Enter Sadmen: The Hard Rock & Heavy Metal Hall of Fame

The boys take a break from normal business this Christmas Eve to bring you the ultimate rock and metal playlist. It's available for you to follow in Spotify - so listen along as Mark, Steve and Richard talk through a clutch of songs to make your metal Christmas as merry as possible.

On the latest leg of the Sadmen's journey through the annals of hard rock and heavy metal, they headed for the NWOBHM-rich year of 1981 and three albums that were about as diverse as it was possible to get at the start of the denim-rich Eighties.

It's an episode that also has echoes of the Enter Sadmen podcast's beginnings, as two of the albums saw the lads picking their way through the new 'solo' adventures of two vocalists who we last met in Episode 3.

Under the microscope in this episode: Future Shock from Gillan, Fire Of Unknown Origin from Blue Oyster Cult and Ozzy's Diary Of A Madman

We've all got albums that have sentimental value because they were greater than the sum of their parts. In this episode the boys discuss the albums that made them feel differently about music.

It's an eclectic collection that includes Boston's self-titled debut, the seminal offering from Floyd - 1973's Dark Side Of The Moon and the third album (or perhaps fifth, depending on your take) from San Francisco veterans Y&T - Mean Streak. 

In this episode of the Enter Sadmen podcast, the lads pay tribute to the late and truly great Eddie Van Halen before digging out some of the albums they bought on the strength of the album cover alone: Marillion's Fugazi, Blackfoot's Strikes and a little known German outfit with links to Accept - Bad Steve and an album called Killing The Night.

As is often the case with the Enter Sadmen pod, the show manages to swing effortlessly from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. 

www.entersadmen.co.uk 

One of the questions the Sadmen had to answer for the Enter Sadmen website (www.entersadmen.co.uk) was very simple. Maiden, Motley or Maiden? With no conferring allowed, all three of them picked Metallica. Episode 14 was the time to find out if that was true.

The Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes randomly selected 1983 as the year that would anchor the show and the three albums up for review would be those released closest to that particular year - which proved to be quite easy, since all three bands released albums in that year (all within 4 months of one another, as it happened).

So, here we go with Piece of Mind, Kill 'Em All and Shout At The Devil. A corking episode in prospect - but which of these seminal releases would find itself furthest up the Hall of Fame ladder at the end of the show?

In the latest edition of the hard rocking podcast Enter Sadmen, the boys reach deep into the vanity case and tackle three albums that went big on slap.

From early-70s New York City kitsch (KISS' self-titled debut) to two genre-defining Scandinavian bands (Melissa from Danish thrashers Mercyful Fate, and post-punk Finn-linked rockers Hanoi Rocks and Two Steps From The Move), this edition of the pod asks - and answers - the question: did the makeup mask a lack of musical talent ... or expose it?

Regular Sadmen followers will know we were honoured to record a special edition of the podcast with Diamond Head legend Brian Tatler recently, in which he shared stories about 40 years of life in the band and also gave us a run down of his Top 10 albums of all time.

If you're a DH fan and haven't heard the show, check it out now!

But what we also ask our special guests to do is choose the 3 albums that we'll review on the next edition of the show. So, this latest episode sees the boys get to grips with the trio of giant releases that Brian felt should be put under the Enter Sadmen microscope - Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, Priest's Sad Wings Of Destiny and AC/DC's shit-or-bust Let There Be Rock...

The Enter Sadmen podcast is all about reviewing, rating and ranking the good, bad and the ugly of hard rock and heavy metal to create the ultimate hall of fame. But it's always nice to get the perspective of the people who were there at the time - either making the music or contributing to the process of making it.

Not only that, but we ask them to tell us their top 10 albums of all time - and then get them to decide which 3 albums we review, rate and rank in the following edition of the show.

40 years on - give or take a few months - from the dawn of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the boys of the Enter Sadmen podcast choose three of the most notable albums released during the the genre-defining year of 1980.

One is Ace Of Spades, the classic fourth album from Motorhead, the band that essentially set the blueprint for the thrash bands who would emerge in the early 80s.

And if Deep Purple are the grandfathers of rock, then the laws of lineage demand that the final piece in this week's episode jigsaw is a band we must then view as one of its fathers - the David Coverdale-fronted Whitesnake and Ready An' Willing.

What seemed like a good idea at the time - choose an album you've never heard from any Top 100+ list on the internet - turns out to be anything but as the boys get to grips with early-70s prog rock (Jethro Tull's Aqualung) and argue about the merits (or not) of two albums that are to prog as Genghis Khan was to human rights - Blues For The Red Sun from Queens Of The Stone Age prototype Kyuss, and Tool's Undertow.