boss man and be like, 'Hey? What's up with Metallica?' That'd be a whole different dream scenario. I don't even know if I'm ready for that."

What are you listening to at the moment?

"I try to mix it up. Rhea [Ripley] has got me more into Motionless In White and Ice Nine Kills, bands that I heard of but just didn't listen to, but now they're on every playlist I have, which is kinda cool. I like Soilwork's new stuff a lot - a lot, actually - it's on repeat at this point. I'm a big fan of Trivium. I've mentioned In Flames; they went through a phase where they were trying to find their new sound, and man do they got it now. That melodic death, but they figured out a way to do it. It's fire."

Do you get to go to many shows these days or is it a case of just seeing who's in town when you're in a certain territory on the road?

"That's usually how it goes. That's happened to me with Killswitch; I got to see them, I hit up Mike [D'Antonio, Killswitch bassist] and I'm like, 'Hey man, I'm in town!' and he's like, 'Yeah, come to the show!' It's pretty cool, they take care of me."

Still hitting the mosh pits?

"That one I can't do! I can't get in there, smack [into] somebody and then it's on video, like, 'This guy's bullying people!' Not a great look. But still, very much one of my favourite things is live music, as much as I can. Even if it's at a restaurant or a random bar, just a band playing, covering songs, it's always the coolest thing to me. To this day, I can't get over how cool it is."

WWE Backlash: France airs Saturday 4th May on WWE Network and TNT Sports Box Office in the UK and on Peacock in the US.

Tickets for WWE SmackDown & Clash at the Castle: Scotland at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow on Friday June 14 and Saturday June 15 are available next Friday from Ticketmaster.co.uk.

As the former figurehead of Rainbow, Black Sabbath and his decades-spanning solo band, Ronnie James Dio was one of the finest and most identifiable voices in all of heavy metal. In fact, nowadays it’s hard to imagine the inventor of the ‘devil horns’ doing anything else. But – before Elf and everything else – Dio first entered the music world by singing something very, very different…

“I started playing music when I was five,” the late legend told Alternative-Zine in 2005. “I started as a trumpet player, so that was my musical influence as a kid from that particular point, playing classical music… But I didn’t want to carry on as a trumpet player, I was too fascinated by being a bass player and being in a rock ’n’ roll band.”

Back in the late ’50s, a fresh-faced Dio began pursuing his dream as a member of doo-wop band The Vegas Kings. There (known by his birth name, Ronnie Padovana), he played bass. The band would quickly change their name to Ronnie And The Red Caps, which is where Dio got his first chance to flex his astonishing vocal pipes.

“With Vegas Kings we never recorded anything,” Dio continued. “That was too early for us. But in Ronnie And The Redcaps we released the first thing we did, the first thing we wrote. I must have been around 13 or 14.”

Ronnie And The Red Caps put out the single Conquest in 1958, then fronted by original singer Billy De Wolf. It wasn’t until 1960, and after a few changes in the lineup, that the band released the swooning ballad An Angel Is Missing, with the early rock ’n’ roll shuffle of What I’d Say as a b-side. It was on that single that Dio, credited under his now-famous stage name for the first time, handled the vocals.

“That was the band that became Elf,” the frontman said of The Red Caps in 2001. “That was the beginning of it all for me, that’s where you kind of learn what you’re all about and find out that this is what you want to do for the rest of your life. We wore silly hats, but in those days, you did silly things.”

It’s pretty wild to hear Dio singing in such a delicate manner as he does on An Angel Is Missing, but you can feel his unmistakable tone and class nonetheless.

The band’s name was later changed again, with The Red Caps moniker swapped out for Ronnie Dio And The Prophets. The band released a series of singles, including a jiving cover of R&B singer Jessie Hill’s hit Ooh Pah Pah Doo, later made famous by Ike and Tina Turner, for Atlantic Records in 1962. 

David Felstein, who Dio would later invite to play guitar in the initial lineup of Elf, described Ronnie Dio And The Prophets as “the best band around” the local scene at the time.

Ronnie Dio And The Prophets would play their brand of skiffle, R&B and early rock ’n’ roll until evolving into Elf in 1967. It was in that collective that Dio would truly find his voice as one of heavy metal’s greatest-ever vocalists. 

But still, during those early years, Dio showed a very different side to himself, proving his class was always there and that there were no boundaries to his vocal prowess. Frankly, the man could do it all. What a legend.

Few genres on this planet can get you pumped like heavy metal, which is why it's almost always the first thing most of us reach for when hitting the tracks for a run or preparing to lift some weights at the gym. Kris Barras, the MMA fighter-turned-frontman for British hard rockers Kris Barras Band, knows a thing or two about metal and working out, so we got the man himself to compile his ultimate gym playlist. Turn it up, and get ready to break a sweat. 

Avenged Sevenfold - Bat Country 

"Back when I was training for fights, I used to do my morning runs at 6am. I hate running and I am definitely not a morning person, so I needed a track that would fire me up from the get-go. This was always first on my running playlist, guaranteed to get me psyched up and in the zone. I still get butterflies in my stomach when I hear it, reminds me of all those freezing cold mornings on the road!"

Slipknot - Wait And Bleed

"This track was my first introduction to the band, when they started blowing up over here. I was in my early teens and really starting to get into heavier music and when I heard this I just had my mind blown. Lots of Slipknot tracks make it on to my gym playlist now, all the songs you’d expect - Eyeless, Duality etc - but for me, Wait And Bleed will always hold a place in my heart as one of the first tracks that really got me into metal.

Drowning Pool - Bodies

"This one isn’t on my gym playlist any more, but was always there back in the day when hitting pads, sparring etc. It’s a fairly cliche choice; there was a time when you couldn’t go to an MMA show without hearing this one about ten times in a night. I guess that’s why I liked it, though; it always had the association with the fight game for me."

Soulfly - Jumpdafuckup

"This one is a banger, guaranteed to get you pumped. It's always on my weight training playlist. The raw energy and power of the song just gets me going - no way I’m going to quit during a set when this one is on!"

Machine Head - From This Day

This is another nostalgic one for me and sits firmly on my current gym playlist. Whilst The Burning Red probably isn’t the most popular Machine Head album, it was the one that got me into the band. I used to be in a nu metal-type band when I was around 14/15 and this was one of the first songs we covered, playing it at my school’s battle of the bands and local youth clubs. We were terrible, ha ha!"

Disturbed - Down With The Sickness

"I had my first proper fight when I was around 19, under Muay Thai rules. This song was my intro track for my first seven or eight fights. The drum intro playing whilst I stood there getting pumped, then once the ‘OO WAH AH AH AH’ hit, I’d charge into the ring. Got to love the theatrics, ha ha! It would always get me focused and ready for the fight. As I got more experienced, though, I switched it up for something more chilled. I started to feel like needing to be more calm and collected was more important, especially when fighting higher calibre opponents. Just getting mad and psyched doesn’t work against higher ranked guys. So I actually used to do the ring walk to Teardrop by Massive Attack in the later stages of my career."

Architects - Animals 

"Something a bit more recent. I love what these guys do and this track is a banger for sure. It’s the perfect tempo for training too, it just stomps along. The percussive anvil-whacking gives it almost a primal feel. Also, it sounds a little bit like weights dropping. The kind of thing that would get me banned from my local Puregym!"

