For those of a certain generation who like their music hard and heavy, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) represented a special era of music that leaned heavily into instrumental virtuosity, hooks, riffs and biker-influenced attire that leaned towards denim, vests and leather. Chief among the newer acts emerging from this scene that kicked off in 1979 were lesser-known bands like Tygers of Pan Tang, Samson and Girlschool alongside better-known standard-bearers that included Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Saxon. Fast-forward four-and-a-half decades later and Saxon is still throwing the red meat of hard rock to the massed. The band is currently touring behind the recently released Hell, Fire and Damnation, the quintet’s twenty-fourth studio outing. For vocalist Peter “Biff” Byford (who co-produced the 10-track effort with Judas Priest touring guitarist Andy Sneap), the album wound up being an inadvertent concept album.
(Photo by Ned Wakeman)
“[The record] goes into a little bit of a good versus evil type theme,” Byford admits. “I think that Hell, Fire & Damnation is about good and evil battling through the ages with religious overtones there. It initially wasn’t a concept. We just wrote a bunch of songs and put them all together and that’s sort of how it turned out really. It wasn’t until we’d written everything that I got the idea that maybe we were onto a good thing here and this album was going to be great.”
While the lazy music fan might be quick to dismiss hard rock acts as solely writing about sex, drugs and rock and roll, Saxon’s subject matter is of a more literary take, albeit with soaring guitar solos and a pounding backbeat. Not unlike their brethren in Iron Maiden, history, the occult and science fiction provide plenty of fodder on this newer set of songs. The results range from Marie Antoinette’s fate (the anthemic “Madame Guillotine”) and the unfortunate wretches accused of supernatural wrongdoing (the double-timed “Witches of Salem”) to powerful Mongol emperors (an epic “Kubla Khan and the Merchant of Venice”) and Area 52-fueled conspiracy theories (the groove-driven “There’s Something in Roswell”). Quickly banged out in October 2023, Saxon’s latest album is infused with a spontaneous spirit driven by the need to have it available for purchase before the band hit the European leg of the tour opening for Judas Priest starting this past January.
“We didn’t have a lot of time to make it and finish it, but I think that added to the excitement of the album because everybody worked really hard and were really pushing it,” Byford said. “Andy Snead, the producer, was working in America with Judas Priest at the time, so I had to do quite a bit of the recording of the guitars and things myself. It was an exciting album—a kind of wham, bam, thank you ma’am kind of moment. Vocally, I spent quite a bit of time working on melodies and lyrics to make it a bit more interesting than your average rock and roll lyrics. Singing on this album was also a nice moment—my son was engineering at the time for me, so that was a good thing.”
Always known for being very much an exciting live band dating back to Saxon’s early days opening for Motörhead, Byford acknowledges how important his group’s loyal fanbase are. So much so, that Saxon is inviting their devotees to help craft the tour’s set-list via social media.
“We’re promoting Hell, Fire & Damnation, so it’s going to be four or five songs from that album,” Byford explained. “I’m going to do a Facebook post asking people what they want us to play. There are 16 songs including five songs off the new album and let’s see what people say. Let’s get people involved in the tour. Every show we do is totally different. We’re a great live band and we don’t have a lot of things running behind the scenes. If an audience wants us to play a certain song and if we know it, we’ll play it. Those are the sort of live shows we run.”
Saxon might be classified as a heavy metal act, but the band’s roots date back to the late ‘70s UK punk scene when they were named S.O.B. and sharing bills with The Clash. Byford’s pre-Saxon life found him starting out as a singing bass player for a blues-rock band before enjoying a brief stint playing flute for an obscure British psychedelic outfit called Jumble Lane. But it would be the NWOBHM scene that provided the springboard for Byford and his crew to achieve international fame with a highlight being an American tour supporting 1983’s Power & the Glory and opening for Iron Maiden in the States. It’s a period Byford remembers fondly.
“It was quite an exciting time you know,” Byford said. “Because [Iron] Maiden, Saxon and Def Leppard were new bands on the scene, we were labeled different than other bands like Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Wishbone Ash, who were great bands but were not of a new generation of bands. We picked up a whole new generation of people—mostly schoolkids really—14 and 15-year-olds. And a lot of punks were disillusioned with that scene and came to Motörhead actually. Our first tour was with Motörhead and their audience took us in and we became popular because of those tours. We had a great album and great tours. Everything was in the right place at the right time. The planets aligned and that’s what the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was. That movement swept around the planet really.”
For now, Saxon’s immediate future involves plenty of touring, with much of the barnstorming involving the East Coast and the Midwest before a summer return to the UK to headline festivals and hit the road with Priest again. When asked about the band’s longevity, Byford points to Saxon’s blue-collar background and the mantra they’ve adopted from a song featured on 1981’s seminal Denim and Leather that also became the title of his 2007 memoir.
“We wrote a song called ‘Never Surrender,’” Byford said. “It seems to be our motto and people like it.”
Saxon will be appearing with Uriah Heep on May 7 at The Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts, 71 E. Main St., Patchogue. For more information, visit www.patchoguetheatre.com or call 631-207-1313.
