As the seventies drew to a close, punk’s fire had died down, but not before leaving an indelible mark on how eighties pop music would be defined, which led to the rise of new wave. Meanwhile, another front stayed wide open in the musical underground. Punk was a sudden eruption that burned bright for only a handful of years and still shook the whole music world, and it rubbed off on a bunch of new bands who went for a bristlier sound and built their style on much sharper technical chops. These bands also drew inspiration from the heavy sound of Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin, Motörhead, Uriah Heep, Rainbow and Deep Purple. Throw in Judas Priest, UFO, Thin Lizzy and Wishbone Ash too, no problem. It’s 1980, the year of a slew of debuts from bands that put a new kind of metal on the world map: the »New Wave Of British Heavy Metal« (N.W.O.B.H.M.).
Saxon, though, had a slight edge over the rest of the metal underground at the time. They already had their debut studio album in the bag, which sold around 12,000 copies on release, very encouraging for a band at the very start of its career. The band had just come off a hugely successful tour with Motorhead, but it wasn’t enough to win over their management at the time. So they got dropped, but someone was still watching over them: the folks at EMI, in the person of producer Pete Hinton. He got them a deal with the French label Carrere Records. The album »Saxon«, released in 1979, didn’t chart in the UK, but the songs Big Teaser and Backs to The Wall both made the top 75 singles, which is a promising result for a young band. Especially because this very band was already toying with a musical direction that would only later define the genre.
That month-long tour of the UK with Motorhead, which saw Saxon and Lemmy’s crew play three nights in a row at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, among other shows, was clearly a turning point. The two bands got on brilliantly on the road, which is why it wasn’t the last tour they ever did together (but that’s another story). The tour was a big reason why Saxon gradually took over as the leading band of the early boom known as the »New Wave Of British Heavy Metal« (N.W.O.B.H.M).
There were a few more things going on at the time that worked in Saxon’s favor on the scene. In 1980, EMI put out the famous compilation »Metal For Muthas«, featuring Iron Maiden, Praying Mantis, Samson, Angel Witch, Sledgehammer and Nutz, among others. It was the year of debuts from Iron Maiden, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Angel Witch, Def Leppard, Diamond Head and Girlschool, and also the year when artists the world already knew put out new albums that turned out to be career-defining. Those were Judas Priest with »British Steel« and Motorhead with »Ace Of Spades«. Then there was the new tour promoting the Metal For Muthas compilation, which kicked off on 01.02.1980, with Motorhead, Samson and Saxon alternating as headliners, and with the support slots reserved exclusively for bands from the new wave of British heavy metal. There were 22 of them across the whole tour (Iron Maiden among them). In mid-February, Saxon played the famous BBC house and, as part of the »BBC Sesssions« series, did a show where, among five songs, they already unveiled the brand-new Motorcycle Man and 747 (Strangers In The Night).
»Wheels Of Steel« shot up to number five on the UK albums chart on release. It simply catapulted Saxon onto the scene. Suddenly. All at once. With force. Straight to the top. Saxon even appeared on »Top of the Pops«, where they played (and recorded) the song Wheels Of Steel at the BBC studio. At the time of its release, Wheels Of Steel was simply seen as one of the essential albums to come out of the scene, helping define and found the N.W.O.B.H.M. movement. The new album was stylistically much more focused than the stylistically all-over-the-place debut, and the band also sharpened its denim-and-leather look and reached more decisively for the symbolism on which it was slowly building its musical cult of personality. For »Wheels Of Steel«, the band put the famous eagle on the cover and kept the recognizable logo. Little by little, the eagle became not just a symbol of the band but of the whole N.W.O.B.H.M. era. On 21.03.1980 the band released the single Wheels Of Steel, which broke into the UK top 20 singles. In June of the same year it was followed by 747 (Strangers In the Night), which did even better, climbing to number 13 on the UK top 20 singles chart. In September the band released one more single, for the song Suzy Hold On.
When the band started booking shows, they soon found out everything was sold out in advance. Saxon kept moving up to bigger and bigger venues. It only made sense. They’d caught the right train, at a time when nobody was bigger than anybody else, in the sense that nobody knew competitiveness, everybody was just creating on a wave of huge inspiration and the positive vibes of approval from the people around them, especially promoters, labels and A&R folks in general. All of a sudden the UK tour stretched out over several months.
That year the band also played the famous Monsters of Rock festival in the middle of Donington. Doors swung wide open for them, out of nowhere. And “Wheels Of Steel”? A historic album. Not just for the band itself, but for metal as a whole. Back then, you’d have been hard-pressed to find an album that captured the wild, untamed spirit of a brand-new genre’s big adventure better than »Wheels Of Steel«. It’s regarded as the central musical achievement that founded the “N.W.O.B.H.M.” movement.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