Bring Me The Horizon - Wonderful Life

"This is by far my favourite Bring Me The Horizon track. There’s something about it that just makes me smile. The orchestration at the end is epic, it just lifts you up and makes you feel good. It's the perfect track for me when I’m on a treadmill, absolutely hating life, this one will come on and I’ll always smile and push through. We actually have this as the last song we listen to in the dressing before walking out on stage."

Kris Barras Band - Unbreakable

"Now, I’m not suggesting for one second that I listen to my own music whilst staring at myself, flexing in a mirror. However, I did once have this on whilst training, when I was getting the mixes sent through after recording the album. Whilst it is no longer on my training playlist, I reckon that it’s a decent enough gym tune for any readers to have a go with!"

Kris Barras Band's latest album Halo Effect is out now via Earache. The band head out on a UK tour starting in Southampton today, April 12

Tuyo, the theme song from Narcos, wafts lazily in the background of the dimly lit studio, as Rob Halford, Judas Priest’s iconic frontman, glares through the dark lenses of his aviator sunglasses, his head crowned by a shiny leather cop hat. The photographer snaps away. 

Dressed to the nines in his black biker coat, hands adorned with fingerless, studded gloves, Rob looks like he’s ready to rain hellfire and brimstone upon a stadium full of surging, wild-eyed headbangers. Then things get weird. “Are you ready for a kitty cat?” inquires Travis Shinn, the photographer. 

“I’m always ready for a kitty cat,” Rob replies, with palpable excitement. This is no saucy volley of double entendres, but an exchange that introduces a heart-melting spectacle. A tiny, orange tabby kitten is handed to Rob, and his stoic metal façade crumbles, revealing a man bursting with unadulterated joy. It’s obvious to every metalhead with an internet connection that Rob loves kittens. 

On Instagram (727,000 followers and counting), he posts an inordinate amount of feline memes, poses in kitty t-shirts, and often tags LA nonprofit Kitten Rescue. However, today’s photoshoot is at a recording studio in Rob’s hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, so we’ve called in local organisation the Arizona Animal Welfare League to brighten Rob’s day. 

Kiwi, the tabby, gazes deeply into the Metal God’s face before suddenly turning fugitive. After a swift rescue, he’s replaced with Hazel, a shy black kitten with saucer-sized eyes. She purrs her way into Rob’s embrace, finding solace in his snowy white beard. The room is now a symphony of coos and clicks, as Travis immortalises the love fest. Rob, lost in the moment, lavishes Hazel with affection, in a scene that’s oddly tender and starkly different from the metal fury that he’s known to command. 

“I love all creatures,” Rob says wistfully, after the last kitten has been whisked away. “Animals were here before we were, weren’t they? Ha ha! So there’s the respect right there. They’re such an important part of your life, whether you’re an owner of a dog, cat, lizard, snake… You develop a bond to this living, breathing creature. They’re companions, they have empathy. Particularly when there’s some kind of challenge going on in their person’s life, like a bereavement, they snuggle up to you. It’s a very profound moment.” 

We retreat to a snug back lounge in the studio – a hallowed ground where Rob’s etched countless tracks into the annals of metal history. His longtime partner, Thomas, delivers a steaming cup of coffee to him. We slump into the black leather couches, ready to get a sense of Rob Halford in 2024. In the public eye, he’s a screeching, leather-clad firebrand, a tireless preacher in the church of heavy metal, ever ready to spread the gospel to the horn-throwing faithful across the globe. 

He’s also a beacon of inclusivity and a much-loved member of the LGBTQIA+ community, coming out on MTV in 1998. But seated across from us today, Rob is mellow. His 72 years have resulted in wisdom born from raw life experience, and a sobriety streak running 38 years strong. He speaks with an ease that’s disarming, flipping questions back at us like a seasoned card shark. Decades in the States haven’t scrubbed away that thick Black Country accent, as if it’s a badge of honour he refuses to shed. 

“Who I am as a person has never really dissipated,” he says. Smiling, he continues, “We call ourselves ‘Yam Yams.’ To be a ‘Yam Yam’ is to come from my part of the West Midlands, or the Black Country, as we call it. And you don’t put yourself on a pedestal. You don’t elevate yourself because we’re all people, we all do different kinds of jobs. I happen to be a singer in a heavy metal band. The fact that it is who it is and what we’ve achieved is irrelevant.” 

In 1973, Rob joined forces with the rampaging British metal beast known as Judas Priest, adding his otherworldly vocals to a classic line-up that included guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing, alongside bassist Ian Hill. Members have come and gone throughout the ensuing half century, including Rob himself, who took leave of the band from 1992-2003 to pursue various solo projects. 

K.K. Downing left in 2011 and, for several years now, the line-up has featured Rob, Glenn and Ian alongside drummer Scott Travis (since 1989) and guitarist Richie Faulkner (since 2011). They’re now poised to release Invincible Shield – incredibly, it’ll be the 19th album for the band, and the 17th for Rob. 

These days, Rob’s a long way from his fellow Yam Yams. He first set foot in Arizona in 1988, rolling through town after a show in Las Vegas. Phoenix, a bizarre cocktail of painted desert mirage and concrete reality, whispered seductively to him, its sun-blasted landscapes cutting a stark contrast to the industrial West Midlands. 

“I’ve always said that everybody has another favourite place, don’t they?” he says. “Like if it’s a vacation place, you keep going back to that one special vacation place because it means so much to you. That’s what happened to me with Phoenix.” 

Over the years, myriad bands have asked Rob to share his insights for surviving the steel-jawed carnivore that is the music industry, including a young System Of A Down passing through Phoenix in the 90s, while opening for Slayer. “I told them that you have to remember to love each other, talk to each other and give each other hugs,” he says. 

“Every band is this great big emotional fireball. It’s a very difficult process to keep it all working well. On the musical level, things might be working fine, but it’s the other stuff you really need to pay attention to as well. That’s why I always say, in my bits of Gandalf metal wisdom, talk to each other. Whatever’s on your mind, just say what it is. The development of your relationship with people in the band is probably more important than your relationship with the music.” 

In 1986, after years of relentlessly punishing his body and his psyche with booze and drugs, Rob put himself before the music and raised the white flag with his bandmates. He dove headlong into recovery, and has remained clean and sober ever since. In 2020, he underwent treatments to remove cancerous growths from his prostate, receiving the all-clear from doctors a year later. 

“Before,” he says, “when I was faced with life issues, particularly when I was in the closet, I’d just get blitzed out of my mind because a) it would make me feel better and b) it would kind of dampen down the pain I was going through. So to be at this place now where you deal head-on with, ‘Oh, you’ve got cancer’ – back in the day, it would have been ‘Give me a couple of lines,’ or ‘Let me do a gram.’” 

Today, Rob exudes a deep sense of ease. Every morning, he does a prayer ritual, and every night he practises gratitude. “Now I’m always at this kind of peaceful place, to deal with anything that life throws at me,” he adds. “It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? It is a gift.” 

It’s a gift that served him well in 1998 when, during his time away from Judas Priest, he stepped into the glaring lights of MTV and came out to the world. “I think that most people know that I’ve been a gay man all of my life, and it’s only been in recent times that it’s an issue I feel comfortable to address,” he said on camera. “This is the moment to discuss it.” 

