Episode #1: The First Albums We Bought With Our Own Money
The very first Enter Sadmen podcast got off to a blistering start with three albums that are, arguably, among the very best of the genre.
Van Halen - Van Halen (1978)
Steve is the pod’s resident Van Halen nut and so it’s probably no great surprise that he chose to spend his paper round money on their debut album from 1978. As he explains in the show, he got into Van Halen - and subsequently all things loud - by accident when he was asked to make up the numbers after someone dropped out of going to see VH when their UK tour rolled into Finsbury Park, London, in 1980.
In order to not look like a complete bellend in front of his new mates, he found the cash to buy a denim jacket, a flying VH patch to go on it and the band’s first three albums (on cassette, mind - and if that means nothing to you, go and ask your mum or dad). He hasn’t looked back since.
In this episode, we look at how the band’s unconventional and uncompromising approach to experimentation set them on the path to superstardom; how a young Eddie Van Halen (just 22 when the band recorded this) made an instant and indelible mark on the genre, setting the bar for every lead guitarist who would follow; how Michael Anthony is - and remains - the unsung hero Van Halen’s sound (and not just because he’s a remarkable bassist, either); and how this release allowed the band to write their own rules at their record label, Warner Bros.
AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)
Ordinarily, Mark is the podcast’s AC/DC superfan, but one of their albums wasn’t the first record he bought with the money he made from selling his Dad’s Benson & Hedges to his mates at school. But the last album Bon Scott recorded before his death just a few months later was Richard’s.
Much to the displeasure of his mum, who took issue with the album cover in general and Angus Young’s devil horns in particular, Richard had been determined to buy Highway to Hell after hearing the third single from the album, Touch Too Much.
In the podcast, we discover why this album was make or break time for a band that had won over Europe and Australia but had failed to crack the crucial American market; we examine the role of legendary producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange in shaping the band’s subsequent stratospheric success; and we ask the most important question of all: just who is the frontman in AC/DC?
Judas Priest - British Steel (1980)
As a 15-year-old who had spent a year pretending he was into soul music (even going so far as to buy a dapper belt) because that’s what the girls were into, Mark’s first album purchase was intended to authenticate his credibility as an out and out metalhead.
Having already been given AC/DC’s If You Want Blood … You’ve Got It by his parents, this was the second rock album he actually owned, but the first he bought for himself - and he chose it not because he liked Judas Priest (other than Breaking the Law, he’d never heard the band), but because every self-respecting metal fan in the UK seemed to love the Black Country rockers.
In this episode, we look at the progressively commercial shift the band took with the album that followed their first really accessible release, Killing Machine (retitled as Hell Bent for Leather in the USA); we talk about the recording process at the home of former Beatle Ringo Starr and the role the Thomas the Tank Engine narrator’s cutlery played in it; we celebrate the jaw-rattling twin guitar attack of KK Downing and Glenn Tipton; and we tell how Priest broke into the UK Top 20 with a song written following an early hours contretemps between Tipton and Downing and a dressing gown-clad Rob Halford …