It’s been a difficult time for heavy metal of late. We knew he was sick but Ian Fraser Kilmister, with that indomitable spirit, wouldn’t let us, his fans, down. Recording albums and playing live right up until the end, it’s as if we knew the day would come but neither he, nor us, would accept that crushing fate.

For weeks there seemed like an outpouring of collective grief. Even when the godlike Bowie and then the rock of which so much of heavy metal is built, Jimmy Bain, passed away it all got caught up in this exhausting wave of despair.

Doing a new issue of Iron Fist felt meaningless; we were named after a Motörhead song and now Motörhead was no more. While every other magazine poured over the details of Lemmy’s life, we wanted to mourn the band as well as the man and through our haze turned to the only person we could think of, Jase Of Spades from the blog 366 Days Of Motörhead to help us both with our office playlists and tribute. In this issue he reminds us of the many albums, live recordings and rare tracks that the ‘Head have left as their … Read More

With the Germany heavy metal titans coming to London tonight for an incredible show at The Kentish Town Forum with the mighty NWOBHM survivors Hell, we dug up this snippet of an interview from Iron Fist #8 where we celebrated 30 years of being ‘Balls To The Wall’

There’s a moment near the end of the post-apocalyptic video for Accept’s breakthrough hit ‘Balls To The Wall’, right at the moment the song’s climactic bridge kicks in, when suddenly a massive gust of wind whips the hair of the band and rain starts pelting the camera lens. For a song already so thunderous, it’s a perfect moment, so much so that one could be led to believe it was choreographed, but as it happens, it was all just a stroke of luck. Frigid, frigid luck. “It was miserably cold,” says guitarist Wolf Hoffmann, speaking on the phone from his home in Nashville, chuckling about the lengths the German band would go to make an impression on the public. “It was in the fall, might have been November, that time of year when it’s wicked cold. Of course we had to wear all the cool outfits on the stage, the leather pants. And we … Read More

Formed in 1982, HELL were the ultimate ‘could’ve been’ band, until their biggest fan plucked them from obscurity and put them back where they belonged – on stage and on top of their game. LOUISE BROWN speaks to KEVIN BOWER and ANDY SNEAP about triumphing over the curses and disappointing chapters of their career

When we started Iron Fist, the idea behind the ‘Under The Influence’ series was to celebrate the bands that changed the face of extreme music and inspired countless new metal maniacs to pick up a guitar and raise fucking hell; Sodom, Incantation, Raven, Emperor etc. But this issue’s feature is different. Different in that Hell never really made the impact that should have when they first began in 1982. Misfortune and mis-timing resigned the Midlands-based four-piece to the depths of obscurity and despite being groundbreaking and pioneering for their time were stuck between that NWOBHM heyday and the mid to late ‘80s when heavy metal really started to get exciting. By 1987 the band had imploded and they watched as newer bands did what they had been doing for years in terms of theatrics and musical experimentation.

However, while their name vanished from the heavy metal hallowed halls, bar … Read More