“When I made that announcement at the MTV studio, I didn’t really realise how big of a deal that was going to be,” he says today. “This was before the internet, so the way the message was communicated was at a snail’s pace. Which isn’t a bad thing, because when Billie Eilish finally made the pronunciation of who she is [she unintentionally came out as bisexual in 2023], the world was on fire for 48 hours and then the world moved on. I think I understood within a matter of days how I’d now put myself into a place of, ‘What’s going to happen next?’” 

In the landscape of the 90s music industry, coming out as LGBTQIA+ was akin to stepping into a hurricane. An artist risked lost record deals, vanishing radio play and a mainstream audience recoiling in their archaic prejudices. For Rob to go public was pure courage on display, and he felt a flood of relief. 

“There’s no doubt that I became a better person because I could just let go of a lot of the walls that I had to create around me for my own protection,” he continues. “Mostly for the band’s protection. If I’d have gone back to Priest as I did, and I still hadn’t come out of the closet, would I have made that announcement? Life has these beautiful things that happen to you that are sometimes out of your reach. So that coming out episode was probably the best opportunity that I had to suddenly be who I am.”

Today, Rob is not only a well-loved member of the metal community, but of the mainstream. In 2022, Judas Priest were finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, alongside country music legend – and gay icon – Dolly Parton. The ceremony unleashed a bizarre yet brilliant spectacle, with the Metal God joining forces with Dolly or a rendition of her massive hit Jolene, resplendent in a long, black, glinting jacket with vertical, stud-embellished white strips. 

“Somehow, instinctively, I knew we were going to meet,” Rob explains with a radiant intensity. “I always tell the story of my mother’s grandmother, who was a clairvoyant, and I still think I’ve got a little of that in me, because something went, ‘You’re going to meet Dolly Parton.’ 

Two or three days later, these emails come into the office, and Dolly’s reached out, asking, ‘Would you sing some lines on Jolene?’ You sit at home and go, ‘Oh my god, this is truly going to happen!’ Being a gay guy, ‘I’ve got nothing to wear!’ I know that she likes to sparkle and I like to sparkle, so what I wore on that night was apropos.” 

When they first met at the rehearsal, the two legends clicked immediately. “She goes, ‘I love your beard!’” he exclaims, “and she starts to clean my beard! It was so surreal! I’m meeting this living legend and she’s tickling my beard and going, ‘So you’re going to sing some Jolene with me?’ I was just floating.” 

In 2023, the two duetted on the song Bygones, for Dolly’s crossover album, Rockstar. Rob opens his arms and gestures broadly across the room, explaining that he recorded his vocals in this very studio while she was in Nashville with her producer, Kent Wells. 

“We’re on the phone to each other and she’s going [puts on a credible Southern US accent], ‘Send me the files! Send me the files!’ So I sent her the files and she calls back and goes, ‘I love these! This is gonna be great!’ This is Dolly Parton on speakerphone! Ha ha! She’s just this beautiful beacon of life. You can tell by the way I’m speaking that this is important to me as a musician, to have had this literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with someone so great.” 

It wasn’t the only once-in-a-lifetime opportunity Rob had last year. On October 7, he walked onstage at California’s Power Trip – one of the biggest metal festivals in history. With upwards of 200,000 attendees over three days, it featured Metallica, Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC, Tool and there, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of Ozzy Osbourne’s unfortunate cancellation due to health reasons, Judas Priest. 

Reviewers, in a blissed-out, post-festival haze, anointed Judas Priest as the weekend’s zenith, eclipsing even the mighty AC/DC. It was a thrilling testament to the electrifying allure of OG British metal in a world overrun by a mainstream gone stagnant. “It felt right,” Rob says. 

“It felt like we needed to be there. I saw all my friends who were going to be playing, including Ozzy, and I thought, ‘Man, this is so great. What a great cross section of rock and metal.’ But Power Trip was more about showing this league of musicians together in a very unique presentation. The sadness that Ozzy wasn’t able to make it and the thrill to get the call – that Ozzy would love to see if you guys would step in – that kind of completed the picture in a lot of ways, minus Ozzy.” 

In 2018, Glenn Tipton stepped away from touring duties after disclosing a diagnosis of later-stage Parkinson’s disease. He’s remained active in the studio and has appeared onstage with the band a number of times since. In the dusty California desert, he joined them once again to the roaring delight of the crowd. 

Beaming with pride, Rob says, “It was just beautiful when he came out and the audience went, ‘Glenn!’ He’s such a hero and he received so much love and respect, as he deserves, because he’s one of the greatest ever metal guitar players that’s lived. There is no other guitar player like Glenn Tipton. “That was a special moment for Glenn. It was almost like a complete cycle because – I won’t say this with my hand on my heart – but there’s a possibility that was the last time that you saw Glenn play live.

It’s getting increasingly difficult for him. So for him to find the strength to actually come out and play is a beautiful thing. Having said that, we’re about to start the big Invincible Shield tour in the UK and, if I know Glenn, he’ll get in his car and drive to Glasgow, do the show and then drive home. Ha ha!”

[since this interview, Glenn has indeed made two more appearances with Judas Priest as part of the band's UK tour]

With Rob, Glenn and Ian in their 70s, it’d be both easy and misleading to view Invincible Shield as a bookend to Judas Priest’s storied career. For Rob, it’s a continuation of what they’ve always delivered. “It’s another strong, solid representation of what this band can do,” he says. “We’re not holding back. There’s still this full-on determination to see if we’ve still got it.”

With Invincible Shield, they have distilled the essence of their past and blended it with the force of modern production. In the ‘Don’t Repair Things That Work Just Fine’ category, the guys relied on the songwriting model that’s served them faithfully for decades. 

“When Glenn and Richie and myself get in a room, like Priest have always done, as a three-piece – two guitar players and a singer – that’s the metal magic,” Rob explains. “All of that energy, all of that youthful exuberance was still there in those initial writing sessions.” 

Rob then answers the question about Glenn that’s been endlessly asked on social media. “He’s still an important contributor to everything this band does,” Rob says, “including his work all over Invincible Shield. That’s Glenn playing the guitar. So whether it’s just a chord, whether it’s riffs, or whether it’s a little bit of lead, Glenn is on Invincible Shield. That needs to be said. His value and his input have not diminished; he’s just as important a part of Priest as he ever was.” 

As Rob listened to the grooves coming together, the lyrics and themes began revealing themselves to him – particularly the defiant title track. “I realised that all of these songs are part of an invincible shield,” he explains. 

“Priest is an invincible shield. Metal is an invincible shield. Our fans create an invincible shield. I just love the visualisation. Initially, a shield defends you, but it also lets you push forward. It’s a great object, a shield. Then you put the word ‘invincible’ next to it and man, that’s a big statement right there. I presented the whole idea to the guys and they were like, ‘Yeah, thumbs up – let’s do this!’”

Longtime producer Andy Sneap has taken on an even greater role. In addition to stepping in for Glenn as the band’s second guitarist, he wields a galaxy of experience gleaned from producing and jamming with a legion of metal bands. 

“Andy’s a blessing,” says Rob. “Firstly, the day that Glenn said he felt that he was going to step back and let Andy stand in his place onstage, that was a very profound moment. Andy was able to do Glenn’s parts really well. He was in a band called Hell and he was in a band called Sabbat.” Rob grins. “That’s the black dog metal – the evil stuff, as I call it.” 

