New wave of British heavy metal

The new wave of British heavy metal (often abbreviated as NWOBHM) was a nationwide musical movement that began in England in the mid-1970s and achieved international attention by the early 1980s. Editor Alan Lewis coined the term for an article by Geoff Barton in a May 1979 issue of the British music newspaper Sounds to describe the emergence of heavy metal bands in the mid-to-late 1970s, as punk rock declined amid the dominance of new wave music.

Although encompassing diverse styles inherited from rock music, the music of the NWOBHM is best remembered for infusing earlier heavy metal with the intensity of punk rock to produce fast and aggressive songs. The DIY attitude of the NWOBHM bands led to raw-sounding, self-produced recordings and a proliferation of independent record labels. Song lyrics were usually about escapist themes, such as mythology, fantasy, horror, and the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

The NWOBHM began as an underground phenomenon growing in parallel to punk and largely ignored by the media. Promotion by Sounds and rock DJ Neal Kay moved it into public consciousness and toward radio airplay, recognition, and success in the UK. Its musicians and fans were largely young, white, working-class men who suffered the hardships of unemployment after the 1973–75 recession. As a reaction to their bleak reality, they then created a community separate from mainstream society to enjoy each other's company and their favourite loud music. The NWOBHM was criticised as being local media hype for mostly talentless musicians. Nonetheless, it generated a renewal in the genre of heavy metal music and furthered the progress of the heavy metal subculture, whose updated behavioural and visual codes were quickly adopted by metal fans worldwide after the spread of the music to continental Europe, North America and Japan.

By some estimates, the movement spawned as many as a thousand heavy metal bands. Only a few survived the advent of MTV and the rise of the more commercial glam metal in the second half of the 1980s. Iron Maiden and Def Leppard became superstars; Motörhead and Saxon also had considerable success. Other groups, such as Diamond Head, Venom, and Raven, had more limited chart success, but influenced the successful extreme metal subgenres of the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s. Many bands from the NWOBHM reunited in the 2000s and remained active through live performances and new studio albums.

In the second half of the 1970s, the United Kingdom was in a state of social unrest and widespread poverty as a result of the ineffective social politics of both Conservative and Labour Party governments during a three-year period of economic recession. As a consequence of deindustrialisation, the unemployment rate was exceptionally high, especially among working class youth. It continued to rise in the early 1980s, peaking in February 1983. The discontent of so many people caused social unrest with frequent strikes, and culminated in a series of riots, including one in Brixton and another in Toxteth. During this period, the mass of young people, deprived of the prospect of even relatively low-skill jobs that were available to the previous generations, searched for different ways to earn money in the music and entertainment businesses. The explosion of new bands and new musical styles coming from the UK in the late 1970s was a result of their efforts to make a living in the economic depression that hit the country before and during the governments of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The desperation and the violent reaction of a generation robbed of a safe future are well-represented by the British punk movement of 1977–1978, whose rebellion against the establishment continued diluted in the new wave and post-punk music of the 1980s. These self-proclaimed punks were politically militant, relishing their anarchic attitude and stage practices like pogo dancing. They wore short and spiked hairstyles or shaved heads, often with safety pins and ripped clothes, and considered musical prowess unimportant as long as the music was simple and loud. However, not all working-class male youths embraced the punk movement; some preferred to escape from their grim reality in heavy metal, which was equally effective in providing fun, stress relief, and peer companionship, otherwise denied because of their unemployment.

The UK was a cradle of the first wave of heavy metal, which was born at the end of the 1960s and flowered in the early 1970s. Of the many British bands that came to prominence during that period, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple achieved worldwide success and critical acclaim. The success of the music genre, usually called heavy rock at the time, generated a community of UK fans with strong ties to psychedelia, hippie doctrines and biker subculture. Each of these bands was in crisis in the mid-to-late 1970s: Led Zeppelin were plagued by discord and personal tragedies and had drastically reduced their activities, Black Sabbath had fired their charismatic but unreliable frontman Ozzy Osbourne, and Deep Purple disbanded. As a consequence, the whole movement lost much of its momentum and media interest, which were refocused on what British writer Malc Macmillan calls "the more fashionable or lucrative markets of the day" such as disco, glam, mod revival, new wave and electronic music. Just like progressive rock acts and other mainstream music groups of the 1970s, heavy rock bands were viewed as, in the words of journalist Garry Bushell, "lumbering dinosaurs" by a music press infatuated with punk rock and new wave. Some writers even declared the premature demise of heavy metal altogether.

The crisis of British heavy rock giants left space for the rise of other rock bands in the mid-1970s, including Queen, Hawkwind, Budgie, Bad Company, Status Quo and Nazareth, all of which had multiple chart entries in the UK and had conducted successful international tours. The British chart results of the period show that there was still a vast audience for heavy metal in the country, and upcoming bands UFO and Judas Priest, also had tangible success and media coverage in the late 1970s. Foreign hard rock acts, such as Blue Öyster Cult and Kiss from the US, Rush from Canada, Scorpions from West Germany, Thin Lizzy from Ireland, and especially AC/DC from Australia, climbed the British charts in the same period.