‘It wasn’t an easy time in the UK, the 1980s,” says Damon Maddison, bassist with Brighton thrash metal band Hydra Vein. “There was a fair amount of anger about. The country had gone up in riots, not too many years before there was the miners’ strike, there was general strife happening everywhere. It was ripe for thrash metal.”
The high-octane subgenre tends to evoke beer-soaked denim, bloodied noses, tangled hair and Californian vocals – and Metallica, the most famous band from the US scene, remain as popular as ever with a UK No 1 album this week. But thousands of miles from the Bay Area, ex-punks and teenage metalheads from Nottingham to Bristol were making their own thrash mayhem in the mid- to late-80s, leaving Ghostbusters-themed lawsuits, police battles and haunted delay pedals in their wake.
