In musical terms, Anvil plainly made their mark in those grubby early days. It was just a dirty time and a dirty environment, so yeah, we had a lot of fun but there was some pretty awful stuff going on.” If you slept with anyone you’re gonna get a dose. You had to bring sleeping bags, because if you slept in those beds you were gonna get scabies and fuckin’ crabs. I’ll be honest, I’ve had better times! Ha ha! Some of those days were pretty rough. “But I don’t look back at the 80s with great nostalgia. “Getting the first album recorded was a massive highlight,” Lips states. Despite his and Robb Reiner’s resolute determination, an initial flurry of low-key success in the early 80s never led them to a major commercial breakthrough, and due to poor management decisions and a whole stack of bad luck, the 80s didn’t turn out to be golden age that Anvil unquestionably deserved. If you’ve seen Sacha Gervasi’s astonishing documentary, Anvil: The Story Of Anvil (and if you haven’t, what the fuck?) then you will know that Lips’ hopes for world domination never quite came to fruition. Maybe my hormones weren’t working as strongly, I don’t know! Ha ha ha!” The second one made a slight departure from that, because I guess it became a little less important. “That guy hears School Love and he says, ‘Oh my god, that’s absolutely filthy! We’re not signing that!’ Ha ha! So it makes sense that the first album was so much about sex. “Anybody between the ages of 18 and 23, that’s all that’s on your mind, right?” he muses, not unreasonably. Lips notes that securing a record deal hadn’t been too much of a problem, but that at least one prospective benefactor at Capitol Records had flinched when confronted with the sexually charged (but slightly juvenile) lyrics to songs like School Love, I Want You Both (With Me) and, in particular, Bondage (opening line: ‘Tie me down you mean old bag!’). Hard ’N’ Heavy was released on via Canadian rock imprint Attic Records. Metal On Metal was much more of a heavy metal record than the first one.” As soon as that came out, we started writing for the second record, which came out in 1982. It just so happened that we didn’t release it until 1981. So it’s really all that stuff that was part of the 70s. Then there’s Bondage, which was directly influenced by Ted Nugent. Bedroom Game was directly influenced by Rainbow. What were we influenced by? Obviously English stuff and also American stuff. So it’s really previous to metal even being called metal, if you know what I mean. “Realistically, the material that was written for that first record was written two to three years before it was recorded. Although Hard ’N’ Heavy was a largely straightforward hard rock record, songs such as Bedroom Game and Bondage are some of the earliest ever examples of what would become speed and thrash metal. Looking back to the music Anvil were making in the early 80s, it’s easy to see how wildly ahead of their time they were and how, along with Motörhead, they contributed several major new weapons to metal’s creative armoury. They just started to call it heavy metal and we were happy to be part of it. So it was a really new thing, but to us it was just a continuation of the hard rock that we’d been listening to since we were kids.
We had cassette tapes that we’d run through our PA system and we’d introduce other cool bands to the audiences that we were playing for. We formed in ’78 and I guess we were kind of bringing metal to our country. “It was something that was mainly coming from the UK. “When the 80s started, metal really didn’t exist, particularly in North America,” he recalls. Today, genial frontman Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow looks back on those early days as a time of wide-eyed enthusiasm.
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