Those who have been watching BBC’s repeats of Top of the Pops from 1981 might have a slightly distorted impression of that year in pop. Because so many episodes have had to be excised from the run – owing to their presenters having been revealed as perpetrators of sex crimes – you don’t get much sense of it having been a golden year for the Human League. In fact, Don’t You Want Me seems to have arrived fully formed at No 1, with almost no sign of the three big hits that preceded it.
You do, however, get an awful lot of two bands. Bad Manners appear to have been on pretty much every week (what must Jerry Dammers have thought, seeing his vision of ska as a politically engaged, progressive medium of social commentary reduced to endless refrains of Lip Up Fatty?), while through 1981 and 1980, heavy metal was represented primarily by Saxon.
This bunch of unlikely looking, spandex-clad blokes from Barnsley managed four top 20 hits across those two years – Wheels of Steel, 747 (Strangers in the Night), And the Bands Played On and Never Surrender. Amid the parade of beautifully coiffured new romantics, or compared to the dandy highwaymen of Adam and the Ants, there’s something deeply touching about seeing Saxon’s bassist, Steve “Dobby” Dawson, on Top of the Pops – a moustachioed, balding man with the look of a deputy manager of a sports shop, dressed up in trousers tight enough to count the change in his pockets, a leather jacket thrown over a bare torso. No matter how hard he tries, he doesn’t look like he’s in danger of being invited to join Van Halen anytime soon. As Joe Elliott of Def Leppard once put it: “There was something so … northern about Saxon. Maybe it was the moustaches.”
These days, the late 70s/early 80s UK metal boom is often perceived through the prism of a very few bands: Iron Maiden, who rose to sustain a near-40-year career as one of the world’s biggest bands; Judas Priest, whose British Steel album pretty much codified the scene; Motörhead, who inspired a generation of young metal fans to embrace extreme velocity as their modus operandi; Def Leppard, who were polished by producer Robert “Mutt” Lange and released two of the biggest-selling albums ever; and, for the purists, Diamond Head, the band who inspired Lars Ulrich and Metallica.
But at the time, Saxon were as big as any of them and bigger than most, by the simple method of singing about things that excited their teenage fans – motorbikes (Wheels of Steel, Stallions of the Highway, Motorcycle Man), flying (747 (Strangers in the Night), 20,000 Ft), steam trains (Princess of the Night), or warfare (Machine Gun, Fire in the Sky).
Their greatest subject, though, was themselves. Saxon were not a group who formed at university and instantly signed a major label deal. Singer Biff Byford had been a miner and a textile worker before Saxon surfed the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) – he was 28 by the time they released their first album – and he sounded delighted to mythologise the transformation in his fortunes in song. “When the band started to take off, it did feel like I was escaping,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “The band was totally DIY. Our PA was home-made – we went to the library and got books on how to build speaker cabinets. With NWOBHM, people just knew this thing was about to break. It was a very exciting time.”
Joe Elliott – from just up the road in Sheffield – was a huge fan of Mott the Hoople, and it’s hard not to think Byford must have been, too. Saxon – proudly provincial, utterly but sincerely ridiculous in their attempts at glamour, resolutely working class – seemed to embody the same virtues as Mott, and songs such as And the Bands Played On and Denim and Leather shared the same desire to romanticise the life of the young band as Mott did on songs such as Saturday Gigs (“And then we got to Croydon!”).
The former commemorated the band’s appearance at the first Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington in 1980, while the latter was a hymn to the simple act of being both a metal band and a metal fan. It’s magnificent: set to one of the dumbest, most monolothic riffs in rock (and one it sounds like drummer Peter Gill, formerly of the Glitter Band, might have had some input in), Byford remembers the dawning of NWOBHM: “Where were you in 79 when the dam began to burst? / Did you check us out down at the local show? / Were you wearing denim, wearing leather? / Did you run down to the front? / Did you queue for your ticket through the ice and snow? / Denim and leather / Brought us all together / It was you that set the spirit free.”
It’s triumphalist song, from a band who had reason to feel triumphant. Though their debut album had done little in the charts, its successors positioned Saxon as one of the biggest British rock bands of their generation: No 5 for Wheels of Steel, No 11 for Strong Arm of the Law, No 9 for Denim and Leather, No 5 for The Eagle Has Landed. And then the chart positions started slipping, never to recover, with even a move from Carrere to EMI in 1985 doing nothing to stop the decline.
At the same time, Maiden and Leppard were getting bigger and bigger, moving from theatres to arenas, from UK hit albums to global smashes. It was, Byford reflected, down to a lack of strength in the band’s management compared with the other two. “The Saxon team wasn’t as powerful as Maiden’s or Leppard’s,” he told Mojo magazine. “Peter Mensch [with Leppard] and Rod Smallwood [with Maiden] were like another member of the band. We didn’t have that.” Still, at least they didn’t make a misjudgment as catastrophic as Diamond Head, who turned down a management offer from Mensch in favour of sticking with singer Sean Harris’s mum.
By 1988, they had been dropped from EMI after failing to break into the US. And the long twilight began. But metal never forgets, and while a new Saxon album would never generate the excitement it would have done in the early 80s, their position among modern metal’s forefathers was secure. The band – with only Byford and guitarist Paul Quinn left from the original 1976 lineup – continue to tour and record (they’ve got a string of UK shows lined up for October and November). They get invited on to the bills of the big festivals, gracing the likes of Sonisphere, Download and becoming regulars at the Euro metal gathering Wacken. And they’ve been honoured by Metallica, who have brought Byford on stage to sing Motorcyle Man with them. More telling, perhaps, was that in 2012 they won the best UK band award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods awards, more than 30 years after first recording.
Denim and leather, still bringing them all together.
