Somkin' Valves: A Headbanger's Guide To 900 NWOBHM Records - Buch

Taking cue from the do-it-yourself attitude of their country’s punk movement, Britain’s up-and-coming heavy metal bands that comprised the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) were not content to wait for record labels to come knocking. Instead, they took to issuing their own music, typically in the form of 7 inch singles but also 12s and full-length album, many indie, some on small labels, and some on the major labels smart enough to get on board (essentially EMI and MCA).

Martin Popoff, author of 45 books on heavy metal (and at 7900, writer of more record reviews than anybody in history across all genres), has undertaken the task of documenting virtually every record large and wee from heavy metal’s most fabled period (beginning essentially in ‘79 with a hard stop at 1983) providing catalogue information, mini reviews as only he can do, plus a gob of thumbnails of those wonderful 7” picture sleeves and LP covers.

Note: the lion’s share of the material in Smokin’ Valves: A Headbanger’s Guide To 900 NWOBHM Records combines rewritten and expanded text from Martin’s long out-of-print The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal Singles plus the relevant reviews of full-length albums from his Collector’s Guide series, specifically the ‘70s and ‘80s book. These reviews have also experienced judicious editing and rewrites.