Saxon - The "I'm In Love With That Song" Podcast - Music Commentary, Song Analysis & Rock History

Saxon came out of England in the 1970’s and quickly established themselves as one of the leading lights of the “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM). Their 2nd album, Wheels Of Steel, is considered one of the classic Metal albums. On this episode, we dive into “747 (Strangers In The Night)“, one of the hits from this album and remains a concert favorite at any Saxon show.

— Is Rock dead? Of course not! And there’s plenty of podcasts on the Pantheon Network to prove it!

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back, true believers, to the “I’m In Love With That Song” Podcast. I’m the host of the show, Brad Page, coming to you on the Pantheon Podcast Network. Each episode of this show, I pick a favorite song to dig into, as we continue our exploration to uncover what makes great songs work. No knowledge of music theory or technical jargon is necessary here. We’re just going to use our ears to listen and see what we discover.

This episode, we’re going back to 1979 to take a look at the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and a song by one of the bands at the forefront of that scene. This is Saxon with a song called “747 (Strangers In The Night)”.

We haven’t touched on the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal on this show before. So before we get into the song, let’s talk about that. If you’re not familiar with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, or as its often abbreviated in print, NWOBHM or “Newabum”– which I find either of those pretty awkward, so I’m just going to keep calling it the “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal”.

This was a scene that began in the mid-seventies in England, and by the early eighties it broke big around the world, with bands like Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest. The scene really developed in parallel with punk, but it was its own separate thing.

This is, of course, a gross generalization. Like any scene, there’s a lot of complexity when you dig into it. But one of the things that distinguished the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was that they took the core sounds of hard rock and early metal bands like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, and they injected it with some of the energy of punk. It was faster, more aggressive. Again, I’m giving a surface level overview here, but I think you get the idea. The term New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was coined by Jeff Barton, a writer for Sounds magazine, in 1979. There were literally hundreds of bands that came out of that scene, everything from Motorhead and Venom to Girlschool and the Tigers of Pantang. But one of the most successful and long lasting was a band called Saxon.

Though they never cracked the big time in the US, Saxon were huge in England, Europe and Japan. They had eight albums in the UK. Top 44 of them that reached the Top 10, and they’re still making records in touring today.

Saxon came together around 1975, after two separate bands disintegrated. The remaining members merged into a new band they initially called Son of a Bitch. They were negotiating a deal with a French record label, but the label insisted that they change their name to something a little more commercially acceptable. So Saxon was born in July 1978.

Their first album, titled Saxon, was released in 1979. Their second album, “Wheels of Steel”, was released in 1980. It hit number five on the UK chart and generated two hits for them, the title cut, “Wheels of Steel” and “747 (Strangers In The Night)”.

The lineup of this album was Graham Oliver and Paul Quinn on guitars, Steve Dawson on bass, Pete Gill on drums, and Peter “Biff” Byford on vocals. All five band members share writing credit, and the song was produced by Saxon and Pete Hinton.

Biff Byford was watching a BBC documentary about the great northeast blackout that happened in America on November 9, 1965. That started when a 230-kilovolt transmission line in Ontario, Canada, failed, which then caused other lines to go down, eventually bringing down the entire northeastern transmission network. It plunged eastern Canada, parts of seven US states and all of New York, including New York City, into darkness. People were trapped in subways and elevators, supposedly even the airport runway lights went down.

This inspired Biff to write the song. That image of planes coming in to land and the airport lights suddenly go out, the planes forced to divert or circle going nowhere. The song begins with one of the classic metal guitar riffs, with a great guitar solo played over the top.

Let’s check out the guitars here. Just classic heavy guitar tones across the board. Pretty straightforward recording, too. Just a little bit of reverb on the rhythm guitar and some echo on the lead guitar. One is panned left and one is on the right, though there is some crossover on each channel. I believe that’s Graham Oliver on the guitar on the left and Paul Quinn on the solo on the right.

The band breaks here, letting that rhythm guitar come to the front, really establishing that riff before the vocals come in for the first verse. You can really hear that reverb on the guitar during the break.

Biff sings those first two lines solo and then overdubs a harmony with himself on the next two lines. But on the next part of the verse, he sings three lines solo and only harmonizes on the last line.

And that lands us at the first chorus. This is the part of the song that Biff Byford wrote first. He liked the idea of strangers meeting in the night during the blackout. There’s always been a legend that nine months after the blackout, there was a baby boom. I don’t think there’s any evidence to really prove that, but hey, makes for a great punchline to the story. And Biff was tapping into that.

Second verse. Biff mentions a plane, Scandinavian 101, in this verse, based on a real flight involved in the 1965 blackout. The actual plane was Scandinavian Airlines flight 911. The pilot had his eye on the airport landing lights, but when he glanced down at his controls and looked back up, the lights were gone. Dangerously low on fuel, the plane was lucky to make it. Some planes were able to land thanks to a full moon that just happened to be that night. Bits of all of this make it into the song.

Let’s listen to what’s going on musically during the chorus. The two guitars, again panned left and right, are playing the same arpeggio throughout the whole chorus.

But the bass is playing a descending pattern, going lower every four beats. Now, let’s hear that all together, and then we’ll bring the vocals back in.

Here comes another guitar solo. This time it’s Graham Oliver who gets the spotlight. He’s the guy panned to the left. It’s another great solo.

Third and final verse. We’ll focus in on some of Biff Byford’s vocals here.

The Band UFO released an album called “Strangers In The Night” in 1979, a full year before Saxon recorded this album, but I haven’t seen any evidence that Biff Byford was influenced by that title. Biff has said that he probably got the idea from Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers In The Night”. Biff’s actually a Sinatra fan. They return to the Riff here one more time and we get some jet engine sound effects.

One interesting thing is that on the verses, Biff overdubs harmonies with himself, but on the choruses, he doubles the vocal– but it’s not a harmony. He sings them in unison. Both parts are the same.

That’s a nice big raise of the vocal there. And with that, they’ll play out the fade with one final guitar solo from Paul Quinn.

Saxon – “747 (Strangers In The Night)”

I don’t claim to be the biggest metal fan, but there’s a lot that I do like, and I’ve always had a soft spot for Saxon. I first saw them open for Rush in September 1980, if I remember correctly, and they rocked. Biff was every bit the rock star, and Paul Quinn was almost an anti-rock star. He had kind of an Angus Young thing going on; he wore a little cap, probably to hide his balding head (which I can relate to), and he spun his guitar around on his chest. I saw him do that long before I ever saw ZZ Top do it. The whole Band was great.

Thanks for listening to the show. New episodes of the “I’m In Love With That Song” Podcast are released on the 1st and the 15th of every month, so we’ll be back here soon. If you’d like to dig into our previous episodes, you’ll find them on our website, lovethatsongpodcast.com or look for us in your favorite podcast app. We’re on Apple and Google and Amazon and Spotify and Pandora and every place that you can think of. So you got no excuse for not joining in on the fun.

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I’ll see you next time here on the Pantheon Podcast network. Thanks for being a part of this show on “747 (Strangers In The Night)” by Saxon.

REFERENCES:

Saxon
https://www.saxon747.com/

Wheels of Steel album
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheels_of_Steel

Motorhead
https://imotorhead.com/

Venom
https://www.venomslegions.com/

Girlschool
https://www.girlschool.co.uk/

Tygers of Pan Tang
https://www.tygersofpantang.com/

Jeff Barton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Barton

Sounds magazine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounds_(magazine)

Tag: Saxon