Angel Witch - Angel Witch (Bronze '80, BRON532) At the dark end of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal you had folks like Demon, Venom, Witchfynde and Angel Witch. But Venom were a lark, Witchfynde inconsistent, and Demon, already early on, flirting with clanky pop and prog. Angel Witch on the other hand, flew like a leather-winged harpy right out of the blocks, solidly braced in place with their self-titled album, barely a band effort, more a solo project from one Kevin Heybourne surrounded by a rapidly deteriorating band. Knocking about south London, the band briefly were called Lucifer, Kevin musing that "we played one gig under that name and then promptly changed it." A series of mysterious, accomplished pure metal singles, compilation tracks and EPs later, and the world was blackness-blessed with an equally mysterious debut record, starkly introducing itself with a hellish John Martin painting. "Well, yeah, we had to get the rights from the gallery, Tate Gallery, to use the transparency. I originally I saw it in a book by Dennis Wheatley. I've always been interested in that stuff but I've never taken it seriously. I see religion as religion is, you know what I mean? I think it can be just as bad as Satanism. So yes, I tracked it down to the Tate Gallery, same as the Baphomet as well, the goat thing, same gallery." How serious was the band about Satanism? "We weren't. We weren't. I mean we were just into the old Hammer horror films. It's just imagination and fantasy. I thought, you know, a lot of bands sing about love and stuff like that, real issues, and I just wanted to get away from that, do pure fantasy. A lot of people out there want to hear that, you know?" "My main influence was always Black Sabbath," continues Heybourne. "The thing that they had which was different to all the others like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath had a darker sound and I was really into that. And their guitar sound was so muddy and heavy, it just filled the whole thing out. And that was the angle I was trying to take. I listened to loads of stuff, Black Sabbath, UFO, Schenker as a guitarist, even Ted Nugent (laughs), whatever you could get your hands on at the time; Thin Lizzy also with the dual leads, which of course Priest had as well." The album opened with Heybourne's first-ever written song, 'Angel Witch', penned when Kevin was a mere tyke of 16 or 17. A classic opener, 'Angel Witch' had a corker of a melody, cranked with a heavy metal rumble that was the crux of all those 7" singles flowing out of the NWOBHM. As well, Kevin's voice was a perfect match for the mystique of the music, naive, almost hurt. The man could really sell fear. "The basic premise of the rhythm is something like the one from a band called Pink Fairies. I can't remember the name of the track, it's so long ago. It was something like 'she took me to a room and hit me with a broom'; it kind has the same rhythm and the same chord progression." Next up was 'Atlantis', a professional and very modern speed metal machine with sinister black clouds of doom and shrieky foreboding harmonies. "Oh, 'Atlantis' was a real trick to get down, the drums, and I think in the end, they had to play them the other way around, sort of snare bass bass instead of bass snare snare. That was a very, very trying time, a real pain in the ass. We were working with Martin Smith, the producer, and basically he didn't want big drum rolls and stuff like that. He wanted to try and cut this out and cut that out which I thought sucked a bit. But I kind of knew what he wanted to achieve. He wanted to make it more basic so people could hear what's going on instead of it been cluttered. Lyrically, that was just straight out of me own box (laughs)." Yes, and who was this Martin Smith? "He hadn't produced anything before us. When I knew him then, he was in Electric Light Orchestra, but that was it as far as I know. He's still around and he's still doing it. He's got his own little set-up and he does a few little bits and pieces. He was a member of ELO, but I don't know for how long. All told, the album took about three weeks of playing and a week of other stuff to get done. Bronze didn't give us much of a recording advance, come to think of it, it wasn't much of a publishing advance either (laughs)." All told, how were you treated by Bronze? "They paid up, really; publishing and royalties and stuff. We didn't have any problems with that at all. I don't know. They terminated our contract after a year. We weren't the kind of band they really wanted. I always felt that they were trying to control us and make us more commercial sounding with things like 'Loser' and 'Suffer' off of their first single, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. It didn't work like that." Any idea how many copies of the album sold before the CD age (where these things get very muddy, especially with this album!)? "Oh God, I know it sold 35,000 within the first six months. And I had assumed they got their shit together and released it everywhere, like in America, but I don't think it ever came out there. I think it came out in Germany and Japan and I thought it was a worldwide release. My statements tell me it sold in these territories." Elsewhere on the record, 'White Witch' hums along ironically with a similar bounce to 'Angel Witch', but like 'Angel Witch', it's pan-seared with grand, well-positioned leads; Satanic pop so to speak. "Yes, that's when I was working in a mental institution as a porter as my day job at the time. There was this weird girl there that just made my imagination run wild. She told me a few things. She told me she was a witch and she had died and I kind of wrote the thing around her. Obviously the things in this song didn't happen to her (laughs)." 