Invincible Shield opens with an eyebrow-searing firestorm of Panic Attack, The Serpent And The King and the title track. “We always think about those first three tracks,” explains Rob. “I think that every band understands that your fans have been eagerly awaiting your new music and you’ve really got to be strong and forceful in what you’re displaying. By the end of your third song, the commitment should be there from your fans. They’ve got to be going, ‘You guys have got it. I’m all-in!’” 

At this moment, Travis, our photographer, walks into the room to bid farewell. He compliments Rob on the black leather codpiece he wore during the shoot, before turning to leave. “Travis! Come here… Travis!” shouts Rob. As he re-enters the room, Rob flings the codpiece to him. “Are you serious?” asks a gobsmacked Travis. 

“Yes. It’s a new one, actually,” Rob says. 

“You just made my day,” says our intrepid photographer. 

“You can send me a Christmas card with you wearing that,” laughs Rob. “Have you ever, in your life, with all the bands you’ve worked with, had a gift like that?” 

Howls of laughter fill the room. Along with a new album and touring, 2024 ushers in a momentous occasion: the anniversary of Priest’s debut album. For Rob, it’s something of a full-circle moment. 

“We are going to be celebrating 50 years of Rocka Rolla, so I’ve just sat down and been listening to it again. We’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for that record,” he smiles. “The timing on One For The Road, and the phrasing on that, it’s so peculiar, so different, it’s so never-been-done-before… those little elements have been with Priest from Rocka Rolla to Invincible Shield.” 

At 72 years old, Rob remains energised, still delivering metal bangers with convincing passion while taking time to donate codpieces to wayward photographers, cuddle cats, run a wildly entertaining Instagram account and be a generally awesome human being. Though seasoned by the years behind him, Rob Halford continues to look squarely into the future, embracing change and living in a state of gratitude. 

“What I like today about the music business is that people used to have to fit into boxes. It was almost like there was an expiration date, you know? Ageism would play its role and the way you looked played a role. All that’s done now. 

There’s just total respect there for everything that you do, how you look, what you say, whether you’re straight, gay, whatever. That’s irrelevant, because we’re all people and we’re all being creative in the music world.” 

He smiles. “We’re still a bunch of kids, really! Ha ha! We get in the van and flip each other off! It’s stupid but it’s beautiful.”

Invincible Shield is out now via Sony. Judas Priest are on tour now. For the full list of dates, visit the band's official website

Whether it's Stone Cold Steve Austin's love of Saxon and Judas Priest, Chris Jericho fronting his own metal band Fozzy or Megadeth icon Dave Mustaine presenting Triple H with the Spirit Of Lemmy Award at Download 2016, the link between pro wrestling and metal has been a constant since way back in the 1980s. 

This coming weekend, WWE's biggest annual event and the biggest spectacle in all of wrestling, Wrestlemania, returns for its 40th incarnation courtesy of a two-night extravaganza in Philadelphia, so we thought we'd take a trip down memory lane to pick out 12 times heavy metal has stolen the show on the grandest stage of them all. From rock legends accompanying their countrymen to the ring in Wrestlemania's earliest days to nu metal heavyweights rubbing shoulders with undead icons, metal and the WWE have combined to provide some timeless moments we'll never, ever forget.

Ozzy Osbourne accompanies the British Bulldogs (Wrestlemania 2, 1986)

Following the success of the inaugural Wrestlemania a year prior, its sequel was held simultaneously at three different venues across the United States on April 7 1986. One of the shows, taking place at the Rosemont Horizon (now the Allstate Arena) just outside Chicago, featured a main event of The Dream Team (Greg Valentine and Brutus Beefcake) defending the WWF Tag Team Championships against The British Bulldogs (Davey Boy Smith and Dynamite Kid). Accompanying the Bulldogs and their manager Captain Lou Albano to the ring? None other than Ozzy Osbourne, who watched on as the Brits captured the gold.

Alice Cooper accompanies Jake 'The Snake' Roberts (Wrestlemania 3, 1987)

Jake 'The Snake' Roberts was one of the most feared and respected wrestlers of his era, rarely seen without his beloved pet python Damien (look, the 80s was a wild time, OK?). Who better to be in Jake's corner for his Wrestlemania 3 hoedown against The Honky Tonk Man than the godfather of shock rock himself, Alice Cooper?! Alice even got in on the action, grabbing Damien and freaking out poor Jimmy Hart with his slithery pal after the match. "I had performed in front of big audiences, but nothing like WrestleMania III. It was terrifying," The Coop would say years later.

Motörhead play Triple H to the ring (Wrestlemania 17, 2001)

Triple H's relationship with Motörhead - and Lemmy in particular - is well documented. The British rock legends soundtracked Trips' famous The Game entrance theme in the early 2000s, and he and Lem became firm friends over the years that followed. At Wrestlemania 17 in 2001, the two icons united in the coolest way imaginable, as Motörhead actually played Triple H to the ring for his match with fellow WWF mainstay, The Undertaker. Badass. Motörhead would repeat the trick a few years later for Wrestlemania 21.

Saliva play Wrestlemania twice (Wrestlemania 18, 2002)

Nu metal was well and truly ruling the world in the early 2000s, and the WWF knew it. Saliva were becoming one of the US's biggest alternative bands at the time, so for Wrestlemania 18 at the Toronto SkyDome in 2002, they got to play the biggest party in wrestling twice - once to kick off the show and again to play The Dudley Boyz to the ring later on. Not a bad night's work.

Drowning Pool play Wrestlemania twice too! (Wrestlemania 18, 2002) 

Hey, we told you nu metal was big in those days! Sure enough, Wrestlemania 18 was granted four nu metal performances in 2002, with Drowning Pool also pulling double-duty, playing their single Tear Away and following in the footsteps of Motörhead by playing a re-tweaked version of The Game for Triple H's entrance ahead of the show's main event. Drowning Pool's cover of The Game definitely hasn't served as the definitive version, but it's still remains a fun throwback to a unique time. 

Limp Bizkit play The Undertaker to the ring (Wrestlemania 19, 2003)

Anyone reading this who followed the WWE/F in the early 00s surely knew Limp Bizkit would appear in this list at some point; Rollin' was famously The Undertaker's theme song of choice during the early days of his American Bad Ass era. Fred and the boys finally got to play the song for him in person at Wrestlemania 19 in 2003, ahead of his match against The Big Show and A-Train. And, like their predecessors at Wrestlemania 18, Bizkit also got to play the event twice, performing Crack Addict earlier in the show. 

P.O.D. play Rey Mysterio to the ring (Wrestlemania 22, 2006)

Christian nu metal veterans P.O.D. not only put out some certified bangers in the early 00s; they're also etched into WWE canon forever after penning the theme tune for legendary cruiserweight Rey Mysterio. Rey's fellow San Diego natives played him to the ring for his historic triple threat match against Randy Orton and Kurt Angle for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship at Wrestlemania 22. Rey would emerge victorious, securing his first world title.

Metallica soundtrack a classic Hell In A Cell (Wrestlemania 28, 2012)

When Triple H and The Undertaker stole the show in a brutalising match at Wrestlemania 27 in 2011, you sensed their Mania legacy might not be done yet. Sure enough, one year later in Miami, the two WWE icons took things to another level courtesy of one of wrestling's most infamous and dangerous encounters - Hell In A Cell. As if throwing in fellow WWE legend Shawn Michaels as special guest referee wasn't enough to add to the occasion, the demonic cell structure itself even got its own entrance theme - Metallica's The Memory Remains. 

