In the summer of ’69, Wilson netted the teen-aged guitarist Jimmy Ronnie and the equally young drummer Ian McDougall. As a trio, the band played a few gigs with Wilson on vocals. Their sets mostly consisted of cover songs, with a heavy emphasis on the blues and blues-accented hard rock. When the band was still calling itself NAJ, Wilson caught a Black Sabbath show in Dumfries in late 1969. Like most people, Wilson’s first taste of Sabbath completely changed his opinions about rock and roll, and before long his little side project was veering off into heavier realms.
After Mike Waller joined the band on vocals, the four Scotsmen took to calling themselves Iron Claw (which was taken from a line in King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” not from Fritz Von Erich’s famous wrestling hold). The new name fit the band’s new image as a rock band that was as hard as Aberdeen granite. They soon earned a reputation as a noisy act who loved the heat of amplifiers and the power that comes standard with lower notes played by slurred hands. By 1970, Iron Claw looked like an act poised for stardom.
Unfortunately, their first run as a cohesive group only lasted from 1969 until 1974. In that time, Iron Claw underwent a series of alterations: they went from being a four piece to a five piece, and then back to a four piece. As the membership changed over the years and gigs got more scarce in the U.K.’s northern reaches, Iron Claw tried to stay alive, but by 1974 it was all over.
During their initial run, Iron Claw only produced a handful of demos, and yet they opened for such legendary acts as The Kinks and Pink Fairies. They were also one of the first Black Sabbath cover bands in Scotland, if not the world. In many respects, Iron Claw, like a lot of the hard and heavy pioneers of the early 1970s, were a little too rough and a little too rugged for their time. Nowadays, a lot of bands can capture even the slimmest of Internet exposure and gain a few fans in the process, but in the early 1970s, bands lived or died by major labels. Iron Claw died, but miraculously came back and reformed as a second-life act in 2010. The spark that lit the fire for this reborn phoenix came a year earlier in 2009. In that year, Rockadrome Records, a boutique American label that specializes in obscure ‘70s and ‘80s hard rock and heavy metal, released “Iron Claw” - a compilation of the band’s unreleased material that clocks in at well over an hour. At sixteen songs, “Iron Claw” is a metallic beast that underscores the British magazine Classic Rock’s description of the band as “The Lost Pioneers of Heavy Metal.”
Still, “Iron Claw” comes out sounding all the cooler because of its rotten quality. For instance, the monophonic overcharge of “Mist Eye” makes the band sound like a streetwise Black Sabbath, while “Rock Band Blues” sounds like an overlooked hit that somehow got lost at the bottom of the sea. “Winter” has a similar vibe, although that track shows a band in the middle of its maturation phase. The soft interludes of “Winter,” which include both folk and stripped-down blues elements, make the track sound more professional somehow. The garage is far away on “Winter,” and yet overall, “Iron Claw” shows only moments of fashionable brilliance. For the most part, this is as cult as one can get, but it’s a sure bet that most metalheads like it that way.
Through a combination of tough, heavily distorted riffs and a rhythm section that constantly sounds like its about go off the rails, “Iron Claw” creates an atmosphere that is uniquely Scottish. One can taste the biting winds of the Highlands on songs like “Skullcrusher,” while “Loving You” is the track that best parallels the album cover’s gloomy and ruined castle. There’s no Fleet Street pretty boys to see here; “Iron Claw” is a knock ‘em dead record that reeks of the pub and a healthy fight on a Saturday night.
Words: Benjamin Welton
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