In May 1979 an article by Geoff Barton appeared in the hard rock magazine Sounds after visiting Neal Kay’s Bandwagon. He described a new movement of metalbands in the UK. He called this movement the New Wave or British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM).
Nobody could then suspect that some of those bands would fill Arena’s years later. The biggest leader of the movement has become Iron Maiden.
The top consists apart of the aforementioned Iron Maiden of, Saxon, Def Leppard, Angel Witch, Diamond Head, Raven, Tygers of Pan Tang, Venom. But there are hundreds of other bands that belongs to the NWOBHM. Other fantastic bands are Savage, Battleaxe, Fist, Blitzkrieg, Girlschool, Holocaust, Tytan, Jaguar, White Spirit, Vardis, Tank, Blackmayne, Sweet Savage. Unfortunately I can not name them all, they are just too many.
And some bands have not released more than a (few) demo (s) and / or a (pair of) single (s) with their own savings. Paralex, Ztormtrooper, Black Ax, Bleak House, Random Black, StormQueen and so on.
All these bands have contributed to the NWOBHM which has been so important for the development of Heavy Metal. Metallica for instance, which would not have existed without the NWOBHM. The NWOBHM set the Heavy Metal train in motion, allowing us to welcome genres such as Thrash, Death and Black Metal.
Since it was 40 years ago in May 2019 that Geoff Barton’s article appeared in Sounds, it seemed to us of 130dB radio Metal Show a good idea to give this movement the honor it deserves by organizing a NWOBHM TOP 60.
So last month we played the Top 60 very best NWOBHM songs in 5 broadcasts. 300 enthusiastic fans have passed on their personal Top 10 to 130dB. That yielded a whole list, from which we have compiled the Top 60.
If you want to listen to the broadcasts, you can do that on different platforms. Such as Spotify, Apple, Anchor, Mixcloud and a few more.
Listen back the NWOBHM broadcasts:
| Broadcast | Content | ▶️ Apple | ▶️ Spotify | ▶️ Anchor | ▶️ Mixcloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Countdown 60 - 49 |  1 |  1 |  1 |  1 |
| 2 | Countdown 48 - 37 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | Countdown 36 - 24 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 4 | Countdown 23 - 11 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| 5 | Countdown 10 - 1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
