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Like a lot of Gen-Xers, I stopped listening to new 'heavy metal' in the mid '80s when I realised it was no longer heavy metal. Metallica made some great albums, and Venom made some good scary-but-fun ones, but I never considered such bands to be heavy metal per se. Heavy metal, for those of us who grew up on the '70s bands, was more than just an extreme sound--it was also an attitude, and these new punk-influenced (punk-misinterpreted?), thrash-style bands simply didn't have any semblance of that attitude. They were more right-wing, violent and ignorant.
And I certainly never considered all those 'hard-rocking' commercial bands to be heavy metal; they were early '70s-style glam/glitter rock at best--and even then, closer to the sounds of Gary Glitter and The Bay City Rollers than those of Slade and T. Rex! Brighton Rock and Poison put me off so-called 'heavy metal' altogether.
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