When you’re a kid and have little or no disposable income, or when you’re a teenager with just as little, you don’t have the luxury of buying all the new albums. As I’ve mentioned before, when I was growing up there was no internet as such, and certainly no itunes, YouTube, Spotify or Grooveshark. There were no torrents. If you wanted to hear an album you either bought it, borrowed it or, if you were lucky, got to hear it at a listening post in a record shop. If that last sentence made no sense to you, you are too young. I officially hate you.
So you had to be careful how you spent your money, and one of the ways I found to get the best bang for my Irish Pound was to buy compilation albums. This was a way to hear bands I did not know of, and see if I liked them. It meant there could be a lot of dross of course, but the chances were that I would get at least two or three decent songs off the record, and maybe an introduction to a new band or two I could follow later when I started earning properly. There weren’t too many Metal compilations about at that time, but three I recall having, and as they turned me on to many new artistes (and off others), over the next three days I will feature them as the final trilogy to wrap up
Metal for muthas, Volume II --- Various Artists --- 1980 (EMI)
For years --- and I mean years --- I wondered idly what a mutha was? I thought it was pronounced “myoo-taw” and that it was some secret name of Heavy Metal heroes or something. Of course, I eventually got the joke. Strangely, I never bought or even heard volume I --- I think I bought this second hand with a pile of other records, in the days when you could go into the city with twenty quid and come back with a bag bursting with albums --- and it seems to be acknowledged as the better of the two, with contributions from Iron Maiden, Praying Mantis and Samson, whereas the bands here are all, or were all at the time, pretty much unknown to me. But in a way, that’s what made it such fun, discovering new music.
As well as briefly running through the tracks here, I’m going to be checking in on each artiste, to see how they did after this album. Did they go on to great things? Did they have a moderately successful career? Or did they vanish without a trace? Some I know the answer to, some I don’t. We open however on a band that not only bookended this album, providing both the opening and closing tracks, but who became a firm favourite with me. Which is unfortunate, as they never seem to have gone on to have released any albums and I never heard from them again.
Track one: “One of these days” by Trespass.
They were a short-lived band from Suffolk who all had day jobs. Of course, after the release of this single they all …. kept their jobs. Yeah, they were never even moderately successful, and recorded little material, making it all the weirder that they not only ended up having an anthology but also at least three compilations, most if not all of which were bootlegs. Still, I loved what I heard here, and “One of these days” gets the collection going with a jangly, Lizzyesque guitar before the guitars kick up and take the song into a rockin’ hard boogie rhythm. Oddly, this was their most famous (as such) and successful track, and while I like it I much prefer their other one. But I think this really shows a band who could have broken through but somehow just never got the breaks, despite being managed at one point by The Enid’s manager. Guess it was never meant to be.
it’s nothing revolutionary but it’s clearly good enough to stand beside the likes of Praying Mantis, Samson, Xero, White Spirit and the slew of others who rode the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the early 80s, and with a few exceptions the contributions from Trespass stand head and shoulders above everything else on this album. But sometimes it just doesn’t happen, and barring the closing track, and despite much frenzied searching, I never found anything else by them until about a year ago when I pounced on their “anthology”, also called “One of these days”.
So where are they now?
Having failed to make the big time (or even the slightly smaller time) Trespass broke up and later three of the band members formed a new band, which itself broke up after about three years. The guys then released an album called “Head”, which is said to contain new Trespass material, but despite a lot of searching and many sacrifices offered to the metal gods, I have never been able to track it down. That came out, apparently, in 1993, since when the band have just fallen off the edge of the world, and have not been heard from since. If anyone has information on them I’d love to talk to you.
Track two: “Telephone man” by Eazy Money.
I’m always (was even back then) sceptical of bands who replace an “s” with a “z”. Can’t find much information on them, which probably means they’re no longer around. In fairness, from what I remember of their track here that was not too surprising because I recall it being distinctly under-par. Mind you, maybe I was just seriously disappointed after having heard Trespass to be shackled with a much inferior band. Perhaps time has changed how these ears will perceive this song. Let’s find out.
