Given that the movement was called NWOBHM, what was the first wave of British heavy metal?
Deep Purple and Black Sabbath were hardly called heavy metal when they first started. “I guess that was called heavy rock or just rock. But they were certainly the first wave. The big bands like Purple and Sabbath or Uriah Heep. That’s what I mean. They got the big record labels. The new thing to come up had to be the new wave because you got the same sort of type of bands bringing out their own things without any big labels backing them.” Given how the Rondolet label managed to pretty much fuck everything up I couldn’t help wondering how did you end up on Rondolet to begin with? “I guess it was ourselves being quite naive and desperate at that time. We had been playing for years without any record label or interest. Certainly we had sent of tapes to EMI and Virgin without any interest at all. So what we decided to do was to play everywhere constantly, which we did. We ended up with an incredibly fanatical and loyal following. When we came and played back round were we came from this f
