Video Flashback: Sampson - "Vice Versa"

One of the bands that often gets short shrift when people are talking about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal is Samson -- often they're brought up as a kind of a musical footnote, as the band in which Bruce Dickinson would shine as the singer who would not long after front Iron Maiden.  And, to be sure, a case can be made that their best work was the two albums on which he sang, as "Bruce Bruce" -- Head On (1980) and Shock Tactics (1981).  It's unfortunate that these albums, and the band as such, doesn't get more notice, for if you listen to those two albums, you hear the vitality of a genuinely heavy and yet melodic band, whose members come together quite well for some classic early-80s metal compositions.
I came across this gem of a video for "Vice Versa" several days ago -- I'm not sure of the context of clicking and searching that brought me to it, but I remember being intrigued by the idea that they had managed to get into the growing video scene early on in.  As a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s, we had MTV -- and cable at all, for that matter -- only for the briefest trial period, so what I got to see of music videos was entirely a matter of what got played at friends' houses, and what I got to see when we would stay at the house of my tech-early-adopter uncle (and purchase-indulgent aunt!) in Chicago.  So, this video was entirely new to me.

Video Flashback: Black Sabbath - "Trashed"

Of Black Sabbath's many albums, I can easily say -- though this is still supposed by many to be anathema -- that Born Again was early on and still remains one of my favorites.  Ian Gillan's collaboration with the band was short-lived and, from his description, ill-fated.  But, that period produced some excellently playful, grit-guitar heavy, imaginative songs that, for me, ought to be Sabbath standards:  Digital Bitch, Hot Line, Disturbing the Priest -- and of course one of the heaviest metal songs ever composed, Zero the Hero.  The entire album -- panned by many at the time -- has really stood the test of decades.  The songs have aged well without becoming dated and faded.  And, this holds as well for the opening track, Trashed.

I didn't actually get to see this early-MTV era video for the tune until just a few years ago.  I bought Born Again as an album, and played it enough times to wear the record down quite a bit, back in 1984, along with a trove of 8 or 9 other Metal LPs through the gimmicky Columbia Record Club  (effectively tripling the size of my metal record collection!), so Trashed early on became one of those songs permanently burnt into the figurative mp3s of my own wetware memory.  It's quite interesting to watch this video -- or rather the two videos, as you'll see below -- looking back retrospectively from the vantage point of several decades.