As soon as that came out, we started writing for the second record, which came out in 1982. It just so happened that we didn’t release it until 1981.

So it’s really all that stuff that was part of the 70s. Then there’s Bondage, which was directly influenced by Ted Nugent. Bedroom Game was directly influenced by Rainbow. What were we influenced by? Obviously English stuff and also American stuff.

So it’s really previous to metal even being called metal, if you know what I mean. “Realistically, the material that was written for that first record was written two to three years before it was recorded. Although Hard ’N’ Heavy was a largely straightforward hard rock record, songs such as Bedroom Game and Bondage are some of the earliest ever examples of what would become speed and thrash metal. Looking back to the music Anvil were making in the early 80s, it’s easy to see how wildly ahead of their time they were and how, along with Motörhead, they contributed several major new weapons to metal’s creative armoury. They just started to call it heavy metal and we were happy to be part of it. So it was a really new thing, but to us it was just a continuation of the hard rock that we’d been listening to since we were kids. We had cassette tapes that we’d run through our PA system and we’d introduce other cool bands to the audiences that we were playing for. We formed in ’78 and I guess we were kind of bringing metal to our country. “It was something that was mainly coming from the UK. “When the 80s started, metal really didn’t exist, particularly in North America,” he recalls. Today, genial frontman Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow looks back on those early days as a time of wide-eyed enthusiasm.

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