Interestingly, it opens on a soft keyboard and organ line, then the guitar cuts in and the song very much reminds me of Deep Purple. It’s not bad, very American sounding and the guy certainly has a good voice, though it’s not anything that terribly special. The constant
beep-beep from the synth, mimicking the sound of a telephone, gets annoying after a while. Yeah guys, we got it: even ELO only used the sound of the phone once on “Telephone line”. No need to beat us over the head with it! Good chorus to be fair, but it’s much more verging towards AOR than NWOBHM. Picks up at the end with a fine guitar and keyboard solo which quickens up the tempo and helps the song end really well. You know, I need to revise my opinion even from a few lines ago: this is fu
cking awesome! Just shows how a song can develop and suddenly kick you right in the ----
So where are they now?
Well, as I said I can find nothing about Eazy Money, but their vocalist, Marc Storace, did go on to front one of the bigger rock/Metal bands of the 80s in Krokus. So in one way at least, the spirit of Eazy Money lives on.
Track three: “Cutting loose” by Xero
Now this band I have been finally able to dig up some information on, oddly enough through the Answers.com website, and thanks to a guy called Eduardo Rivadavia. Seems that Xero (pronounced “zero”) were set to break into the big time, being championed by rock’s biggest fan on the radio, DJ Tommy Vance, but they unfortunately ran afoul of Iron Maiden’s management when they tried to release a song they had played live but which was a cover version of a song which had had Brucey involved in (for the full story see here
Xero: Information from Answers.com and their label dissolved under legal pressures. That was the end of Xero, and a salutory lesson in naivete.
A good heavy fast rocker, “Cutting loose” is a decent track with a lot of blues Rory Gallagher about it, and maybe early Free, kind of more hard rock than Metal really. It has perhaps one of the silliest lines ever in a Metal song (and that’s no easy feat!) ---
”They used to call me boomerang/ Cos I kept coming back!” Gods preserve us! Goofy lyric aside though this song shows a band who were just really getting it together and could have been big. With a guitar riff very reminiscent of NWOBHM giants Iron Maiden, this song keeps the quality high on the album, and singer Moon Williames certainly knows how to scream in a Dickinson style, while Bill Liesgang is no slouch on the guitar either.
So where are they now?
Well, as I mentioned Xero the band did not last beyond about 1983, but again thanks to Eduardo I have information on what happened to them in later life, and it’s a somewhat varied result. Moon Williams hooked up with prog rock icon and ex-Asia man John Wetton, while Liesgang got plenty of session work. Strangest of all, bass player Boon Gould joined Level 42!
Track four: “High on high” by White Spirit
Another band who released one album only and then split, but whose members all did okay for themselves afterwards. White Spirit also share the distinction of being the only artiste here, other than Xero, to appear on two out of three of the albums I have chosen to end this section. If they have a claim to fame it must surely be that from their ashes sprung later Maiden guitarist Janick Gers.
With an intro more out of something you’d expect to hear on a prog rock album than a Metal one, it’s a pumping, boppy start but you really would think you were listening to Kansas or REO Speedwagon here. It’s a good song but very wimpy in terms of metal. Don’t get it. I hear elements of Asia and Yes in it, but not Maiden or Motorhead. That said, it’s a great song, just not what I would consider a great Metal one. Vocalist Bruce Ruff certainly has an interesting voice, but then just to reinforce the prog rock idea there’s a very proggy keyboard solo in the song, and no guitar one really.
So where are they now?
Like so many bands, White Spirit became just another casualty of the NWOBHM, unable to capitalise on their debut album sales --- not surprising really, as it sounds like they wanted to be more a prog/AOR or even soft rock band more than a Metal one, and they were never going to survive among the likes of Leppard, Girlschool, Angel Witch and even Praying Mantis. In musical genre terms, White Spirit were the dolphins among the sharks, and they got torn apart.
But as I said, their big star was Janick Gers, and he went on to work alongside Ian Gillan in the ex-Deep Purple vocalist’s eponymous solo band, also spending time with Fish on his debut solo album and Bruce Dickinson on his before joining Iron Maiden proper, where he has remained to this day. Of the rest, Bass man Phil Brady joined Therapy, an English band not to be confused with the Irish one Therapy? while drummer Graeme Crallan can be heard playing on Tank’s 1984 album “Blood and honour” but left after that. He sadly then passed away after an accident in 2008.