'Confused' is arguably the album's weightiest, blockiest chunk of depressive coal. The lyric is an uncharacteristically frank look at teen alienation. Turns out it's uncharacteristic for a reason. "I didn't write the lyrics for that. My ex-wife actually wrote them. Obviously I wrote the music. And actually I thought the lyrics were pretty good. I thought, yeah, this is actually what people feel like, the kind of people that go to those things, go to gigs. They have a bit more of an open mind. You can say what you like to them and nobody really holds you against what you say. The press do, on the other hand (laughs)." "That was just about a bad dream really, the falling dream, things that happen in nightmares," notes Heybourne about one of the record's strongest tracks, 'Sweet Danger', driven by a careening, somewhat sour melody, happy go drinking, doom be your fate. "That song has a Rush influence on it at the beginning, hasn't it? (ed. play it: he's probably referring to the intro from 'Bastille Day'!) You can't be 100% original, you know what I mean? Everybody's got to get their influence from somewhere. I don't see it as a bad thing. I've never hidden the fact that Black Sabbath is my favorite band. And that is evident in the sound of the music." About the droopy doom balladry of 'Free Man' Kevin offered that "I guess that's just my teenage years coming out, whereas 'Devil's Tower' attracts the quip, "that would have to be close encounters, wouldn't it (laughs)?" Press at the time, as I recall, seemed pretty chuffed with the album, with us folks way far away also getting fed a pile of bad reviews with respect to the band's supposedly laughable live gigs. What gives? "There have been so many different line-ups, and it's been restricting in one way or another, I suppose. I would say that we were an average live band. I wouldn't say that we were a great band but I wouldn't say we were a lousy band live either. I mean, you've got to start somewhere. I guess there are always problems. I mean, I don't think Dave Hogg was that brilliant a drummer, to be honest. I could see when he was speeding up or slowing down. He wasn't very consistent." Did he die? Because I hear he had leukemia? "No, he didn't die, I don't think. I hear he's still around and he's a bus driver. I guess he pulled through. He really didn't help himself. When he was on the drugs he was on, he was taking other drugs as well (laughs), so it really wasn't going to make things any better." So I take it, he was part of the reason for the original break-up of the band? "Yes, Riddles and Hogg. Dave Hogg had to go because, I don't know, a bit of a problem with drink. He just slowed down so much it became ridiculous and it made everybody else look bad. I had to get rid of him. And we got in Dave Dufort. In 1981, we broke up. I'd had enough of what was going on. Things were getting sort of a little bit hot; people were getting hot under the collar (laughs)." What do you remember about the reviews for the album? "I'd say about 50/50. We had some bad ones and some good ones. Some people raved about it and some people absolutely hated it. This is where the... you're talking about one person's opinion of your album. And that sort of annoys me. It goes out to the public and you say, 'they believe this?!' You've got a mind of your own. It's dangerous." It is of note that two tracks recorded at the same sessions didn't get on the album, an updated version of the sinister blast metal classic 'Extermination Day' and 'Guillotine', which couldn't get on "because it was just too damn long", Heybourne adding that it was the record company's decision, the band having little control over the final track selection. In addition, before the original configuration broke up, the band had at least laid down rehearsal recordings of four or five new songs, one of which was called 'Lucifer', two others of which got revived for the first of the two reunion studio album, Screamin' n' Bleedin' in '85, second being Frontal Assault in '86, the last proper recordings the band ever mustered. In any event, Angel Witch never caught the twisting red tail of the debut album's metal mastery ever again, recording the two studio albums after which a host of CDs regularly emerged, slinging rarities, live material, repackaged old stuff with or without the singles and EPs as bonus tracks, a general recurring echo of a great band that once was. By the measures of most who care about these things, Angel Witch, the album, is lauded as one of the top five New Wave Of British Heavy Metal albums of all time. Revenge is theirs, after all sorts of critical drubbing and ridicule, the record reissued upon reissue, forever ensconced as a deliciously dark metal classic. "I really like that whole album," remarks Heybourne without a twinge of irony or bitterness at the 20 year rock 'n' roll battle that has been his. "I'm very proud of it because it's the first one and because of the fact that I wouldn't be where I am now without it. I feel I have a bit of respect because of that album."