Metal’s Greatest Punk Singer Remembered: Paul Di’Anno 1958–2024
A freewheeling homage to an architect of the NWOBHM
Heavy Metal is supposed to sound like Heavy Metal.
(Which usually means Hawkwind, right, but let’s not make this about Hawkwind, okay? Tim tends to make everything about Hawkwind or Dean Friedman. Let’s not go there.)
Heavy Metal should sound like gigantic, godlike gears grinding against the rhythm of some huffing, ghastly satanic mill, oh the kind that left scars on the planet by digging out it’s flesh and ore. It should be doomed yet hungry steam-belching troop trains on the way to the ash-darkened front, going dot-dash-dit-dit-dash, the steel wheels sparking red and white.
Right?
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or NWOBHM (Punk Rock’s dog-collared conjoined twin, which occupied Great Britain circa in the late 1970s and very early 1980s), was an aggressive, conscious and fascinating return to that ideal, after metal had devolved into symphonic Benadryl-chewing, Tolkien-wanking and Clapton-esque half-baked blues FM heroin heresy.
Yeh.
I mean, for God’s sake: Someone needed to kick Kiss’s Music from the Elder down a flight of stairs.
Listen, we have just lost Paul Di’Anno, a significant and archetypal hero of NWOBHM, one of the louche and magic failure/successes of rock ‘n’ roll who deserves our hosannas, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Di’Anno, who fronted Iron Maiden between 1978 and 1981, didn’t sound much like anyone’s idea of a metal singer: Basically, he’s a punk rock singer, somewhere between Jake Burns and Jimmy Pursey with maybe a little bit of Eric Bloom’s snooty, spoken/sung baritone; and my god, I wish there had been more like him. How many times have we wished our favorite metal band was fronted by a punk singer? I mean, wasn’t that what Grunge was all about? NWOBHM was a movement intended to bring metal out of the arenas and football stadiums and back into the clubs; it was meant to remove the superhuman from metal, and return it to the lager-thumping punters who wanted less lemon-squeezing and more headbanging.
Listen, I don’t claim to be an expert — oh my, not remotely — on NWBOHM; I wouldn’t trust myself to tell a Witchfynde from a Thünderwytche. But I know what it feels like when rock ‘n’ roll sounds the way it’s supposed to. I think this is a good point of comparison: Like Grunge roughly 20 years later, NWOBHM felt like a necessary correction, like a diverse but somehow unified group of bands trying to do rock’n’roll the way it was supposed to be done: You can’t find it in your record store, and the major labels aren’t sniffing it yet, so you’re going to have to go into your garage or your basement and do it yourself, and circulate it on cassettes.
VIDEO: Iron Maiden “Remember Tomorrow”
NWOBHM was an amazing flipping movement; in the U.K. it’s noted with gravity and respect, but here in the United States, it’s largely unknown. Maybe it was the peculiar acronym that failed every effort to transform it into spoken language: Noah Bottom? Nuh-woe-bem? I mean, it’s a movement that deserved a hot, sexy, blunt, chopped and slashed name; instead it was weighed down with, uh, EnnDoubleYou-OhhhBeeAitchEmm (which, mind you, was preferrable to the name I first heard attached to the movement: NWONEHM – New Wave of North English Heavy Metal, which honored the fact that many of the movement’s significant bands came from the smoggy, working class steel towns and former coal towns of North England). Maybe with a snappier name — U.K. Fast’n’Loud Indie Metal would probably have done the trick? — it would have done better in the United States, that Golem-like meningitis-brained behemoth that both defines and defies tastes, and lumbers through the world like the fat guy smashing through the gas station food mart aisle looking for a toilet, knocking over Noodle Cups and Oreos without discrimination? (“It is my RIGHT to Jackson Pollock your public toilet, stomping on Hostess Cupcakes and C Howard Violet Gum on my way, I am The American! I am not the country of Copland and Ginsberg, I am the land of Gallagher and Piscopo!”). As it happens, to the general American music consumer, the legacy of NWOBHM may be the fact that two of its’ acts grew up to become commercial behemoths (Iron Maiden and Def Leppard), and the slightly lesser known — yet huge — impression NWOBHM left on the first generation of American speed and death metal bands.
In many ways, NWOBHM ran on the same chesty electricity + ale + Dexedrine-flecked spit as the (roughly contemporary) American hardcore punk movement, by which I mean the initial speedspray of American Hardcore, 1978 – 1981, when it was the snotty, rebellious kid brother to Post Punk, and a logical response to both the failures and successes of punk’s first wave (and a way to finger-f*ck the commercialization and inclination to artiness of punk’s first wave). I mean, by 1979, it was clear that whatever punk rock had been, it was gonna end up being U2 and The Cure, and there’s a place for that, sure; but someone had to raise their fist and go, nuh-uh, here’s Legionnaire’s Disease and the Germs, we are the inarticulate rusted razor beyond the next-level Bowie-isms, yeh. Both hardcore and NWOBHM were ignited by the sense that a.) Punk hadn’t gotten it done, and it was dissolving fast into something else without having quite reached its apotheosis; and b.) an entire fanbase very, very much needed music of extremes. (“Punk’s apotheosis” would have been, oh, if the Del Monas had been formed in 1978, instead of 1985. Got it?). In other words, Punk moved forward before the job was done, and that’s where Hardcore and NWOBHM came in. Oh, and Oi, too: NWOBHM was the virtual (non-identical) twin to Oi, a genre that’s been vastly misunderstood: Both were about working-class boys and girls gnashing their teeth, making noise and removing the art school from Punk and the prog/blues flab from metal. The first generation of American hardcore, by and large, wasn’t quite as working class — that came later — but like Oi and NWOBHM, there was a conscious desire to continue punk’s mission statement of volume, speed, simplicity, and self/indie release, as opposed to move away from it. In fact, a handful of the first generation American hardcore bands — notably Dead Kennedys, SSDecontrol, The Faith, and even The Germs — could have passed for NWOBHM groups, if they had different vocalists and incorporated extended solo sections; which all goes to show that something was in the air, and it was the idea that it was time to “do” metal the right way, or do punk the metal way.
