The Old School Metal Show

The Old School Metal Show made it's debut on the internet radio station Hardrockin80s.com on December 5, 2003, and has been going strong ever since. The idea of the show was actually an accident in a strange sort of way. Over on the radio station where I, at the time, had been working for over 2 years, part of my job there was to audition unsigned and independent bands that wanted to get airtime on the station. It was my job to listen to the music of these bands and decide if they fit our format well enough for us to get them on the air. It was during this time that i received an email from Gramie Dee. He had a new band that he had formed called Morgueazm and he was asking if he could get the songs from that bad on the air. After listening to them I agreed that they were for sure good enough to get on the air with us. During this time more email's between us changed hands and he told me that he also had some music from an old band that he was in called Blood Money and asked if I would be interested in it as well. It was also during this time Gramie told me that Blood Money was from the genre of music known as the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal). Well, growing up in the 80's like I did, I had heard of the NWOBHM and knew a few bands that made it from there such as Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and so on. Gramie also told me he knew of a lot of other bands that had a lot of music just sitting around and maybe he could get in contact with them and see what we could do. 2 months later, the Old School Metal Show was born.

During those 2 months, I scoured the internet trying to find any music I could from the list of bands Gramie had given me. It was also during this time that I found the website nwobhm.com which has turned out to be a wealth of great information. That site had more band website links and after some time, I had gained a good amount of songs to start the show with. The very first show was an hour long show and it actually featured a few bands that were not part of the NWOBHM. Due to my lack of knowledge of all the bands, I had inadvertently taken some links to bands from other linked pages and ended up getting music that should not have been on the show. This actually went on for the first month or so until I learned a little bit more about the genre and who belonged and who did not. I guess you have to break a few eggs....

Each week when I would try and figure out which songs I would play on that week's show, I would find more and more music from the bands. Word had gotten out that we were doing a radio show based on the music of the NWOBHM bands and I started getting email's from bands I had not heard of nor ever tried to contact. This was great news at the time because I had almost run out of new music to play each week. It was my intention at the start to do a new show every Friday and not have to rely on repeating the same bands or songs over and over. That is the quickest way for a show to get stale and people to start tuning out. So over the course of the next few months, more and more music from the bands rolled in to me and the playlist for the show grew and grew. On March 26, 2004, I decided that I had enough music now from enough bands and the show on that day was the first 2 hour show we ever did. We have been 2 hours long ever since.

Due to me posting information about the show on as many websites that I could find, word of the show continued to grow and to this day, it seems that every week the show gets bigger and bigger by the amount of listeners we have on the station. Our software allows us to see the number of people who are tuned in at any particular moment and it seems that number grows every week. This can only be seen as a positive sign that the interest of the music of these bands is growing again. If it will ever grow to where the interest should be, one can never tell. Many of these bands have told me that back in the 80's when they were playing, there was no airtime for them on their local radio stations. It seems the stations then were mostly concentrating on the pop music and whatever the charts were saying were the hits of the day, and not the rock and metal that was out there just screaming for attention. The music from these bands is just as good now as it was then and just every bit as good as any music being put out today. In fact, in my humble opinion, better in a lot of cases.

So there you have the brief version of the history of the Old School Metal Show. Every week we try our best to put out the best show possible. We have been told on more than a few occasions that this show reminds a lot of people of the old Friday Rock Show that aired over in the UK every Friday night at 10pm UK time. Is it a coincidence that our show here airs on Friday night at 10pm UK time?

You bet it is.

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