Hard Heavy and a Tad Aggressive 1976
With the arrival of punk in 1976 music not only got more straightforward after the excesses of the progressive rock era, but it also introduced us to a time that gave out a more aggressive sound, with a somewhat home-made feel to it! In many ways future hard rock and heavy metal acts of this generation, certainly owed a debt to the punk movement and the summer of 1976, as both its home-made approach and its aggression gave the ‘heavy genre’ a much needed boost. It wasn’t an easy start for some of these bands, but after a few years the groundwork laid here would shape the future of the genre. Two great early examples of this were the all-female Runaways and of course Motorhead.
The Runaways consisted of Cherie Currie-Vocals, Joan Jett-Rhythm/Vocals, Lita Ford-Guitar, Jackie Fox-Bass and Sandy West-Drums/Vocals and they used a number of well-known artists as focal points, but a certain Suzi Quatro may have been the most influential on them! From the word go, the band’s ‘in yer face’ hard rock approach put them in the punk borderline camp but unsurprisingly their approach bought them little success in their native USA, but luckily the Japanese market took to them at once, certainly proving as I’ve always believed just how receptive Japanese rock fans were to new and fresh rock outfits around this time. The band put out a number of albums over the next couple of years of which their debut and
Queens of Noise are their best regarded. After the band folded most of the members went onto solo careers of which Joan Jett would be the most successful. The Runaways also just predated the NWOBHM chicks Girlschool on the scene as well.
Motorhead on the other hand, would gradually ease their way into things after a number of early setbacks with their record label (as yet again another record label didn’t know how to promote them) The band members though were hardly newbies to the music business, especially frontman ‘Lemmy’ Ian Kilmister who had already been in a number of bands most notably Hawkwind. He was then joined by Larry Wallis ex-Pink Fairies and Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor already the replacement drummer, and the band issued their debut album
On Parole in 1976. But due to record labels lack of interest, the album didn’t get a release and most of the material soon ended up on the following year’s official debut
Motorhead.
On Parole in its complete form would have to wait until 1979 to get an official release, but of course by then the band had made their breakthrough on
Overkill and
Bomber, and that is where I will properly review the Motorhead albums!
