Heavy Metal Music in Britain

Gerd Bayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317123002
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, heavy metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, heavy metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British heavy metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British heavy metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of heavy metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analyses that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture.

PART I
Metal Commodities

Chapter 1
The Empowering Masculinity of British Heavy Metal

Deena Weinstein

At its core, British heavy metal is an expression of masculinity.

And if that judgment was all there was to it, you would have just completed reading a remarkably brief chapter. In fact, this simple assertion conceals several problems. To begin with, there are two major terms that beg definition: what is meant by masculinity, and what is meant by British heavy metal? Secondly, the claim that British heavy metal is an expression of masculinity may be trivial given that rock scholars have long declared that rock itself, of which British heavy metal is a subset, is, in one way or another, masculine.

Before describing and interpreting British heavy metal’s sonic, verbal and visual discourse of masculinity, I will address these problems, defining the two key terms, and indicating that British heavy metal’s paradigm of masculinity is different from the masculinity commonly seen in rock itself.

‘Masculinity’ as a signifier has been on the defensive for decades, at least in the West since the 1960s, when popular culture joined social movements aimed at demarginalizing racial, class, age and gender Others. Emerging in this era, rock was born in a compromised position. Culturally, it stood squarely on the race- and class-marginalized shoulders of rock ‘n’ roll and blues, but it was mostly made by middle-class white males in partnership with companies run by white males.

Rock is often seen as masculine since the overwhelming majority of its creators are males. Mary Ann Clawson accounts for the dearth of women in rock bands, particularly instrumentalists, by noting that ‘[t]he band is the elemental unit in rock as an ensemble music. It is the critical institutional locus of learning and initiation; and significantly, the early band is, both socially and culturally, a formation of masculine adolescence’ (103). Ian Chambers provides a similar take, contending that rock emanates from ‘a male camaraderie, formed at school, on the street corner, at art college or in a gang’ (qtd. in Frith and Horne 90).

A related tack is taken by those who assert that rock’s central instrument, the electric guitar, is ‘seen as a man’s preserve’ (Strohm 186). For example, André Millard and Rebecca McSwain state: ‘In the world of rock ‘n’ roll the guitar was an inescapable symbol of masculinity, and the dynamics of the performance were filled with sexually significant actions and meanings’ (157).

Those styles of rock in which the electric guitar is central have been derisively labelled ‘cock rock’, reducing them to machismo posturing. ‘Rock and roll is a celebration of male machismo sexuality’, Michael Brake contends (174). Summing up so many others, Millard and McSwain assert: ‘In several genres of rock, especially heavy metal and hard rock, the way of holding and moving the guitar was closely connected to its phallic symbolism’ (158). It is not merely interpreting the guitar as a phallic symbol (perhaps that is in the eye of the beholder); song lyrics and stage moves also contribute to the effect:

Most rock music from the fifties until the end of the sixties shared the misogynist narrative politics of male modernism in its construction of a villainous feminine Other (mass culture/society) against which it rebels. Like modernism, early (and some later) rock provided a male preserve of masculine heroes whose story is the struggle for authenticity against the ever-present danger of selling out to the feminizing horror of pop. (Medovoi 158)

‘As the discourses of art and truth fed into popular music-making, the boundary line between pop and rock became boundaries of gender’, Simon Frith and Howard Horne conclude (93). Other rock scholars concur: ‘In this binary scheme, in which rock was metonymic for authenticity and pop for artifice, authentic rock became masculine and artificial pop became feminine. In the gender hierarchy of rock culture, the masculine represented higher status and values and thus reinforced traditional gender hegemony’ (Mäkelä 100).

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press present a critical compendium of what they see as rock’s misogyny, such as ‘the born-to-run impulse (the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop), the soldier or warrior who takes refuge in the camaraderie of brotherhood-inarms (The Clash, Public Enemy), and self-aggrandising fantasies of man-machine omnipotence (heavy metal, techno) and of kingship (the Doors, Nick Cave, gangsta rap)’ (xiv). Their history begins with ‘American garage punk and British R&B [which] evolved into heavy rock, and then heavy metal. At each stage, the blues form was progressively more bastardised, its machismo exaggerated. The blues’ cocksure strut turned to phallocratic overkill; Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love” (1963) becomes the “thermonuclear gang rape” of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (1969)’ (23).

