“Proud to fly the flag”: What was the first band to identify as heavy metal?
Genres are never created on a whim. Even though rock and roll seemed to arrive like a bolt of lightning when artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard began climbing up the charts, it all came from them learning the basics of rhythm and blues before making it more energetic for a new generation. But even with rock and roll getting more edgy by the minute in the 1960s, heavy metal was always following slightly behind.
Although many bands from The British Invasion could have fallen under the banner of punk had they been born a few years later, the seeds were already being planted from something heavier on the horizon. Artists like The Stooges had already been exposing people to heavier flavours of rock, and looking at the more raucous songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones like ‘Helter Skelter’, it wasn’t like there was no room for something more aggressive on the charts.
At the same time, the bands that tend to get roped into the conversation of pre-metal don’t always see themselves in that light. Led Zeppelin always claimed to have their own mix of genres, and even though ‘Immigrant Song’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’ might have pieces of metal in their DNA, they were never comfortable being mentioned in the same breath as people like Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden.
But even Sabbath wasn’t comfortable with it, either. They had their own unique approach to rock by making scary music, but Tony Iommi’s musical vocabulary was still in rock and roll and blues rather than traditional metal. There was a middle ground, though, and it took one other band from Birmingham to help kickstart the metal revolution properly.
So who was the first band to claim to be heavy metal?
Despite coming from the same stomping grounds as Sabbath, Judas Priest were a much different animal when they debuted in the 1970s. They had a great deal of respect and admiration for bands like Sabbath and Zeppelin, but listening to their approach to harmony and strange sonic detours, they became the blueprint of what heavy metal was supposed to sound like, especially once Rob Halford opened his mouth to scream.
Even though the rest of the bands under the metal genre took that label as inaccurate at best and an insult at worst, guitarist KK Downing remembered being immensely proud of the moniker, saying, “There was a period where people were not admitting that they were metal, but Priest maintained it. We were always proud to fly the flag.”
Halford also echoed that sentiment, saying, “We believe in who we are, and we’re proud of what we do, so from the very beginning, that’s all we wanted to be associated with. You know, ‘We’re Judas Priest. We’re heavy metal.’” But their metallic identity went far beyond the visuals of Halford in his whips and chains and seeing everyone decked out in leather.
The old guard of metal still had the blues approach, but listening to how many of Priest’s albums are arranged, they are meant to sound larger than life in a way that was totally distinct from what people like Zeppelin and Sabbath were used to. Their music sounded like blues transforming into metal, but by the time a song like ‘Victim of Changes’ came out, heavy metal had truly reached its final form.
