Tokyo Blade - If Heaven is Hell

Loft your air guitars and warm up your screeches, people, we’ve got some heavy metal for you! While the big hitters of the late seventies and early eighties new wave of British heavy metal were selling out stadiums and taking enough drugs to either keep a horse awake for two weeks or put it to sleep for two weeks, there were so, so, so many comparative minnows in the same pond trying to break the surface of the water. And a good chunk of it was, how to put this... crap? Not that Tokyo Blade were ever the smallest fish, mind. They definitely aren’t the first name that comes to mind when the genre rears its head, but that might be something that changes for you after listening to this Rock Song of the Week pick!

Funnily enough, Tokyo Blade being part of the NWOBHM movement puts their origin point squarely in Britain – Salisbury in England, to be more geo-specific. They’ve undergone the usual revolving door of cast and crew given they’ve been about since 1982; I count 29 different members past and present, which is roughly the same amount of people it took to put people on the moon for the first time. Incredibly, and seemingly counterintuitive to that fact, the band still has what was considered its classic line up in the early eighties. It just took there being another 25 people in and out of the band before they got back together again in that formation. Somehow everyone involved managed to put together fourteen albums in between disappearing to do stuff with other bands, and for the most part they keep that era sound very much alive. Their latest album is actually fresh out as of the start of this year, so check it out after this if you feel like doing some comparisons instead of banal things like working or looking after your family.

Amid a lot of fairly tepid NWOBHM music out there, Tokyo Blade stands out for sheer determination to progress the cause. For every Iron Maiden or Def Leppard who broke out and stole the limelight, there was a Tokyo Blade plugging away making great genre music that went under the radar (though, let’s be honest, they weren’t immune to a stinker themselves on occasion). This is not one of them, however; sporting a glorious “Rock and Roll!” battle cry to start out, If Heaven is Hell is a certified stomper of a hard rock anthem that is going to make you yearn for simpler days – even though nowadays, that could be as soon as last week. I can’t think of a better reason, then, to forget all your troubles for six minutes or so and have a bloody good rock out to this one. Eventually those quack doctors are going to realise this is real medicine and stop insisting I “look after myself” and “go to the hospital urgently” all the time.