In the spring of 1983, Venom arrived in the United States with enough explosives to start a war. According to the music promoter Jonny Zazula, the Geordie trio had “a bomb board” of a kind “used by the IRA”. They “had dynamite”, too. During an appearance at the Paramount Theatre, on Staten Island, one of the band’s homemade pyrotechnics “blew up like a satellite, like a flying saucer”. Such was the velocity of the night’s first explosion that “the whole front row of the audience went blackface”. 

As the smoke cleared, Abaddon, the group’s drummer, recalls “the hole in the stage was the first thing we saw when we realised that things had gone drastically wrong”. 

This scene is just one of a number of lively vignettes in Michael Hann’s fascinating and entertaining new book Denim & Leather: The Rise And Fall Of The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. As an occasional acronym, NWOBHM certainly wasn’t pretty, but then neither were many of the bands amassed under its vast canvas. Whether they cared for the term or not – and, naturally, the best groups didn’t – Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Saxon, Samson, Diamond Head, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Girlschool, Praying Mantis, Witchfinder General and many more were all labelled thus. 

They came with energy to burn. As Joe Elliot, the front man with Def Leppard, told me in 2019: “My generation were the first generation after the hippies that looked at [music] from a tangible point of view and went, ‘It’s okay to put two fingers up at The Man and smoke weed, but you’re treading water’. We were the first to go, ‘You’re not making any progress’. For us, we didn’t have a white-collar mummy or daddy to bail us out. This was all on us… so we built our own rocket and we jetted off to other planets.” 

Whether by accident or design, their timing was perfect. Certainly it’s worth considering what might have become of very loud music were it not for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. As John Gallagher, the vocalist and bassist with Raven, astutely observes, “around ’78, or ’79” the established order was disintegrating. “You had Aerosmith fall apart,” he tells Hann. “[Led] Zeppelin were falling apart. Even coming up to their height, UFO were barely hanging on.” The reason for this, of course, was “the drugs”.