Nita Strauss shreds for Shinsuke Nakamura (Wrestlemania 34, 2018)

After taking a back seat at Wrestlemania for most of the following decade in favour of pop, hip hop and r'n'b acts, metal has returned in a big way at Wrestlemania in recent years - not least at Wrestlemania 34 in New Orleans in 2018. Reigning WWE Champion AJ Styles defended his title against recent Royal Rumble winner Shinsuke Nakaruma, and the challenger decided to level-up his rock star entrance courtesy of an army of violinists and an appearance from guitarist Nita Strauss, who soloed the crap out of Shinsuke's badass theme.

Metallica soundtrack The Undertaker's final match (Wrestlemania 36, 2020)

As a man who went undefeated at Wrestlemania for 21 matches straight, The Undertaker will forever be etched into the lore of WWE's biggest show. At Wrestlemania 36 in 2020, in what would turn out to be his final bout, The Phenom defeated AJ Styles in a unique, cinematic 'Boneyard' match. The encounter was bookended by the use of Metallica banger Now That We're Dead - the third time the metal legends' music had been used to hype an Undertaker match at Wrestlemania following Manias 27 (For Whom The Bell Tolls) and 28 (The Memory Remains). 

New Years Day play Rhea Ripley to the ring (Wrestlemania 37, 2021)

Anyone who's read our interview with Rhea Ripley knows she's the most metal wrestler to hit the WWE's women's division in years, even utilising much-missed Suicide Silence frontman Mitch Lucker's famous 'death stomp' in her entrances. In 2021, she went one step further by getting Cali metallers New Years Day to play her to the ring for her match against Asuka for the Raw Women's Championship. They even stomped along with her!

Edge makes a historic, Slayer-powered entrance (Wrestlemania 39, 2023)

Adam 'Edge' Copeland is famously a huge metal fan, telling Metal Hammer back in 2021 that he longed to see Metallica actually play Wrestlemania one day. We can only imagine his excitement at getting to use classic, evil AF Slayer anthem Angel Of Death for his spectacular entrance at Wrestlemania 39 in Los Angeles last year. Donning a glittering skull mask and bat wings, it might just make for the most metal wrestling entrance of all time.

Camden has long had a reputation for being London’s most metal area. From legendary music venues like The Underworld, the Electric Ballroom and the Roundhouse, to beloved bars such as The Dev and The Black Heart, it’s a cornerstone of nightlife for any local – or visitor – who loves their music heavy. Raven Records is the newest – and perhaps most innovative – fixture of the community, offering not only an impressive selection of kickass records, but a fully stocked non-alcoholic bar and café.

“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” explains owner Ben Dean, who opened Raven Records with his fiancée, Chloe Marlow, in late 2023. “I got into Alcoholics Anonymous at the age of 24, so I’m over 16 years now without a drink, but I find it a bit of a struggle in terms of going out. A lot of the time, in metal bars, you’re limited to Coke, lemonade, Red Bull or water. We’re not judging people on how they drink. It’s just that, for me, I can’t drink, and I wanted to create a place where I’m comfortable with everything on offer.”

Comfort is paramount to what Raven Records provides – Ben and Chloe hope to cultivate a safe social space for metalheads and alternative music fans of all stripes. Their shop stocks albums from 80s glam metallers Cinderella to Greek black metallers Rotting Christ, and everything in between. But while their range of music is undoubtedly impressive, so is the fact that there’s a fully stocked 0% alcohol bar, offering everything from IPAs and ciders to non-alcoholic whisky.

And if you want something warmer? Raven Records also sells an array of metal-inspired hot drinks, including some decidedly kvlt coffee blends such as the “ultra dark roasts” from Black Coffee Worship (a company formed by a “Swedish-born, Liverpool-residing goth”).

Ben and Chloe met on a dating app in September 2021. Both have a deep-rooted love for metal, and while Chloe enjoys the melodic and brutal stuff alike, Ben’s music tastes have only grown more and more extreme. They also share a history of working in the music industry, he as an A&R representative and she as a DJ. So when it came to orchestrating a proposal, Ben did it in the most metal way possible: crowdsurfing during Download Festival 2023. “I went crowdsurfing dressed as a mermaid,” Ben remembers fondly. “I was hoping I’d see him on the big screen,” laughs Chloe, “but I’m quite short, so I didn’t see a thing!”

The seed for Raven Records was planted in November 2022. “I said to Ben that I’d been wanting to set up a shop for a while,” Chloe says. “He went, ‘I also want to set up a shop – this is really cool! Let’s have a think about it and see if we can make it work.’ We combined our two ideas, our two concepts, together.”

The search for a physical location took some time, however. Ben and Chloe initially eyed a shop near Shepherd’s Bush, but the deal fell through. They also scouted out a former kebab place in Tufnell Park, which Chloe reflects on as “the grimmest thing ever”.

“I’m never eating takeaway kebabs again for the rest of my life,” she laughs. Eventually, the spot at 24 Camden Road became available, putting them at the heart of the heavy community. The record-selling, bar and café components are all up and running, although there’s still room to expand. Ben and Chloe are planning to open up the decidedly Helvete-like space downstairs, so they can host tarot readings, artist signings and more.

In the longer term, the aspiration is for Raven Records to extend its influence beyond Camden and into the wider metal scene. Their ultimate goal is to set up shop at UK festivals to offer pastoral care, whether to metal fans who are trying to quit drinking, or those who just need to take a break. Ben also hopes that Raven Records will help change people’s perceptions about drinking on a night out.

“This should be a place where people can come and socialise and have a chat without having to lubricate themselves with alcohol, which I think a lot of society does at the moment,” he says. “I found Rob Halford, when he talked about being 38 years sober recently, really inspirational. I think we need more people that can stick the flag in the ground and say, ‘I’m sober, and that doesn’t make me less of a metal fan.’”

Find out more at ravenrecordshop.com. For support with alcohol addiction, visit alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk

A splatter comedy fuelled by heavy metal, 2015’s Deathgasm was an unexpected runaway success. The independent film followed a teenage band who accidentally summon evil via ancient sheet music – with exceptionally messy consequences. But as writer/director Jason Howden tells Metal Hammer today, “I never aspired to make a hit movie – or even a particularly good movie! Ha ha!” 

Jason’s vision was fuelled not by dreams of cinematic grandeur, red carpets or glitzy awards shows, but by a lust for the gritty, rebellious essence of low-budget filmmaking. 

“I wanted my own war stories!” exclaims the New Zealander, reflecting on his inspirations like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Evil Dead. However, destiny had big plans, and Deathgasm shot to underground fame, resonating powerfully with metalheads and horror enthusiasts alike – a testament to taking unhinged creative risks. 

At the film’s 2015 premiere at the South By Southwest festival, in Austin, Texas, Jason found himself an unlikely celebrity. “I remember being in Austin and a couple of people were like, ‘Dude, you’re the Deathgasm director!’ It hadn’t even been released yet. It was really weird to have people come up and congratulate me and talk about the film and say they were fans.” 

The 2023 announcement that a Deathgasm sequel is now in the works has the metal community ablaze with anticipation. Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon picks up where the original left off – which presents some creative plotting, considering the original ended with (and if you don’t want spoilers, read no further) most of the characters dying in a demonic apocalypse. 