Track five: “Lady of Mars” by Dark Star
Here we have finally a band who recorded more than one album, though in fairness they did split after the first, reforming in 1987, two years later, to record a second album. Having no luck with that they then split for good. Again this is more in the melodic, almost AOR vein than out-and-out Metal, and I doubt too many metalheads would rate it. However it became and remains one of my two favourite songs on the album, even beating out Trespass’s “One of these days”. I really loved this. Though it starts off with a good, punchy guitar and indeed rides on a heavy riff, and the vocalist has a great rough gravelly voice, there’s something too poppy about it to make it a proper Metal song. It’s infectiously catchy as Ebola in Sierra Leone (What? Too soon?) and there are great backup vocals. It also ends with a really heavy guitar and crashing drums.
So where are they now?
After the second split following the lack of success of their 1987 second album, Dark Star stayed together, minus their singer, who went on to management, while his bandmates formed a new outfit called Poker Alice, a primarily blues-based band.
It’s my recollection from my youth that from this point on the album dipped seriously in quality, though as has already been proven, my memory can’t always be relied on, as I thought “Telephone man” was crap and it wasn’t. Nevertheless, I have a clear remembrance of a sense of disappointment till we got to the closer, the second Trespass song. But we’ll see how time has treated that memory.
Track six: “You give me candy” by Horsepower
The only thing I can find out about them is that, uncharacteristically for an NWOBHM era band, they were not in fact English or even British, but relocated to the UK from Philadelphia. Perhaps they saw or heard of the burgeoning Metal scene across the ocean and thought “We’ll have some of that!” Well, this is more like it! Much as I loved Dark Star, this is more like the kind of Metal you’d expect to have found on an album like this. With a big, fast, rocking beat very reminiscent of the likes of ZZ, Horsepower rock unashamedly on with good-time guitars and who-gives-a-s
hit drumming.
It’s like Horsepower brought a sense of American fun and freedom to a subgenre that was often at this time in danger of taking itself too seriously. As bands struggled to get noticed, many aping or in some cases copying the established or rising bands --- often note for note and riff for riff --- some of the enjoyment in the music got left behind. These guys from the city of brotherly love remind us that music is to be enjoyed, and they’re like the best of Blindside Blues Band, ZZ and Lynyrd Skynyrd all rolled into one. With a healthy dose of Southern Boogie this track not only rocks but is enormous fun.
Let me see if I can encapsulate it in one sentence. Oh yeah. F
uck, I love this! How could I have thought this was the begining of the slide? The equine ones remind us this is supposed to be a party, and they’re makin’ sure everyone has a real good time! Sure, it’s not what I’d call NWOBHM in any way shape or form, but then neither were White Spirit, and if they belong here then sure as there’s s
hit on their shoes, Horsepower do too!
So where are they now?
Sadly, after setting our shores alive with their own brand of Yankee fun rock, Horsepower headed back over to the States, where they released their first album and obviously stayed together throughout the 80s and 90s, as they recorded a song in memory of the victims of 9/11.
Track seven: “Open heart” by Red Alert
Really, really hard to get any proper information on this band, as not only was there a punk band of the same name operating at the same time (the Wiki link on the album goes erroneously to their entry, which confuses things further) there were two Metal bands called Red Alert. Add to that the fact that it’s also the title of a song and it makes it next to impossible to find an entry on them. All I did find is that they were yet another of the jetsam of the movement, releasing just the one single, the song here, and then changing their name, after which nothing more is known of them.
It’s more straightahead metal this time. Whereas “She gives me candy” was a great rocking tune and a rollicking good ride, it could not really be called Metal, much less NWOBHM, but this can. With a killer riff driving the song and a singer who sounds like he chews cigarettes for breakfast, it’s rough and raw and just the right side of punk that would allow it to fit right in among the many hundreds of bands all pushing and shoving for a recording contract, or at least recognition, in those heady days. It has to be said that it’s nothing special, but it’s not bad. I remember it as a little forgettable, and this time it would seem my memory is pretty much right on the money.
So where are they now?
Absolutely no idea.