Against this prevalent critical view I would argue that despite being male-made and guitar-centred, British heavy metal is neither misogynistic nor an expression of machismo; for the most part women are of no concern; there is no binary of male/ female, no invidious elevation of one gender over the other – that is, British heavy metal is not masculinist. (In a similar way British heavy metal is not racist, despite its uniformly white performers, and its lyrics are devoid of racial references.)

Masculinity

The field of men’s studies, modelled after women’s studies, recognizes a variety of masculinities,1 most of which can be found in the various depictions of rock recounted above. One type, termed essentialist, focuses on the physical features of men. The preponderant part of the men’s studies literature, as well as the critical descriptions employed by those studying music, are of a second type, social masculinity. Scholars distinguish several forms of social masculinity such as patriarchal, hegemonic and misogynistic (see Connell).

All of these understandings of masculinity, essentialist or social, have one thing in common – they are all based on an invidious comparison with women. But there is another non-invidious type – cultural masculinity, and it is this type of masculinity that characterizes British heavy metal. Cultural masculinity is somewhat like cultural youth, or youthfulness. As a biological category and social grouping, young people developed their own distinctive values, ideals, sentiments and activities. By the middle of the twentieth century, youth became ‘a distinctive subculture, with symbols, practices, and folkways peculiarly its own; that is, “youth” became a cultural construct as well as a biological and social category’ (Weinstein, ‘Expendable Youth’ 67–8). Youth, now no longer restricted to adolescents, became available to all, as what postmodernists call a ‘floating signifier’, a symbol detached from socially relevant groups. Think of the way in which underclass blacks (a biological and social grouping) became a floating signifier, thanks to rap music and MTV, which was taken up by white suburban youth.

Cultural masculinity is constituted from key features of biological and social masculinity, but floats free of originating biological and social groups. It is available to others, as demonstrated by female British heavy metal fans. They wore the same denim, leather and band t-shirts (celebrated in a key British heavy metal song, Saxon’s ‘Denim and Leather’) as their male counterparts (Heavy Metal Soundhouse). The all-female British heavy metal band Girlschool also plays, in all ways, with cultural masculinity. (Of course the overwhelmingly male British heavy metal bands and fans played with cultural masculinity too, but because they were also men, their play is not as obvious.)

British Heavy Metal

British heavy metal is understood here as a genre (or subgenre); that is, as a coherent style of music. The term is not a mere grouping of music publicly labelled as heavy metal (and that term alone has various and conflicting understandings)2 and made by British artists (all or some Brits in the band). Such a category would have little coherence and would include a 40 year span of widely diverse music. One needs to specify what is meant by British heavy metal; otherwise, one could, by judicious cherry-picking of songs or artists, say that the category covers almost anything.3

British heavy metal is close to but not fully co-terminus with what has been called the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). That term was initially popularized by journalist Geoff Barton who states: ‘… in truth the NWOBHM was a catchall title for a melting pot of bands with an immense variety of musical styles. … The only thing a lot of NWOBHM groups had in common was that they came to prominence at about the same time … there was a genuine resurgence of youthful British rock at the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s’ (qtd. in Ward).

I mean something far more specific than Barton does. What I am calling British heavy metal has both a code and a particular history, as all genres do.4 Genres are not merely any products made by musical creators; they are the resultant of creators in interaction with each other, appreciators (fans) and mediators (such as venue owners who book these artists and record labels that help record and distribute their music) (see Chapter 1 in Weinstein, Heavy Metal). The code (set of rules) governs a genre’s sonic, visual and verbal dimensions, and allows one to recognize and create something that belongs to that genre. Among the rules governing sound are the constraints on the type of instruments (for example, electric guitars played through particular effects) and vocalization techniques; verbal rules include those for naming bands and for lyrical themes; and visual conventions include colour schemes, facial expression and hair styles. In the next section those dimensions will be shown to be coded as masculine for British heavy metal, but first we need to specify the genre itself, which can be understood as a type of what Michel Foucault calls a discourse.

Genre histories tend to follow a similar form, as Ronald Byrnside notes. They represent a break – a ‘rupture’ in Foucault’s terms (17) – at a particular socio-historical moment and, in their preliminary phase, one or more artists detach themselves from predecessors and create something distinctive. Genres begin before they are named. When several artists working in a new style find a common audience and mediators (such as the rock press, record companies and concert promoters) recognize the genre, it is in its period of crystallization. How long that phase lasts and what succeeds it vary. It may merely disappear from the scene, fragment into several other styles, or become so mannered as to be a parody of its once-vital self.

