Heavy Rock

Before we neatly divided everything into hard rock, heavy metal, doom, stoner rock and a dozen other sub-genres, there was simply Heavy Rock.

For a few glorious years in the early 1970s, that was the banner under which some of the loudest, darkest and most adventurous bands on the planet gathered. They weren’t trying to invent heavy metal—they were simply pushing rock music as far as it could go.

History has rightly celebrated Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but beneath the surface lay an extraordinary underground of bands who were every bit as uncompromising.

Wicked Lady. Moloch. Truth and Janey. Josephus. Fraction. Blue Cheer. Red Dirt. Dust. The Lloyd Langton Group. Highway Robbery. Lobby Loyde. Sam Gopal. Steamhammer. Toad. Burning Plague. Cactus. Sir Lord Baltimore. Stray. Iron Claw.

Some released just a single album. Others barely escaped their local scene. Many disappeared almost without trace before being rediscovered decades later by collectors and devoted fans.

These records were built on enormous riffs, overdriven valve amplifiers, fuzz pedals, Hammond organs, thunderous drumming and guitar tones that still have the power to shake the walls. Blues was gradually giving way to something darker, heavier and more hypnotic.

Looking back with fifty years of hindsight, we now tend to call much of this music proto-metal—the missing link between late-’60s psychedelic blues rock and the fully formed heavy metal that would dominate the second half of the decade.

Yet perhaps “proto-metal” doesn’t quite capture what made this era so exciting. These bands weren’t prototypes. They weren’t unfinished versions of something else. They were Heavy Rock. A genre in its own right.

A brief moment when musicians across Britain, America, Australia and Europe were independently discovering that heavier riffs, bigger grooves and louder amplifiers could create an entirely new musical language.

Some became legends. Many became footnotes. All of them helped build the foundations of the music we still love today.

If you’ve never ventured beyond the household names, I can’t recommend this forgotten corner of the early ’70s highly enough. There’s a whole world of incredible heavy rock waiting to be rediscovered.