Saxon - Archive (videos)
I remember walking into Tower Records in the early 80s and coming away with the Crusader LP soon after its release. As a metal fan of the time I loved it, but only ended up exploring backwards and given some of the material on this multi-source collection of Saxon videos, I made the right choice, as the band would almost instantly start picking up LA and hairmetal influences, rendering them almost creatively obsolete at least through the rest of the decade. In fact I think the band ended up splitting into two and only rejoining after working out some issues later. It’s interesting that the latest material here comes from 1990 as the two pieces done, “Frozen Rainbow” and “Rock n Roll Gipsy,” are among the earliest, showing the band’s obvious Judas Priest influences, and with the former, maybe a little in the way of the epic as well. The band’s in fine form through both of these. There’s a “Nightmare” from the San Remo Music Festival recorded for RAI and obviously lip-synched (Biff Byford even forgets to bring the mike back to his mouth for the beginning of one phrase) as is “Ride Like the Wind” from five years late. In fact there’s a fill in drummer on this (latter) track who spends most of his time spinning his drumsticks Tommy Lee style, making me wonder if the band might have been joking around.
There are two concert fragments. The one from 1986 is definitely of the era and not the Saxon I knew so well, with quite a bit of posing and LA hairmetal nausea. I’ll have to admit that even though I might casually say I like a bit of everything, I’m never thinking of this period of metal when I say that. The band does “20,000 Feet” and one or two other oldies but for the most part this evokes the phase when many of these underground bands of the time (Metallica, Raven, etc) signed to major labels and proceeded to get worse in a hurry.
Pride of place goes to the 7/7/82 Beat Club performances, about 20 minutes of “Strong Arm of the Law” material - this is the band I remember loving. Looking like a group of young guys weaned on Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, there’s a concentration on making good heavy rock without purile teenager hooks and with a sense of space that allows them to create a song like “Dallas 1 PM” which chronicles the Kennedy murders, certainly not your normal metal fare.
The rest of the disc is filled with bits and bobs, interviews and the like which show a much calmer band in person than on stage. It’s kind of amazing Saxon never made the headways into the US like they did into Europe (compare them to Iron Maiden for example), because over there they were quite huge with big substantial crowds behind most of the performances here. If anything it makes me want to go back and revisit the early albums, all of which, at the time I was looking for them again, were not easy to find on CD, but it looks like things are better as far as availability now.