As author and music journalist Michael Hann states in the very first line of the entertaining and informative oral history Denim And Leather, “The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was both a real thing and a confection.” It was a real thing in the sense that at the turn of the 1980s bands from up and across the country reanimated a moribund domestic metal scene using the kind of energy and do-it-your-damn-self ethos that owed more to punk than it did to long-in-the-tooth stagers such as Deep Purple. It was a confection because the clumsy acronym NWOBHM was a media creation that lassoed together groups who otherwise had little but working class derring-do in common. But however cheap and clumsy much of this uneasy alliance may have been, in Iron Maiden and Def ...