“We were the biggest of our generation of metal bands. We’d done it through hard graft and killer songs. None of that trendy image rubbish”: How Saxon’s Wheels Of Steel turned them into the NWOBHM’s first stars

Saxon posing for a photograph in 1981.

British metal warhorses Saxon did as much as anyone to sow the seeds for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, and their classic second album, 1980’s Wheels Of Steel, remains one of that scene’s greatest albums. In 2005, frontman Biff Byford looked back on the making of a record that helped reinvent metal for the 80s.