And the band played on - 40 years later Biff Byford and Saxon are still rocking

Saxon and their frontman Biff Byford have survived nearly 40 years as a band and are still going strong, writes Ed Power

Tue, 25 Oct, 2016 - 01:00

Ed Power

Not many bands can claim to have helped create an entirely new genre of music but heavy metal icons Saxon arguably achieved just such a feat in the late 1970s. They were prime movers in the ‘new wave of British heavy metal’ — NWOBHM to diehards — and are acknowledged as one of the earliest acts to combine the molten ferocity of heavy rock with the catchiness of pop.

They weren’t the only innovators. Def Leppard and Iron Maiden were likewise giving loud, aggressive music a punter-friendly makeover. Nonetheless, Saxon are generally regarded as NWOBHM’s pioneering exponents and their influence has proved enduring. Wherever men with shoulder-length perms gather to mosh and make devil worship signs, Saxon are present in spirit. Without them there would be no Metallica or Guns ’n‘ Roses. They are encoded into the DNA of heavy metal.

“We did realise our music wasn’t the normal stuff that was around in 1979/1980,” says frontman Biff Byford. “Motörhead and Judas Priest were quite big. What we were doing was a bit faster, and shorter. It didn’t have as many guitar solos. We preferred three- or four-minute songs. I wanted to add melody. It seemed to come naturally to us.”

Saxon were painted in the press at the time as fierce rivals of Def Leppard and Iron Maiden. There was a degree of healthy competition, acknowledges the matey Byford, 65. Yet nobody was actively wishing ill towards the other bands. There was ultimately a sense of everyone being in it together.

“There is always camaraderie and always rivalry,” says Byford. “Often, the rivalry was more between the managers of the bands than the musicians themselves. Rivalry is good — if you’ve got somebody you are up against it stops you being complacent. It was friendly.”

It’s been a strange year for Saxon. The group recently released their tenth concert DVD, Let Me Feel Your Power, and Byford has starting writing the next album, the follow-up to 2015’s Battering Ram. There’s also an upcoming Irish trip, including a date at Dublin’s Academy on November 1.

Yet it has been a period of loss and sadness too. In January Saxon were forced to cancel a joint tour with Motörhead following the death of the latter’s frontman, Lemmy. Byford and Lemmy were close: His sudden passing came as an enormous shock. Lemmy was larger than life; even now, says Byford, it’s hard to accept he is gone.

“Lemmy was a great friend,” he says. “We talked regularly by text and phone. We toured with them at the end of last year and were about to do several more dates when he died. We had to cancel. It hit everyone hard. I’ve known him since 1979. Our first ever tour was with Motörhead.”

As with Lemmy, Byford was born to rock. In his fifth decade as a musician, he remains in love with the road. Going on tour is simply a blast, he says. “It’s like a scout group with alcohol,” he says, laughing. “We’re not that sensible. I have to look after my voice more nowadays. It’s still a laugh — like being in a travelling pub. You usually get to bed about 4am. Quite good fun — much better than working.”

Byford grew up in a mining town in south Yorkshire, his hardscrabble childhood informing the band’s early music. “Starting out, a lot of my lyrics were about never surrendering and having your back to the wall. I come from a Yorkshire working class background. My mother worked in the cotton mills, my father in the coal mine. I wouldn’t say I was from a poor family. We always had food on the table and went on holidays. One thing we didn’t ever have was a lot of money.”

After nearly 40 years, Saxon have inevitably had their ups and downs. Musicians joined and left (sometimes acrimoniously) and a shift towards a more commercial major label sound in the 1980s (which saw Elton John contribute piano on 1986’s Rock the Nations) alienated older fans.

But that was nothing compared to a subsequent backlash in the Middle East where Saxon where branded xenophobes over their 1984 album Crusader. Their defence was that they were merely drawing inspiration from historic events — not making political statements about the present day.

“The journalist who wrote about Crusader was obviously trying to cause as much trouble as possible,” Saxon said in a statement after they were “disinvited” from a Dubai music festival in 2006. “We don’t write lyrics to incite hatred or racism, we have fans all over the world of every colour and religion and music should be used to break down barriers and not to build them.”

Byford’s enthusiasm never flagged — no matter how heavily the slings and arrows rained down. He has endured the highs and lows with good grace, though one myth he is anxious to address is that Saxon ran aground when trying to break America by repositioning themselves as a glam metal group (going so far as to take Mötley Crüe on tour with them). “I don’t know if that’s true, “he says. “We had a couple of big articles in the British press [about failing to break the US]. They never said that about Maiden. To tell you the truth, it’s a bit unfounded.”