April 1987. I was packing boxes for university. Cassettes mostly. A dubbed copy of Master of Puppets with the tracklist written in ballpoint. Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill from the year before, still the heaviest thing I owned. And somewhere in that box, Anthrax’s Among the Living that had been on repeat since March.
Here’s what was happening in metal that same week. And most of it was happening in Europe.
April 7, 1987. In Hamburg, Helloween are preparing the release of their first single from the upcoming Keeper of the Seven Keys: Part I. The album won’t drop until May, but the single is coming this week. Kai Hansen has stepped back from vocals. A kid named Michael Kiske is behind the mic now. Nobody outside Germany has heard of him yet. That’s about to change.
April 10, 1987. In Essen, Kreator are writing material for what will become Terrible Certainty. The Teutonic thrash trinity is at its peak. Kreator, Sodom, Destruction. Three bands from the Ruhr valley proving that Germany can thrash just as hard as the Bay Area. Harder, some would argue. More precise. More mechanical. More German.
April 13, 1987. Helloween releases “Future World” as a single. The first taste of Keeper of the Seven Keys: Part I. Power metal as a genre doesn’t really exist yet. After this single, it will. Kiske’s voice is absurdly high, absurdly clean, absurdly powerful. The song is three and a half minutes of pure European metal optimism. No doom. No darkness. Just speed and melody and the conviction that metal can be joyful. Hamburg just changed the rules.
April 16, 1987. Ozzy Osbourne releases Tribute. A live album dedicated to Randy Rhoads, who died in a plane crash five years earlier at twenty-five. The guitar work on this record is devastating. “Crazy Train” live, with Rhoads playing like he knows time is running out. He didn’t know. But listening to it, you’d swear he did.
April 18, 1987. MTV launches Headbangers Ball. Metal gets its own prime-time slot on American television for the first time. Kevin Seal hosts. The show will run until 1995. In Europe, we don’t get MTV until later. We get the bands first. America gets the TV show.
Five events. One week. A German power metal revolution, a British guitar genius immortalised on tape, and an American TV show that will shape what the world thinks metal looks like. Meanwhile, a kid in Belgium is heading to university with a box of cassettes and no idea that the music in that box is about to take over everything.
- Not a bad year to start.
