 While British and international media covered punk intensively , the new grassroots metal movement remained underground until 1978 , largely ignored by popular music magazines such as New Musical Express , The Face and Melody Maker and by radio stations . News about the bands and music circulated by word @-@ of @-@ mouth and fanzines , or through interested DJs , who travelled the country from club to club . Neal Kay was one of those DJs ; he started to work in 1975 at a disco club called The Bandwagon in Kingsbury , North West London , housed in the back @-@ room of the Prince of Wales pub and equipped with a massive sound system . He transformed his nights at The Bandwagon into The Heavy Metal Soundhouse , a spot specialising in hard rock and heavy metal music and a place to listen to albums of established acts and to demos of new bands , which circulated among fans through cassette trading . Besides participating in air guitar competitions and watching live shows , the audience could also vote for Kay 's selections . The DJ made a weekly Heavy Metal Top 100 list of the most requested songs at The Soundhouse , by both newcomers and established bands and sent it to record shops and to the music journal Sounds , the only paper that showed interest in the developing scene . Many young musicians realised that they were not alone in playing metal only through that weekly list , which included bands from all over the country . At the time , Geoff Barton was a staffer at Sounds who wrote features on the new up @-@ and @-@ coming metal bands and was pivotal in directing the developing subculture of metalheads with his articles . At the suggestion of his editor Alan Lewis and in an attempt to find a common stylistic element in the bands ' music , he used the term " New Wave of British Heavy Metal " for the first time in his review of a gig on the Metal Crusade tour featuring Angel Witch , Iron Maiden and Samson at The Music Machine in London on 8 May 1979 . The term soon became the identifier for the whole movement . 
