Issue 4’s Armed and Ready delivers the usual selection of hits and misses… Two legendary bands, still going strong today, one forgotten gem, and one that’s disappeared without trace. Also, Geoff Barton appears to have got out of bed on the wrong side this month, and entertainingly tears into a couple of our plucky pioneers too!
Holocaust
Kerrang! Issue 4 provides rich pickings for Metallica historians, featuring as it does a Letter from Ron Quintana – who basically gave Metallica their name, see our main blog – and also Holocaust are the headline feature in A&R, a couple of years before they are to pen ‘The Small Hours’, later covered by the thrash giants on their Garage Days Re-Revisted EP in 1987. Metallica and others hold Holocaust’s 1981 debut album – The Nightcomers – in very high esteem, and it’s at this moment in time that we are first introduced to the Scottish rockers in Armed and Ready… and Geoff does not entirely agree! “…the LP, i gotta admit, is very disappointing.” Perhaps this is because Geoff loved their previous ‘Heavy Metal Mania’ single so much, and suggests the band have been overwhelmed by the big studio experience, resulting in pedestrian playing and flat production. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and we can all now claim we always loved Holocaust, and that debut album sounds great to me, but Geoff only criticises because he cares and 6 out of 8 paragraphs are positive! And four decades later, the band (John Mortimer) are still going strong, releasing consistently strong albums, right up to 2019’s Elder Gods – possibly their best work.
Grim Reaper
Another band still rocking after all these years is Grim Reaper, who we caught sight of in the Issue 3 back-pages with the contribution of their track The Reaper to the Heavy Metal Heroes exclusive album / cassette offer. The band get a positive write-up, but there are references to their ever-changing line-up, and as if to back this up almost immediately after this strong write-up the band breaks-up, leaving only Nick Bowcott on guitar… But he recruits Steve Grimmett on vocals (who helps to get them properly signed) and the rest is history. After decent success in the mid-80s, Grimmett would go on to front Onslaught and Lionsheart, before GR resumed in 2006, with Bowcott rejoining in 2014.
Vixen
Not quite so enduring is the legacy of Vixen (not that one), of whom it is almost impossible to find any subsequent info (answers on a postcard please!). And it’s a shame as the write-up sounds interesting, with an early incarnation of the band reaching the final of a 1979 Melody Maker ‘rock contest’, with lead singer Viv Withers going on to rebuild the band and releasing a Led Zep influenced demo that’s got Geoff interested, describing them as a band really full of potential.
Gaskin
And finally, if Holocaust got a bit of constructive critcism, Scunthorpe’s Gaskin get an absolute pasting! And unlike Holocaust, they haven’t kept going for 40 years and Metallica haven’t covered them, but to be fair, the music that Geoff describes as ‘stuck in the overwhelmingly old-fashioned Seventies Wishbone Ash time warp and bears little relation to the nuclear NWOBHM of today’ actually stands the test of time and out of all the A&R hoepfuls this Issue, it’s Gaskin and their 1981 album End Of The World that’s spent most time on the WLL turntable… A very accomplished sound – band leader Paul Gaskin has been working on the material for 3 years – with ambition and vision beyond standard rock plodding… Not unlike Def Leppard, but with an interesting dash of that 70’s proggyness that Geoff alludes to – definitely worth a spin, despite the terrible name – “If someone comes askin’, tell ‘em it’s Gaskin!”
Gaskin – Sweet Dream Maker