#4 April 1980

Welcome to this weeks episode of Heavy Metal History.

We move into April of 1980 to discuss the rise of the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) scene with two of the most now well known bands putting out records in the same month on the same day. The timing of those two records couldn’t have been at a better time as the souring and dueling leads of both those band would begin to change and shape the sound of bands to come for years. While Iron Maiden was releasing their maiden (pun intended) record, the flip side of that is that Judas Priest was on their 6th album by this time and had already been a band for almost 6 years. And yet the two bands are synonymous with each other as are the release of these records respectively. I touch on the Ronnie James Dio era Black Sabbath album that was ALSO released in the same month, but I have already covered the making of that album in our part 2 episode of Black Sabbath. The Los Angeles based punk rock band X also puts out one of the genres most well known and memorable records during this time.

The albums we discussed on this episode were:

• X- “Los Angeles”

• Iron Maiden - "Iron Maiden"

• Judas Priest - "British Steel"

• Black Sabbath - “Heaven and Hell” (Also released but previously talked about on our Black Sabbath episode)