In the second of a series of interviews with Midlands' musicians who have played an influential part in the heritage of the area, Dean Pedley, chats to Brian Tatler of Diamond Head.

 

 

Diamond Head founder Brian Tatler has just released his long-awaited autobiography, Am I Evil? which charts both Brian’s and the bands history and is full of anecdotes from throughout a career that saw them be regarded as one of the bright hopes of the NWOBHM and being cited as a key influence by Metallica. The Stourbridge based band came together in 1976 with guitarist Brian being joined by Sean Harris (vocals), Duncan Scott (drums) and Colin Kimberley (bass) and had written more than 100 songs before the release of debut album Lightning to the Nations in 1980. They signed to MCA for Borrowed Time (1982) and Canterbury (1983) in addition to opening the Monsters of Rock festival of the same year.

 

When relations with the record company went sour the band floundered before joining Metallica on stage at the NEC in 1992 to perform both “Helpless” and “Am I Evil?” which led to them opening for Lars and Co at Milton Keynes the following year. After another period of uncertainty Brian and Sean went their separate ways and the latter was eventually replaced by Nick Tart for 2005’s All Will Be Revealed and toured as support to Megadeth at the invitation of Dave Mustaine. Their most recent album was What’s In Your Head (2007) and Diamond Head will be appearing at Birmingham’s Academy in February as special guests to Europe.

 

 

I suppose I had the free time but also I was contacted by an author called Neil Daniels who asked me to contribute to a book he was writing and he advised me to do a Diamond Head book because it’s such a good story and would be an interesting read. So I thought about it and made a start and thought well, if I don’t do it no one else will and I had written about 30,000 words to begin with and then Jon Tucker got involved to help me bring it all together. I wanted to get all of the stories down before they were forgotten and I just figured it was a story that touches so many other bands and people that I really wanted to give it a go and get it finished. And I would let people read little bits as I went along and got some positive comments and I thought well it can’t be too bad because it was something I had never done before.

 

 

Yes, I had written the majority of it when Jon became involved and it needed someone to help me with the punctuation and spelling (laughs) and the layout and keeping it all flowing along.

 

 

What springs to mind is that it was Bon’s last couple of gigs, this was in January 1980 and he died the following month and so that was pretty shocking. But at the time it was so amazing for us to be playing with them as we really loved AC/DC and I’d seen them a few times. In fact, I first saw them on the “Let There Be Rock” tour and to actually support them and get to meet them was incredible. They were very helpful, they didn’t sound check so we had plenty of time to get ready and they helped our drummer Duncan get all his kit in tune and we hadn’t done many gigs at that point so playing in front of 3,000 people was a real eye opener for us and made us think that we could actually make this work.

 

 

Well for e Metal really came about as a result of Judas Priest, I know Sabbath were around but they were really classed as Heavy Rock. I was a big fan of both of those bands and would go and see them at Birmingham Odeon and would be there queuing up to get my tickets along with everyone else. And so I think it was a big influence on me that there were these 2 great Midlands bands that had done really well and so it kind of rubs off a bit and there was a feeling that we could so it aswell. And there was also Robert Plant being a local boy so it felt like there was this connection with the Midlands and not all the successful bands had to come out of LA. I’d meet Robert and get his autograph and it was quite awe-inspiring to a little chap who was just starting out (laughs).

 

 

Yes we got support from the local BBC radio and we did a demo which they played a couple of times on air back in 1979, it was called the Heavy Pressure show and we did a little interview with the presenter, Lowden Goode. We played venues such as Halesowen Tiffany’s and then we got on the Look Hear show which went out from Pebble Mill on BBC2 presented by Chris Phipps and Toyah Wilcox. We did the show in January 1980 with a band called The Selector from Coventry and the audience was mainly made up of their fans but we brought a few of our own with us and they all came down the front when we were on and we went down quite well. It was only shown in the Midlands and I saw it once but no one had got a video recorder at the time so we never saw it again.