Jason has it all sussed out, however, teasing, “The problem with Brodie [the film’s protagonist] is that his ex-bandmates are dead. But he still has these magic pages [the sheet music from the original], and some passages in those pages do different things. In the sequel, he finds there’s a passage that can raise the dead!” 

Deathgasm revolutionised the portrayal of metalheads in cinema. Jason, a lifelong headbanger and connoisseur of old-school death metal, sought to dismantle the tired trope of metal fans as the quintessential bad guys. He explains, “Before Deathgasm, there were so many movies where, whenever they needed a generic bully, they put them in a jean vest or an Anthrax t-shirt and the audience would be like, ‘Oh, he’s a bad guy because he listens to metal.’” 

Deathgasm flipped this narrative, showcasing metalheads as the unlikely heroes – similar to Eddie Munson from Stranger Things, several years later – challenging the stigma and offering a new perspective. Off-camera, Jason has enlisted some serious firepower for the sequel, which will feature a soundtrack composed by Matt Heafy of Trivium. 

Matt, who was deeply impacted by the original film, eagerly joined the project, excited to contribute to a franchise that he feels breathes fresh life into the horror genre. 

“I was obsessed with the movie,” Matt tells Metal Hammer. “It blew my mind! Since then, I’ve befriended Jason. I kept telling him, ‘If there’s ever space for me or if you need a composer to do the next film, think about me.’ Lo and behold, this is where we’re at.” 

“Matt took me backstage at one of Trivium’s shows in Melbourne, Australia, and we had some beers, recalls Jason. “He was really supportive and when he heard that we were doing the sequel. He was just like, ‘Dude, I’m doing this.’”

For Matt, working on Deathgasm 2 is the realisation of a long-held ambition, one that began with his childhood love for videogames and cinema. After scoring two videogames to date, with scores for both a third game and a second film in the works, he sees Deathgasm 2 as an opportunity to weave multiple styles – including metal, obviously – into the narrative fabric of cinema. 

“I hope to do a lot more because I grew up with film,” he says. “I love it so much and I feel like a good soundtrack can absolutely make a movie and a bad soundtrack can absolutely ruin a movie. I sent some crazy ideas to Jason. It will be surprising to see if they happen or not, but some really cool stuff.” 

“I’m really excited about Matt’s enthusiasm and the drive that he has!” Jason says. “I’m so jealous because he is one of those people who is so charismatic and just so good with people. He’s just amazing to work with.” 

Against all odds, predictions and algorithms, Deathgasm exploded as a cultural juggernaut, bleeding beyond the screen into a vivid tapestry of iconic memes, tattoos, Halloween costumes and a joyfully rabid fanbase. Jason, now ensconced in his New Zealand home, marvels at this global frenzy as he looks forward to starting filming in February. 

This isn’t just cinema; it’s a blood-spattered, riff-powered cultural rebellion, a raucous bridge between darkened theatres and surging moshpits. With Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon thundering on the horizon, armed with more gore, knee-buckling humour and Matt Heafy’s sonic alchemy, fans have every reason to be excited, even if the movie’s release is still a while off yet.

To support Deathgasm 2: Goremageddon and get updates, visit the official Kickstarter. 

Roger Waters and David Gilmour may have a higher profile, but Nick Mason is the longest-serving member of Pink Floyd, and the only person to have appeared on all of their studio albums, from 1967’s debut Piper At The Gates Of Dawn to their 2014 swansong The Endless River.

During that time, the band have successfully incorporated a number of different styles into their expansive sound, from the acid-fuelled psychedelia of their early, Syd Barrett-led era to the hints of disco lurking below the surface of their worldwide 1980 Another Brick In The Wall Pt.2. Yet there’s one genre that Mason says never suited Pink Floyd: heavy metal.

Not that they haven’t dabbled in the heavier side of things. The Gold, It’s In The… (from the soundtrack to 1971 movie Obscured By Clouds), the menacing One Of These Days (from 1971’s Meddle), Young Lust (from 1979’s landmark The Wall album) and the blazing Not Now John (which appeared on Roger Water’s final album with Floyd, 1983’s The Final Cut) all found Floyd cranking up the volume to varying degrees.

But there’s one song, a relative obscurity recorded near the beginning of their career, that Mason says convinced Pink Floyd that they could never match the raucous power of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The song itself would subsequently be covered by such influential metal bands as Voivod and Melvins, proving that Mason’s instincts were a little off-target.

The track the drummer is referring to is The Nile Song, a blast of pummelling noise that appeared on the largely psychedelic soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 movie More.

“The Nile Song is probably the heaviest thing we recorded,” Mason told Classic Rock in 2020. “But we weren’t tempted to pursue that particular avenue, no. Bands like Led Zeppelin did it much better than us. We would have made a pretty terrible heavy metal band.”

Despite his dismissiveness, More actually features another song, Ibiza Bar, which sees Floyd turning the volume right up. While it won’t give Black Sabbath any sleepless nights, it does show that they could kick out the jams when they wanted to.

Ironically, while Pink Floyd themselves never played The Nile Song live, Mason’s current band Saucerful Of Secrets, which focusses on Floyd’s early, pre-Dark Side Of The Moon material, included it in their live set in 2018.

After a few years of internal strife, New Wave Of American Heavy Metal trailblazers Chimaira returned in 2007 with a reconfigured line-up and a new hunger with the killer Resurrection album. In this classic interview from that year, singer Mark Hunter and guitarist Matt DeVries told Metal Hammer about the frustrations that almost led to their split a few years earlier

Liars… or merely misguided ingénues? It’s one of oldest band dodges around. When an album, released with great expectations, doesn’t perform as demanded, then look for a scapegoat. Label, management, producer, drummer, goldfi sh… anything will do. Just deflect the blame.

Enter Cleveland’s Chimaira. Their self-titled 2005 record got a cruelly unfair critical and commercial mauling. Therefore, are they now trying to lick wounds by licking an unseen nemesis that’s solely responsible for the perceived failure last time out? No chance. It’s honesty all the way.

“Look, we love the Chimaira album,” insists guitarist Matt DeVries. “Sure, we were under a lot of pressure, trying to follow on from the success of The Impossibility Of Reason (2003), and maybe we were being a little too meticulous with the music, and somewhat sidetracked because we were struggling a little to make a new line-up work. But, musically, we’re proud of what we achieved back then. The problems lie in the way it was promoted, or not promoted.”

Chimaira have long been regarded as among the premier bands of the so-called New Wave Of American Metal. The combination of DeVries, fellow guitarist Rob Arnold, vocalist Mark Hunter, bassist Jim LaMarca, keyboard player Chris Spicuzza and drummer Andols Herrick hit hard with 2001’s debut Pass Out Of Existence and the subsequent …Reason. But everything got turned on its head when Herrick quit in 2003 because he couldn’t take the touring regime any more. All of which brought in former Soilwork drummer Richard Evensand, for a brief, explosive tenure.

“Let’s just say that things didn’t work out, and leave it at that,” says the diplomatic DeVries.

Oh yeah? Hunter has no such qualms in explaining where the problem lies.

“Richie was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He could be the nicest guy in the world one minute, and then turn into a fucking freak the next.”

