Various Artists – Jobcentre Rejects

On The Dole

The new wave of British heavy metal then. It can safely be said that your writer has minimal understanding of the genre. Actually almost deliberately. So why pick up a compilation of NWOBHM? Something to do with “history is always written by the victors”‘.

Without going into a tl;dr diatribe, metal (in general) is very uncomfortable to me. Leaving aside the genuinely distressing history of actual nazis in black metal, there’s a whole heap of edgelords producing mostly male, mostly white music. Metallica are one of the favourite bands of squaddies in Iraq. There’s a super huge amount of unquestioned homophobia and women are so infrequently at the forefront, The Great Kat notwithstanding. But moreover there’s a point where metal becomes entirely associated with a sort of middle-class, white suburban (feint) rebellion.

To one side of that there’s a vision of metal which is way more working class, coming out of the working men’s clubs and such. Something lacking the urbanite bore of punk. Something which is still hopelessly white, hopelessly male, but at least is concerned with getting bollocksed and dancing while being super loud. Slade, Status Quo, glam in general, pub rock (etc). Which is where this compilation comes in.

Situated somewhere between 197198-82, this is seemingly a NWOBHM Nuggets — under-heard gems from what may be a golden era. And the “history written by the victors” bit, in the metal narrative in general, is what pops up here fairly prominently. There’s a lot of bits that sound like NWOBHM — parallel guitar parts à la Iron Maiden, dungeons and dragons narratives, long clean solos, that kind of thing. For me there’s plenty of stuff which points to a few convergent influences — Frenzy sound like a stompier Thin Lizzy, Spider sound like if punk originated in Liverpool, there’s Quo all over the shop (Die Laughing, Predatur). Plenty of this seems pretty cheaply recorded — building (I’m guessing) on the back of the punk ethos.

What I’m getting at really is that a lot of metal isn’t much fun. Obviously NWOBHM is where the headbanging thing started, but there’s plenty of boogie to these tracks. You can imagine actual people dancing to it. Metal after this point — where your Slayers and that come in — starts being weirdly not asexual, but kind of anti-sexual. To one extreme the (necessary) charged politicism of Napalm Death, to another the insidious sexism of Guns n fucking Roses. But it’s not really much fun. This compilation has a bunch of fun on it. Speed‘s “Down The Road” has a solo that’s less “look at me” and more “I’m a bit fucked, let’s just go really fast”. Metal Mirror‘s “English Booze” is about getting fucked. Spider’s “Children of the street” is an amphetamined glam stomper.

Yeah. So that’s where I’m pitching this record. It’s got a bunch of bangers. It sounds like fun. It’s got some solos and metal tropes, but nothing like the kind of whinging bore of, say, Rage Against The Machine. It’s a snapshot into a vision of metal that, at least, could’ve been a sight less middle-class. Arguably necessary. Definitely chock full of stompers.

-Kev Nickells-