Lightning to the Nations

"Lightning to the Nations" is the title track from Diamond Head's self-released 1980 album. Lyrics are written by Diamond Head lead Sean Harris, instrumentation is pretty much a collaboration of the entire band (at the time) of Sean Harris, Colin Kimberly, Duncan Scott, and Brian Tatler. Listening to the electrifying guitar work, it's easy to see why heavy metal magazine Burn! ranked Lightning to the Nations the third best riff album of all time, just after Black Sabbath's Master of Reality and Slayer's Reign in Blood.

How old were the band members when this song was recorded? Tatler, Scott, and Harris were 19, Kimberly was 20. Says Harris of this time: "We didn't know s--t." Unfortunately, their inexperience was taken advantage of by their manager Reg Fellows. Fellows, who owned a cardboard factory, was responsible for the low-quality first album issue (aka "The White Label Album"), and would go around afterwards reselling the album under various names (Am I Evil?, To Heaven From Hell, Behold the Beginning), even with different cover artwork. The band has since been vocal in protesting how they'd been exploited. It was the original cardboard-bound vinyl copy of the album, however, that brought them their greatest mark of fame. In the book Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, Tatler tells us: "Because we were gigging a lot, it was decided that we'd press a thousand copies and sell them at gigs and through mail order. There was an ad in Sounds that ran for four weeks. [Our mail order] was run out of Sean's house. Lars Ulrich ordered one. That's how he got his." Ulrich is, of course, Metallica's founder.

What was it like having Lars Ulrich for an early fan? Also in Precious Metal, Diamond Head lead Harris tells what it was like in 1981 when Lars Ulrich came to visit: "We thought he was a weirdo, of course. [Laughs] But he was nice enough. He got on with us all. He stayed here for a week at the foot of my bed, playing 'It's Electric' every night, keeping us up. It was that sort of thing that made us realize that maybe we had done something a little bit extraordinary." Diamond Head's members didn't even know he was in a band until Ulrich sent them the "Creeping Death" single.