So, enter Kevin Talley, who played on the Chimaira album. He proved to be difficult in his own right. Again, over to Hunter…

“This wasn’t another situation like Richie, but I had real issues with Kevin. At the time of the last album, I had a lot on my mind, trying to deal with a lot of shit that was going down with the band. There were cracks starting to appear for the fi rst time in our relationships on the road. I would have arguments with Matt and Jim, and Kevin would take their side, which really irritated me. So, we weren’t getting along. I wasn’t in the mood, so Kevin and I clashed a lot.”

As Hunter now admits, things were getting very fractious, to the point where Chimaira almost fell apart. And he readily accepts some of the blame.

“We were still giving everything onstage, but I know that I was in a bad place. I was drinking before going onstage, which I never did before. And I was also trashing the equipment. I think it’s fair to say that Matt, Rob and I, at different times, each wondered whether there was any reason to carry on. And then one day, I can’t tell you exactly when, I realised where the real problems were, and what we had to do.”

Refreshed by this epiphany, Hunter – very much the leader of the band – started to clean up his house.

“I realised that I had to stand up and do what was necessary to save this band. I’d been dodging my responsibility as the guy everyone looked to for guidance. It was time to take control again. First thing we needed to do was change labels. Now, I love a lot of the people at Roadrunner, who put out the first three records, but we were getting little support from them on the Chimaira campaign. Fortunately, they agreed to let us go.

“Then it was time to deal with Talley! We were lucky in that, at the end of 2005, Andols played at the Roadrunner United show in New York (celebrating the company’s 25th anniversary). I asked people whose opinion I trusted what they thought of his performance, and they thought he was really kicking. In fact, I gather when someone asked him whether he regretted leaving the band, his response was to sing Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time! So, I called Andols up and asked if he’d like to come along and jam with us when Kevin wasn’t around. That clinched it. I then phoned up Kevin and explained he was out, but that we wanted to do things amicably.I’m prepared to accept that the troubles weren’t entirely down to him… we all have to share the blame.”

Free of the immediate problems, the revitalised band started to write songs again.

“Suddenly, the pressure was off,” exclaims DeVries. “We could be ourselves, and go wherever we wanted musically. We did all of the writing without a record deal, and having Andols back gave us a unity again. This time, we all got involved a lot more. And I started noticing we were ripping ourselves off. How cool was that? In the past, there would be a riff that was pure Sepultura. Now I was hearing our own stuff coming back at us. Finally, it was like we had our own identity.”

Taking their time, the band signed to Nuclear Blast in Europe and Ferret in America. “We could have picked up a deal immediately,” interjects DeVries, “but wanted to wait until we had the record written. That way there could be no interference.”

They chose to work with producers Jason Suecof and Andy Sneap on the most crucial record of their career, the aptly titled Resurrection. “We love what people like Colin Richardson and Ben Schigel have given us in the past,” says the guitarist. “But we’re all fans of Andy Sneap, and what metal band would pass on the chance to record with him? As, for Jason…well, Mark worked with him on the song The Enemy from the Roadrunner United album, and loved what he did with his vocals…

“He’s almost a fucking musical genius,” shouts Hunter. “He’s got his own band, Crotchduster, whose style is crazy. That’s one of the things which attracted us. He writes songs that are two minutes long, and others which stretch out to 10 minutes. Mind you, not everything about working with him is easy. He’d go missing in action! Seriously, he wouldn’t turn up at the studio, and nobody knew where he was.”

Suecof also had an annoying habit about being right without having a clue about the background to an idea. Hunter can barely contain his amusement.

“He came in one day when Rob was playing a riff, and told him to cut the thing in half. Rob was furious, because Jason hadn’t been around to hear the whole idea – just that little bit. At first he refused, but I convinced him to try it Jason’s way – you know what, it worked! The guy just has ability to make instant judgements, and more often than not, they improve things. He also pushed me so hard. I’d do a vocal take, and he’d force me to do it again. Jason and Andy got an extra fi ve per cent out of us and that’s what made the difference.”

Ironically, the most confrontational album of Chimaira’s career has happened because they were so relaxed and in focus.

“Can you believe we came up with our most brutal, although diverse, album through smiling and laughing?” laughs DeVries. “If we ever get depressed, we’ll probably do an acoustic album.”

“It was like doing our debut all over again,” concurs Hunter. “As long as we were satisfied, nothing else existed. But that comes from having belief, and that’s something I have more than anyone. My philosophy is I make mistakes with this band, but I’m always right!”

So, where does Resurrection put Chimaira in relation to their New Wave Of American Metal peers? DeVries laughs at the whole concept.

“We invented this genre! A long time ago, as a joke, we did t-shirts with our name in the style of the Iron Maiden logo, and the legend ‘New Wave Of American Heavy Metal’ on the back. It was inspired by the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. It was meant to be fun. Now everyone regards it as something serious. Do we have anything to prove? Only to ourselves.”

Besides, whatever the symbolic explanations behind the Resurrection title, these boys just wanna have fun.

“We did a very serious, almost reality TV, DVD with The Dehumanizing Process (released in 2004),” concludes DeVries. “But is that what fans need? If we ever do another DVD it’ll be inspired by Mötley Crüe – lots of sex, drugs and insanity. And that’s what we’ve now got back – a love for the music.”

Resurrection’ is not just one of the most important metal albums of the 2007, it’s given Chimaira a renewed thirst for doing what they do best. Hallelujah – and pass the bottle.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 163

On Saturday night (March 2) at 7.50pm, the latest episode of iconic BBC game show The Weakest Link aired, featuring no fewer than eight celebrities duking it out via their finest general knowledge skills to win a big wad of money for a charity of their choice. Amongst the contestants on the episode were Eastenders actress Jo Joyner, TV presenter Jenny Powell, Emmerdale's Natalie Anderson and The Apprentice contestant Thomas Skinner.

It was actor and metal/prog superfan Mark Benton, however, star of the likes of Early Doors, Waterloo Road and Barbara, who ended up walking away with the prize - an impressive £9,400 pot. He bested Natalie in the final, 'sudden death' round, correctly answering that David Mitchell is the name of both the author of acclaimed 2004 sci-fi novel Cloud Atlas and the British actor who made his name in Peep Show.

Mark revealed that the charity of choice that his winnings would be going to is none other than the Heavy Metal Truants, the cycling charity group spearheaded by Iron Maiden manager Rod Smallwood and former Metal Hammer Editor-In-Chief Alexander Milas, who raise money for children's charities Nordoff & Robbins, Childline, Teenage Cancer Trust and Save The Children. Or, as Mark himself put it after his win, "a bunch of rock stars and journalists that do lots of events for children's charities."

Watch Mark dedicate his winnings below, and watch the whole latest episode of The Weakest Link via BBC iPlayer. To find out more about the Heavy Metal Truants and the great work they do, head to their official website. 

If ever there were a movie genre suited to heavy metal, it has to be kaiju. Filled with gigantic monsters rampaging through major conurbations and leaving trails of destruction in their wake, it’s virtually metal writ large in a wobbly creature suit. Japan’s Toho studio created its own super-beast in the towering Godzilla, who, after drawing inspiration from 1933’s King Kong, was soon joined by other impressive, imposing monsters.

In anticipation of Toho’s latest Monsterverse offering, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, here are 10 killer metal songs about Godzilla and his colossal compatriots.

Motörhead – Godzilla Akimbo (Dirty Love, 1989)

Originally recorded as part of the sessions for Motörhead’s iconic Ace Of Spades album, this instrumental rides a loping, lumbering groove that could level urban districts if played at full volume. It’s definitely one of the band’s hidden gems, having first surfaced on Dirty Love: a semi-official album based on recordings made by the band during Ace Of Spades’ rehearsals.

