"It was just women and bottles of Jack Daniel's everywhere." The story of the Next Big Thing whose career was killed by a soppy power ballad

Heavy Pettin publicity photo — (Image credit: Paul Drozdz)

BBC1 chat show Wogan wasn’t often home to bacchanalian excess. But when guests Heavy Pettin performed their Song For Europe entry Romeo on it in April 1987, things got wild.

“Terry Wogan walked into our dressing room and lost his mind,” the band’s frontman Stephen ‘Hamie’ Hayman tells Classic Rock today, laughing. “It was just women and bottles of Jack Daniel’s everywhere.”

As the show’s avuncular host baulked at ongoing scenes of degeneracy, Hayman took another swig of Jack and asked the show’s host: “Terry! Does this mean I can’t get your autograph for my mum?”

Primetime TV or not, Heavy Pettin were appearing under duress that night. In fact they were irked and partying hard to compensate, as youths enjoying the spoils of rock’n’roll sometimes do. In the end they came sixth in that year’s contest to represent the UK at Eurovision. With hindsight, Hayman sees the band’s ill-fated campaign as significant; the moment the bubble burst for them.

“We knew Romeo would finish us”, he says of the song whose airbrushed synth-pop alienated fans of Heavy Pettin’s 1983 debut LP Lettin Loose (produced by Brian May and Reinhold Mack) and its similarly well-regarded 1985 follow-up Rock Ain’t Dead. “The problem was we owed [their label] Polydor a lot of money by then, and they thought Eurovision might be a way of recouping. We were forced into it – snookered, basically.”

Heavy Pettin - Romeo - Live - A Song For Europe 1987 - Eurovision - United Kingdom - YouTube

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Tanned, amiable and now with a transatlantic accent, Hayman is chatting at his home in Florida. These days he has reason to be sanguine about the messy, later litigious demise of the Heavy Pettin configuration that comprised himself, guitarists Gordon Bonnar and ‘Punky’ Mendoza, bassist Brian Waugh and drummer Gary Moat. Now back with a capable new line-up and a fine new album, Rock Generation, the Glaswegian hard rock band (whose name nods at UFO’s 1976 album No Heavy Petting) are again in the ascendant. Like Lenny Kravitz sang: it ain’t over till it’s over.

“We wanted this album to be a bit heavier, a bit more now,” says Dave ‘Davo’ Aitken, one of HP’s two new guitarists, along with Richie Dews. “We also wanted to be respectful to the band’s past, keeping the hooks and strong vocal melodies, without becoming a heritage act.”

An early member of fellow Glaswegian rockers Gun – that’s him playing the guitar solo on the band’s debut hit Better Days – Aitken is also is Hamie Hayman’s chief songwriting foil these days. He recalls the original Heavy Pettin line-up being “like mentors” while he was a fledgling guitarist in and around Glasgow’s early-80s rock scene. Indeed, it was Pettin guitarist Gordon Bonnar who set up Aitken’s audition with Gun.

“Pettin were always really friendly and supportive,” Aitken adds. “Punky [Mendoza] would come to collect the fifty pounds or whatever for us rehearsing at their place, then immediately spend it all buying us beers at the pub.”

Quickly rising up the NWOBHM ladder, Heavy Pettin were initially on Newcastle indie label Neat Records, who also had Venom, Tygers Of Pan Tang and Janick Gers’ pre-Maiden band White Spirit. But in an era part-defined by Def Leppard’s 1983 colossus Pyromania, Pettin’s big hair and even bigger choruses – witness early gems In And Out Of Love and Sole Survivor – soon attracted the majors.

Heavy Pettin at the Metal Hammer Festival at the Frelichtbuhne Loreley ampitheatre in St. Goarshausen, Germany, in September 1985 (Image credit: Pete Cronin/IconicPix)

Holed up at a London rehearsal studio shortly after getting lucrative deals with Warner Music Publishing and Polydor Records, the band were astounded when the lights came up and standing next to Robin Godfrey-Cass, who had signed them to Warners, was Brian May. “Brian said: ‘I really like your songs, and I’d love to produce your debut album,’ Hayman recalls. “Our jaws hit the floor.”

Once Lettin Loose was released, huge support tours followed. When Heavy Pettin went out with Whitesnake, Hayman was astonished to learn that David Coverdale’s ‘vocal care regime’ involved chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Pettin crossed the US with Shout At The Devil-era Mötley Crüe (“You can imagine what that was like”), supported Ozzy Osbourne on his Bark At The Moon tour and witnessed Kiss’s Gene Simmons on the pull.

“You’d hear the elevator go ‘ping!’, then out would come the bold Gene into the foyer,” Hayman says, laughing. “He’d whisper in the ears of a few of the women who were waiting, and they’d follow him back into the elevator. ‘Ping!’”

Simmons also sent Heavy Pettin some songs he’d written for them, and never forgot when they opted not to record them. “Years later, I sang Kiss’s Rock And Roll All Nite with Gene at one of his birthday parties,” says Hayman. “He was like: ‘So what about those songs of mine?’”

Heavy Pettin - Rock Generation (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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Heavy Pettin’s new album Rock Generation was made largely at Glasgow’s Morsecode Studios. Still, with Hayman based in the US and his bandmates in the UK, file-sharing technology also helped. When the singer came home to record his – remarkably well-preserved tenor – vocals, engineer/ producer Ciarán O’Shea decked out the vocal booth with Royal Stewart tartan.

“Obviously I’m proudly Scottish, and that’s never going away,” says Hayman. “But me and Davo were in [famed Glasgow boozer] The Horseshoe recently and the barman goes: ‘Why the fuck are you trying to sound Scottish?’ I was like: ‘Fuck off! I am fucking Scottish!’ It almost ended in a fight [laughs].”

Aitken says he got the idea for Oblivion, an ace new song on which former Venus And The Razorblades singer Roni Lee duets with Hayman, while watching Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in the 2018 remake of the film A Star Is Born. Rock Generation’s feel-good, all-inclusive title track, meanwhile, was an eleventh-hour addition inspired by Heavy Pettin’s experience at the joyous meet-and-greet that followed the packed gig they played in Bogotá, Colombia in 2024.

“It was at this club full of Kiss memorabilia, called Dynasty,” Aitken recalls. “Every age demographic was represented, and it was great to see these kids, this new generation, that loved rock as much as we did as teenagers in Glasgow.”

“That bodes well for us, and it bodes well for heavy rock music,” says Hayman, summing up.

Forty years on from Rock Ain’t Dead, Heavy Pettin are still applying the defibrillator, kicking up a storm.

Rock Generation is out now via Silver Lining Music.

James McNair grew up in East Kilbride, Scotland, lived and worked in London for 30 years, and now resides in Whitley Bay, where life is less glamorous, but also cheaper and more breathable. He has written for Classic Rock, Prog, Mojo, Q, Planet Rock, The Independent, The Idler, The Times, and The Telegraph, among other outlets. His first foray into print was a review of Yum Yum Thai restaurant in Stoke Newington, and in many ways it’s been downhill ever since. His favourite Prog bands are Focus and Pavlov’s Dog and he only ever sits down to write atop a Persian rug gifted to him by a former ELP roadie.

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