British heavy metal’s era of crystallization lasted about three years, from 1979 to 1982. Genres emerge not merely as the result of the transaction among artists, mediators and fans; that transaction is located in a specific socio-cultural time. As George Lipsitz writes: ‘Popular music is nothing if not dialogic, the product of an ongoing historical conversation’ (99). British heavy metal emerges with the rise to power of Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.5 The country was mired in recession, a come-down from its 1960s high of the ‘swinging London’ centre of the popular cultural universe. It was the end of a decade that saw the rise of the working class as the ‘cool’ replacement for the ‘prestige from below’ American blues artists in the 1960s. Musically, British heavy metal came into existence as several well-developed genres were ending their own periods of crystallization – British punk, progressive rock and psychedelia – and it incorporates influences from each of them. The influence of punk’s DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos manifested itself in some of the early British heavy metal bands, which booked their own tours and put out their own recordings. For example, in 1980, Diamond Head issued their 7” single debut ‘Shoot Out the Lights’ (‘Helpless’ was the B-side) on their own label, Happy Face. They sold it by mail through ads in Sounds (see Sharpe-Young).

Evidence of the crucial role played by the mediators in establishing the genre is provided by a quote from Iron Maiden’s founder, bassist and songwriter Steve Harris: ‘All over Britain there were bands in the same position as us, and none of us knew that we all were doing the same thing – until it started getting in the press’ (qtd. in Considine). Harris was referring especially to the rock magazine Sounds. It was in that publication that the term New Wave of British Heavy Metal was coined.6 Although Geoff Barton was the first journalist to use the term in print,7 and is credited by others as its name-giver (cf. Christe 33), it was not his creation. ‘I’d like to take credit for inventing the term “NWOBHM,”’ he said, but accorded the title to his editor at Sounds:‘it was a “Big Al” Lewis brainstorm’ (qtd. in Ward).

But it was Barton who initiated the writing style that became associated with British heavy metal. He said he wanted to write like Marvel Comic’s Stan Lee ‘would have done if he’d been a rock journalist’ (qtd. in Ward). Soundscovered the emerging British heavy metal bands, initially with a pullout section. In June 1981, it launched Kerrang!, the key magazine of the genre (and of related styles), as a monthly. The cover of that first issue included the following, all arguably British heavy metal, artists: Diamond Head, Venom, Raven, Jaguar, Lemmy, Girlschool and Saxon.8

Other mediators were initially more significant to the crystallization of British heavy metal. London’s Heavy Metal Soundhouse (lending its name to Iron Maiden’s first EP, released in 1979) was the genre’s major venue, emerging as the alternative to punk and new wave venues. Neal Kay was in charge of booking the bands; he helped compile and wrote the liner notes for the first major British heavy metal record compilation, Metal for Muthas. Other compilations were made including Heavy Metal Heroesand Metal Explosion.

Tours were put together ‘covering the length and breadth of the country’, such as the Heavy Metal Crusade, which brought bands such as Iron Maiden and Saxon to fans (Heavy Metal Soundhouse). In 1980, Monsters of Rock, the first annual Donington festival, featured a variety of major and minor metal and hard rock bands.

Even radio and television helped. For example, BBC Radio One’s ‘Friday Rock Show’ session aired bands including Diamond Head. The influential television show Top of the Pops,in February 1980, aired Iron Maiden performing ‘Running Free’ live.

As crucial to initiating the genre as the musicians and mediators were the fans. Britain has a good track record for music-based subcultures. One reason is, as Michael Brake maintains, that ‘[w]here there is a vigorous street culture in a working-class district, the commercial aspects of youth culture have little influence’ (66). As a result of their novelty, new genres are generally non-commercial. The fan-base of British heavy metal was non-passive, ‘lean forward’,9 as is the case for all subcultures. In contrast to the ‘lean back’ audiences for mass-media delivered styles, subcultural audiences actively seek out and help create discourses.

The demise of British heavy metal, starting i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction Doing Cultural Studies with Earplugs—Gerd Bayer
• Part I Metal Commodities
• Part II The Literary and Mythological Heritage
• Part III Heavy Metal Societies
• Index