Rockpedia

In short

Hundreds of British bands who took metal back from the arenas, pressed their own singles and accidentally armed the next four genres.

The scene

By 1978 heavy metal was a stadium concern and punk had made it look ridiculous. The response was to apply punk's economics to metal's music: press a single yourself, sell it at gigs, get played on Neal Kay's disco in a Kingsbury pub and reviewed in Sounds. Most of the bands never got further than that. It hardly mattered — the records reached California and Scandinavia, where Metallica covered Diamond Head and everybody in Norway heard Venom, and two of the loudest genres on this map begin with teenagers importing British seven-inches.