Samson Albums

A band at the forefront of the NWOBHM was Samson. While never emulating the success of some of their contemporaries, the band always had a strong and loyal cult following. Formed in 1979 by powerful guitarist Paul Samson and bass player Chris Aylmer in Gravesend, Kent, to the east of London, the line up that recorded the groups debut album 'Survivors' for the independent label Laser included the leather masked drummer Thunderstick. The album also featured a certain vocalist by the name of Bruce Bruce, later to achieve massive international fame as the singer of Iron Maiden. The 'Survivors' album proved to be a promising start for the band and the 1980 released follow up 'Head On' featured 2 songs that were to become NWOBHM classics, 'Too Close To Rock' and 'Take It Like A Man'. Album number 3, the 1981 released 'Shock Tactics', was arguably Samson's finest work, earning the band considerable critical acclaim from the music press and featuring another NWOBHM classic 'Riding With The Angels'. 'Live At Reading', originally released in 1990, features the best moments from the previous three albums, with the added extra of the atmosphere that only a rock band in full flight, playing in front of an ecstatic crowd can bring.

Samson Videos

Samson Discography

Formed by Sidcup-born guitarist Paul Samson in 1977, the band had already been established with their debut, "Survivors", released on an independent, receiving raving reviews. The band toured quite extensively in the UK along side with the other fore runners of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Bruce finished his final exams in the morning and in the afternoon he went down to Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich to rehearse with them.

Since he was not sure of what to expect from a professional rock band - Samson had a record deal and a management - he decided just to jump in and make the best of it. "In fact, the first rehearsals I went down to with Samson pretty much set the scene for my entire time in the band. I left my girlfriend who I had been with for three years at University. I told her I was gonna turn into a complete arsehole. I thought it was what I was gonna have to do, frankly. Because it was not at all what I expected. In my naivety I thought people who were in rock 'n' roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren't, that they didn't even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea, some of them just wanted to have a good drink, a good shag and take some drugs, and I found that really, really difficult to relate to. I thought 'I've got to find out if I'm gonna work with these guys and we're gonna make music'. And as soon as I sort of accepted that, I thought 'Right, I'd better go down and find out what all this drug-taking and shagging's all about then'."

He did smoke a bit already and he had even tried dope at college. And in Samson it was more of a habit. "I discovered quickly that if you were straight you couldn't actually communicate with anybody. It was impossible. So I just thought I'd have to smoke a joint, otherwise I wouldn't be able to write anything, and that's pretty much how it went. I more or less resigned myself to it. I thought it was just part of the price that had to be paid. To be honest, every single thing I ever did at that time, I believed it was just a step towards my goal, of just wanting to be a singer in a rock 'n' roll band."

Bruce nowadays refers to his time in the band as "a blur of chemicals". But he was never into the hard stuff. When it came to illegal highs, marijuana was his biggest personal vice.

During the first rehearsals they wrote a bunch of songs that would be recorded and released on the album called 'Head on'. "I had loads of stuff kicking around and they had loads of bits so we just glued it all together." The songs were slipped into the live set on the coming tour, which was to promote the "Survivors" album. This was quite a step forward for Bruce as his first real tour was third on the bill with Randy California and his all time hero Ian Gillan.

During his time in Samson Bruce was, bizarrely, billed as 'Bruce Bruce' (derived from the Monty Python sketch about the Australian philosophers), a nick that was forced upon him by their management. They insisted on making all the checks out to "Bruce Bruce" which had the effect that Bruce had to go through enormous trouble to cash them in.

The management was one of Samson's reoccurring problems. They booked the band on rather ill matched support tours and had them playing a place and then come back one week later to play the same place but with another act. Eventually it all ended up in high court leaving the band unable to play gigs and get paid. And when the legal side of things were settled and the band left their management in 1981 they discovered that their record company was going bankrupt. "We made every mistake in the business" Bruce acknowledges.

Frustrated with the fact that the band never seemed to get anywhere, Bruce had contacted guitarist Stuart Smith with the idea of forming a band. They had a few rehearsals and wrote some material together but then Samson seemed to get a better deal and the obvious thing for him to do was to stick with them.

The state of the artistry in itself in the band wasn't the best either. "We actually had a lot of really good ideas but we were pretty limited. I mean, Thunderstick had great drumming ideas, but was really short on the ability to execute them." Thunderstick, the mad drummer, was wearing a mask, pouring beer over his head on stage and refusing to utter human sounds in public. He also wanted a cage bout round him on stage. "We actually had this cage built and in the true Spinal Tap fashion we couldn't get into any of the gigs. The only place we could use it was the Reading Festival where he insisted on it. It was like a budgie's cage actually. He insisted on it being covered with a cloth so people wouldn't know what it was".

"But Samson worked together as this crazy, fucked up set-up. We used to play some terrible shows and we used to play some brilliant shows and you never know what you're gonna get. I was the heavy rock, Heavy metal end of Samson and Paul was a traditional rock blues boogie guy and we glued the two things together and got this exciting sound." As the band developed it became more and more obvious that the main men were evolving in very different directions. "The 'Shock tactics' album I did with them and in many ways the best. It had a clear direction but it wasn't a direction Paul was happy with. He wanted it to be more bluesy guitar orientated. But it was the first time I discovered a voice that was really my own."

During the Shock Tactics tour (nicknamed the "We don't give a f**k about the petrol bill tour" due to the appalling routing) Thunderstick left the band and was replaced with Mel Gaynor, a black Funk/Rock drummer who was in the band very briefly and later ended up in Simple Minds(!). "When you took Thunderstick out of the equation and replaced him with Mel, this phenomenal drummer, there was no excitement in it there anymore. When he played he played everything perfectly. Everything was in time, there was no mistakes, there was no danger anymore. So I got bored. I had time to think about the shopping list on stage and that's not good. And I realised that this was what Paul wanted. It enabled him to go into more ZZ top, boogie sort of areas."

Bruce's last gig with the band was at the Reading Festival in 1981, a gig which was immortalised by the BBC and subsequently released on the album "Live at Reading 81". "Listening to some of these old tracks they stand up really well" says Bruce. "Certainly all the stuff on 'Shock tactics' does. When you hear the Reading Live album the band was really cooking. And the songs don't sound dated at all."

Around that time, Iron Maiden had began considering change of vocalist due to of increasing problems with Paul DiAnno. Steve Harris says: "Right from the very first time I heard Bruce singing on stage with Samson, I remember thinking, 'Blimey, that singer's fucking great!'" So Steve Harris and manager Rod Smallwood came to Reading to check Bruce out for the job. Samson went down by storm and Bruce was asked to come down to auditions for the band.