Tenacious D – Kong (The Pick Of Destiny Japanese edition, 2006)

Jack Black has a strong monster movie pedigree, having starred in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong. He also cut a killer operatic metal Kong song with Tenacious D, then hid it as a rarity that only surfaced on the B-side of the vinyl version of P.O.D. and a Japanese version of The Pick Of Destiny soundtrack. 

Sepultura – Biotech Is Godzilla (Chaos A.D., 1993)

On their groundbreaking Chaos A.D. album, Sepultura reached out to Dead Kennedys legend Jello Biafra to write them some lyrics. Given free rein, he came up with Biotech Is Godzilla: a suitably rampant track railing against the dangers of technology in the wrong hands. It was an apt switcheroo, considering Godzilla himself is commonly taken as an allegory for the immense power of nuclear technology.

Godflesh – Mothra (Pure, 1992)

Godflesh took the name of one of the more benevolent kaiju for this promo single and music video from 1992 album Pure. To be fair, it was one of the band’s more accessible moments, but you’d still hardly call it kind-natured as it grinds and hollers with a wild-eyed mechanical intensity. It also takes a few cues from an instrumental of the same name by The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell and drummer Robert Williams.

Anvil – Mothra (Metal On Metal, 1982)

With a completely different take than Godflesh’s song of the same name, Canadian heavy metal stalwarts Anvil go in (as you might expect) with all guitars blazing. You could picture this slab of prime 80s metal soundtracking a monster-sized action sequence, even if the band do the heroic Mothra somewhat dirty in the lyrics.

Raven – Destroy All Monsters (Extermination, 2015)

NWOBHM veterans Raven liked the title Destroy All Monsters so much that they used it twice – first for a live album captured in Tokyo in the mid-90s, then again for the opening track of their 2015 album ExtermiNation. Said song is a suitably gonzo slab of atomic firepower and classic metal histrionics inspired by the equally OTT 1968 film.

Varga – Gamera (Enter The Metal, 2013)

It must be something in that northern water as fellow Canadian metal veterans Varga also venture into irradiated waters, opting for the fan-favourite if slightly less generally well-known flying turtle Gamera. When a song contains the line ‘Tormenting turtle from hell’ and stems from an album called Enter The Metal, you should pretty much know what to expect.

Evil Scarecrow – Godzilla’s Lament (Sixty​-​Six Minutes Past Six, 2009)

Bloodstock favourites Evil Scarecrow have created their fair share of original monster, but the DIY cosplayers-cum-metal titans also delved deep into Godzilla lore on their second album, Sixty​-​Six Minutes Past Six. ‘Beneath China’s ocean sits ancient Godzilla! Alone with one friend whose name is despair,’ they roar. Now all we need is that Godzilla/Crabulon crossover…

Kaiju Daisenso – Rodan (2021)

Green Gargantua. Atoms Breed Monsters. Reptilian Majesty. Dip anywhere into this New York band’s catalogue and you’ll find a bestial slab of monster-inspired madness. It’s there in the name and they absolutely wear the influence on their sleeves, describing their music as kaiju-grind and monsterviolence. There are plenty of ragers, but we’ll go with Rodan, because the pterrifying pterosaur doesn’t always get as much love as some of his better-known contemporaries.

Oxygen Destroyer – Their Reign Has Begun (Sinister Monstrosities Spawned By The Unfathomable Ignorance Of Humankind, 2021)

Oxygen Destroyer are another kaiju-obsessed mob and, in the finest monster-battling tradition, they went head-to-head on a split EP with Kaiju Daisenso. Their name comes from a powerful anti-Godzilla weapon and their musical assault is just as explosive, with a wonderfully feral blackened death and thrash roar.

It takes a lot for a band to stand out from the competition and capture the hearts and minds of their fans, and live performances are a great way of doing that. It turns out that some bands are not content with purpose-built concert halls and sun-kissed festival fields though, and have taken it upon themselves to perform in some of the most awkward, far-flung and dangerous locations imaginable. From ice shelves and volcanoes to restaurants and planes, we count down 10 of the strangest gigs ever played by metal artists.

Metallica in Antarctica (2013)

The world’s biggest metal band proved their global domination in 2013, when they became the first musicians to play on all seven continents. Their Freeze ’Em All show was played in a protective dome without amplification and the 120-strong crowd wore silent-disco-style headphones to hear Metallica rip through a set of classics.

Rage Against The Machine on Wall Street (1999)

Despite mayor Rudy Giuliani decreeing that “Rage Against The Machine shall not play on Wall Street”, the band descended on New York’s Financial District with documentarian Michael Moore for their Sleep Now In The Fire video. Moore was arrested and the band (plus fans) stormed the New York Stock Exchange, prompting it to cease trading early.

Korn at 37,000ft (2005)

Nu metal reached wild heights at the turn of the millennium – and Korn took that literally, performing on a passenger jet full of contest winners and soldiers. They had to downgrade to battery-powered amps and a kids’ drum set to fit into the aisles, with Jonathan Davis singing into the plane’s PA system, but it still kicked ass!

Limp Bizkit on the roof of the World Trade Center (2001)

Another nu metal band on top of the world was Limp Bizkit, who reflected that in the video for their international megahit Rollin’. They performed atop the South Tower of the original World Trade Center and won an MTV Video Music Award, harrowingly, just days before the September 11 attacks.

Linkin Park at Grand Central Station (2017)

We’ve all had that moment of racing down a platform only to miss your train because it’s just too busy. Presumably this was the case for a number of commuters at New York’s Grand Central subway station in 2017, when Linkin Park played an acoustic version of their most famous song, In The End. 

Chino Moreno in a volcano (2016)

As part of 2016’s Secret Solstice festival, Deftones frontman Chino Moreno performed in Iceland’s dormant Thríhnúkagígur volcano. His short acoustic set was at a depth of 400ft to just 20 lucky people, and tickets cost the best part of £2,000. No, he didn’t play Hole In The Earth.

Tesseract on an igloo (2015)

In 2015, djent pioneers Tesseract headed to the northern climes of Finland, deep within the Arctic Circle, to perform as part of Jagermeister’s Ice Cold Gig series. The world’s largest igloo was constructed as their stage, and devoted fans braved minus-20-degree temperatures to witness the act alongside local Sami tribesmen.

Shining on the side of a mountain (2015)

Jazz-metal leaders Shining had the bonkers idea of filming a music video on Trolltunga in 2015. Marketed as “the most spectacular rock formation in Norway”, Trolltunga is a thin layer of stone that hangs over a 700m (2,200ft) drop. While we tip our hats tipped to the band’s bravery, fuck that.

Live Without at Denny’s (2013)

If you’ve existed on the internet at all in the past decade, then you’ve probably heard the phrase, “What the fuck’s up, Denny’s?!” Texan hardcore mob Live Without birthed the immortal sentence in a closing branch of the fast food diner, and the guerilla gig has since ascended into metal meme godhood.

Unfathomable Ruination in an airtight metal box (2014)

As part of his Box Sized Die project, visual artist João Onofre stuck this death metal band in a hermetically-sealed, soundproof box and tasked them with playing until they ran out of oxygen. The quartet lasted around 20 minutes in their cramped confines, before being released back upon the world.