NWOBHM was driven by the sense that “standard” heavy metal had gotten too full of money, complacency, pretension and hot air, and that audiences were hungry for something that was wound tighter than a slinky in Fred Blassie’s fists, which sizzled and burned like tin foil against fillings. Like early hardcore, the mission of the first generation NWOBHM wasn’t necessarily to get a record deal, but just to blow every thought and cobweb out of your mind, and remind you that this was supposed to be the sound your parents hated. It wasn’t supposed to be art, it wasn’t supposed to be something you could bring your date to, it was just the sound of a whole community screaming, over and over, “As much as I kinda like Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door, this is not fucking that, this is the sound we heard in our head when we first heard the word ‘heavy metal’ and imagined what it would sound like!” I mean, only your sister’s friend, or some wag on a grotesque local FM station that shouted the word “Rocktober!” a lot, thought Foreigner, Toto or Survivor was heavy metal. And did I mention Kiss’s Music From the Elder? I think I did, yes.
And that’s where NWOBHM came in.
Of course, there were precedents for NWOBHM: UFO, early Scorpions, Priest (oh very much Priest), a lot of Thin Lizzy (especially the twin guitar sound, which became a trademark of much of NWOBHM), early Queen, the stunning first three Blue Öyster Cult albums, (occasional) Budgie and Motörhead, who weren’t actually a NWOBHM band, but recognized an eager and likely constituency when they spotted one.
The interesting thing is how well a lot of NWOBHM has dated, even the fairly mediocre stuff, and how modern it sounds: any half way decent NWOBHM playlist is full of express-train rock, the sound of excited kids trying to squeeze barbed wire, rusted nails, and a copy of the Necronomicon out of a toothpaste tube. Even lesser NWOBHM (not to mention the peaks it reaches with early Maiden, Saxon, Diamond Head, Samson or Girlschool) is metal done the way we wished metal was done when we were in high school and some FM station was trying to stuff Kansas down our throats; it’s twisting, teeth-scaling, salty, committed, sincere, and it very clearly anticipates the Megadeth / Metallica / Anthrax movement which, in many ways, eclipsed NWOBHM to such a degree commercially and publicly that we forget that those guys grabbed a LOT of this sound from this less-well known movement that came just before it (it is most certainly not an accident that Metallica famously covered a NWOBHM anthem, Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil”). Seriously, even the briefest dip into NWOBHM is hugely rewarding and a lot of fun, revealing metal that “felt” like Punk, even if it had none of Punk’s somewhat Stalinist limitations on expertise. NWOBHM was the metal we always hoped metal would be: a return to the garage, a challenge to do things faster and louder and get it out as quickly as possible.
But back to Paul Di’Anno, who even within the realm of NWOBHM, was a unique artist.
By and large, the NWOBHM bands were still working with (and within) the framework of the “traditional” 1970s-style Gillan/Halford/Dio hard rock singer; but Paul Di’Anno had virtually no aspiration to be a traditional metal shrieker, and he likely would have fit in just as well in the Cockney Rejects or Sham 69. Until the hydrogen peroxide burpers and cookie monster manques of a much later era, I’m not sure any vocalist in any well-known metal band — with the exception, of course, of Lemmy, or maybe the multiple singers in (the vastly underrated) Girlschool — ever sounded less aspirational to standard hard rock shrieking, and more like, well, a punk rock singer. Which, for all intents and purposes, made Di’Anno a fellow traveller not just to Oi and hardcore, but to grunge as well. By being, essentially, a punk rock singer in an anti-blues, lean, serpentine, underfed, over-rehearsed, and over-sped metal band (that’s Maiden circa ’79 – ’81), Paul Di’Anno played a huge role in defining the idea that NWOBHM was not gonna be your older brother’s heavy metal; in fact, there’s a very slim line between Di’Anno’s hoarse, slogan-heavy shouting and the Oi! singers who very quickly followed in his wake (and we note that both Cockney Rejects and Discharge, to name just two, actually tried to alter their sound and jump on the NWOBHM bandwagon). 45 years later, Paul Di’Anno still sounds truly shocking, attitudinal, like someone with a grudge and a chip on his shoulder and a desire to “do” heavy metal differently than those who had come before. It makes me wish more metal bands had engaged Di’Anno / Pursey / Mensi type singers, instead of feeling they needed to be confined to the Bruce Dickinson model. By being an adamant exception to what a metal singer was “supposed” to sound like, and by refusing to compliment Maiden’s serpentine riffing with Halford-isms that it suggested, Di’Anno was saying, “This movement is about something different.”
So: It’s highly rewarding to spend some time with NWOBHM, and let us note and mourn Paul Di’Anno’s passing, after many years of ill health — he was a powerfully important figure in an important movement.
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