 

 

Yes absolutely. First of all I was excited that Def Leppard got signed and Iron Maiden got front page of Sounds and Samson got good coverage and I thought we could get on board with the whole NWOBHM. Geoff Barton was on our side and came to review us when we supported Maiden at the Lyceum and gave us a fantastic full page review in Sounds and we could almost taste a deal at this point. And then it seemed to take ages before we signed to MCA, it was almost another two years and by that point everybody else seemed to have signed...Girlschool, Tygers of Pan Tang...and there was even a piece in Sounds once headed “Why will no one sign this band” by Paul Shuter. I look back now and think that labels must have talked to the management and thought they weren’t up to much or maybe the management were asking for too much and had an unrealistic idea of what record companies were offering. And of course we were with an untried manager...

 

 

I think so and Leppard had Peter Mensch and so you look at those two bands, Maiden with Smallwood and Leppard with Mensch and then Diamond Head had Reg Fellows, local cardboard box manufacturer, and he was learning as he went along and he learnt at our expense really. So yes we were very frustrated by the whole experience of waiting to get signed to a record label.

 

 

This is what seems to be the general opinion but of course I wasn’t aware of it at the time we were just pleased to have been signed and we did our first album with them Borrowed Time which went in the charts at number 24 and it seemed like we were off to a flying start. And then it started to unravel and things began to go wrong and the second album we did with them, Canterbury, we had all manner of problems such as the band splitting up (laughs) and it all went downhill a bit. So yes it was possibly the wrong label but maybe the right manager would have gone in with a big stick and sorted them out (laughs).

 

 

That seemed to be what people would say years later. We were targeting labels that could break rock bands but at the time it never really crossed my mind they weren’t one of them. I was about 21 and I was very naive and all was interested in was the music, writing songs and playing gigs and I didn’t know the business side of it at all.

 

 

We’d written a hundred by the time we had recorded our first album and started out in my bedroom with a little cassette recorder and would put down about three a week and so we built up a lot of songs and learnt a lot about arrangements and how it all worked by listening back and analysing them. And it seemed to work for us that was our learning curve as songwriters, trial and error and experimentation.

 

 

They’ve kind of been our life support system really. Without them we would have faded away in 1985 but they gave us another lease of life, they have covered four of our songs and Lars would constantly name check Diamond Head in interviews and so we only really reformed in 1990 on the back of all that when Metallica were so huge with The Black Album. It seemed like the right thing to do, to give it another go and put an album out and do some more shows. And the songwriters’ royalties that Sean and I receive from the Metallica versions have given us the freedom to keep going.

 

 

Yes we’ll always be in that first chapter about Lars coming to England and hanging out with Diamond Head and then them covering “Am I Evil” and it’s been an amazing twist of fate really, it came good in the end in a way. We didn’t sell that many records at first and split up but somehow we have remained in people’s minds.

 

 

Just being more enthusiastic and more fired up and more able to grab things and get the job done rather than waiting around and trying to find excuses for us not to get on with things. We are more able now to make a quick decision and a gig opportunity will come in and we can say yes we’ll take it, whereas in the Sean situation it would be well why, what are we getting paid, what set are we doing and you can miss opportunities by being indecisive. Nick’s been great and we toured Europe with Megadeth in 2005 which was great and we have been over to Japan and done two albums with him and a live DVD and there has been a lot of forward momentum.

 

 

I was totally ready for a backlash and people saying it was not a good idea but I had to give it a try otherwise we would have just stagnated. And if you look at the Megadeth tour most people in the crowd had never seen Diamond Head anyway and they didn’t know who Sean was and accepted us at face value and one guy came up to Nick and asked how do you keep so young looking (laughs).

 

 

There is always bits of material and we’ve got the tour in February with Europe so we will probably regroup at some point after that but at the moment I’ve been concentrating on promoting the book and hopefully it will do alright and people will appreciate the story a bit more and understand where we came from.

 

 

We used to stop in these grotty bed and breakfasts and there was this one place where the beds were in the cellar and the sheets were really damp and the following morning when Colin got up out of bed he put his foot straight on a slug – that’s the glamorous life of rock and roll (laughs).

 

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Diamond Head play Birmingham’s O2 Academy on 19th February with Europe.