Music Monday: Welcome to Dying and Back Street Woman

This is my occasional series about old music that I like and you’ve never heard of (or maybe you have; how would I know?)

This time around I thought I’d go local, or at least local to where I grew up.

Bristol, in the U.K., is a great city. It’s diverse, progressive, with a lot of history and culture. It even has its own science fiction and fantasy convention, BristolCon. What it doesn’t have, though, is a great deal of native heavy metal. As I’ve pointed out before, heavy metal grew out of the industrial cities of the British midlands. Bristol isn’t part of that, and although it used to be a port city and still has an aerospace industry, it was never the kind of heavy industrial centre that the midlands were.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t any bands, of course. Wherever there were working class neighbourhoods, there were going to be heavy metal bands.

So I’m going to talk about two of the better-known bands from my home city.

First up is Onslaught. Onslaught were formed in Bristol in the early 1980s, before I was really into metal, but in 1989 they released what I think is their best album, In Search of Sanity. This album contained their most complex songs, and while there is certainly a clear influence from Metallica, the vocals from their singer Steve Grimmett led to a more melodic sound. Welcome to Dying, below, is the longest song on the album, coming in at over 12 minutes:

If you’re looking for a rather shorter song from them, here’s the band doing a cover of AC/DC’s classic, Let There Be Rock.

The second local band I’m going to highlight is band called Jaguar. I’ll be honest, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about Jaguar. They never had a great deal of success, but their music is fairly representative of (although slightly faster than) a lot of the young heavy metal bands around in the period of about 1979-82. Listening to them, you can see why bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Def Leppard became such international successes and Jaguar didn’t. That’s not to say that they were a bad band. They weren’t, and they’re still worth listening to. This is a single they released in 1981, called Back Street Woman. I didn’t actually hear them when they were first around (they folded in 1984, before I got into the music), but I came across this track some years later on a compilation album. Here it is:

These weren’t the only heavy metal bands in Bristol, of course (hell, every school probably had half-a-dozen wannabe bands playing to a few dozen friends), but they were the most successful and worth a few minutes of listening.

That’s all for today. Next blog entry is going to be about something else entirely. Stay tuned… :)