New Zealand Music Month: Ye Olde Rivetheads

Classic Metal May 22, 2015

**It’s New Zealand Music Month this May. **New Zealand’s **annual celebration of homegrown music. Generally, that involves a lot of mainstream media highlighting a lot of mainstream acts. So I’m here to try and redress the balance a bit. **I’ll be posting a link to some rowdy New Zealand music for you to check out every day over the next month. Some bands will no doubt be familiar; others I hope will be fresh to your ears.

All of the bands I’ve mentioned in this series of New Zealand Music Month posts thus far have been contemporary groups. But New Zealand obviously has its own musical history featuring plenty of energetic heavy rock and metal bands too. Some of the sonically heavier bands buried in New Zealand’s past were/are utterly fantastic. And their ranks were filled with talented musicians with a deft ear for a meaty hook or two.

But then there were the other bands. The ones that weren’t perhaps as gifted. Although, to give them their due, what they lacked in talent they often made up for in unbridled enthusiasm.

So here’s a sprinkling of Ye Olde rivetheads from the vaults of New Zealand heavy rock and metal. You can decide who the winners or losers are in the technique and talent game. If any of the below appeal, you can track down other bands from New Zealand’s metal past via the History of New Zealand Heavy Metal blog, the History of New Zealand Extreme Metal Facebook page, and I swear I’ll get a book on New Zealand’s metal history done and dusted one day too.

Lionheart: Running Free (1985)