EUROPE – “The Final Countdown”
The first metal song to get to number one, which more than anything else tips you off as to what a strange, broad, inclusive-despite-itself church metal is. And yes, this surely qualifies. “The Final Countdown” puts its fanfare riff atop a gallop of power hair and Valkyrie guitars and the result is impeccably pop – so much so it split the band! – but their roots were heavier, trading personnel with Yngwie Malmsteen, paid-up members in good standing of the Swedish Metal Scene.
My experience of metal in the 1980s was entirely vicarious – people at school would buy Kerrang! or RAW or Metal Hammer, and I would read them with an amused disdain I guess I’ve never fully managed to shake, even though I’m ashamed of it: metal is the most vocational of fandoms and it didn’t choose me. I later started reading the NME instead and felt myself much smarter for it at the time – but of course what strikes me now is how similar, and how precarious, both magazines’ worlds were.
In an environment where access to music was through specialist gatekeepers – radio stations and print magazines – genres became coalitions. Metallica were truer metal than Cinderella? Perhaps, but the economics of genre meant that gatekeepers had to pitch a product that would capture fans of both. And the very existence of the umbrella thus held over them would exaggerate the similarities as well as the differences. Even so the coalitions had to be policed – the very first issue of NME I ever bought agonised on its cover over whether certain bands (The Darling Buds, The Wonder Stuff) joining major labels meant disaster. To a great extent the story of popular music in the 80s and 90s is the story of these grand coalitions – hip-hop and dance music, too – forming, winning and facing the consequences.
Even to an outsider the world of metal seemed particularly split-prone, perhaps because the temptations were greater: the marketplace seemed unlikely to put the integrity of The Wedding Present under too great a strain. But metal bands had the chops and the stagecraft and the gumption to fit right into a stadium rock world – all they needed were the songs, and “The Final Countdown” is such a song. Not that Europe necessarily realised – the riff had been kicking around since the early 80s and Joey Tempest wanted to press it into service as a tour curtain-raiser, not as a single. You can hear exactly what he meant: but the label knew a monster when they heard one.
Is it much more than the riff, and the headlong charge of the rhythm guitar? Does it have to be? The lyrics are well-documented nonsense but Tempest puts in the yearning and abstract conviction they need to not spoil the record, and really they’re just placeholders to get you back to – “It’s the FIH-NAL COUNT-DOWN!”. And there’s a welcome crispness and space in the production which gives Tempest’s voice and keyboards room. It lessens “The Final Countdown”’s heaviness but if you’re heading to Venus you don’t need too much ballast.
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Tom in FT / Popular • 1,943 views • Share/Save
“The Final Countdown” entered the Australian charts in February 1987 and stayed for six months, peaking at number two; no Aussie pop fan of the time could forget it, because it became the unofficial anthem for exactly what its title described. Countdown, the ABC-TV pop music showcase that had dominated teenage Sunday evenings since November 1974, went to air for the last time on 19 July 1987, bringing to an end a force that was instrumental in the success of not only many Australian acts but also such Popular titans as ABBA, Blondie and Madonna, all of whom owed key early hits to promotion on the show. It’s impossible for me now to think of Europe’s song without remembering the show that was pop music – which gives this bunch of Swedish hair-metallers an unfair advantage, really.
Amazingly, no metal act – hair or otherwise – reached number one in the Australian singles charts in the 1980s, although Jon Bon Jovi made it in 1990 with “Blaze of Glory”, a few years after Slippery When Wet had spent six weeks on top of the album charts. Van Halen’s “Jump” reached number two in 1984, but that was also their least-metal song to date, with the same out-of-genre synths as “The Final Countdown”. Other than those, and this, the only artists who came close were more heavy rock than heavy metal.
If I’d been a couple of years younger I might have helped their cause, but by 1986/87 I’d passed through my temporary fixation on Iron Maiden and Van Halen. Although Van Halen’s 5150 held some appeal and Def Leppard’s Hysteria held even more, most hair metal seemed like a pale imitation of whatever it was that I’d heard in metal in the first place. I didn’t know about Metallica yet in 1986/87, so the only band I still listened to who were unequivocally metal were Judas Priest, and even they were flirting with synths on 1986’s Turbo. Whether on that album, or in “Jump”, or “The Final Countdown”, synthesizers in 1980s metal too often sounded wrong, the spandex leggings to the electric guitar’s leather jacket.
So although I can appreciate Europe’s accomplishment in producing an anthem that captures a certain kind of moment to perfection – that moment when a big game enters its final seconds and this comes blaring over the arena speakers – I can’t say it does a lot for me outside that limited context. 5.
No British rock band could have come up with something as unknowingly unapologetic as “The Final Countdown.” Imagine the Darkness tackling an anthemic song about imminent apocalypse; Hawkins would be gurning away in his unfunny falsetto, the guitar solo would be suffocated by the gigantic inverted commas enclosing and enslaving it, the night flight to Venus would be but a planet-sized eyebrow to ward off the blasted Cool Police.
But Europe were Swedish, and thus had neither guilt nor guile. Their TOTP performance of “The Final Countdown” was a masterclass in 1974 Rock School bits of business, with their frontman Joey Tempest – I ask you, Joey Tempest!!! – with his magnificent sub-David Lee Roth mane of perm, dressed head to foot in leather but with his permed chest proudly on display, going through all the tricks; using the microphone stand as phallus, agonised hand pointing towards sky as he considers the end of Earth and the wisdom of rhyming “Venus” with “seen us,” even picking up and spinning the guitarist around mid-solo…meanwhile the defiantly 1974 synth lead melody (bargain basement Star Trek) affects its would-be poignancy as 1986 drums cascade like the motors of the rocket ready to convey Earth’s few benighted survivors to Another and Better Land.
Quite admirable in its way, and clearly appealing to those same neglected pop-metal punters who had bought “Eye Of The Tiger” and had lately picked up on the greased flag-waving of Bon Jovi (“Livin’ On A Prayer,” a #4 hit that autumn, was inescapable) but for whom Metallica and Slayer were perhaps a little too “progressive,” “The Final Countdown” did its Continental business. Whether Europe ever managed to reach Venus, however, is not recorded; their follow-up, “Rock The Night,” suggested that earthly pursuits maintained a greater pull.
(I’d give this a 4 but for some reason can’t post my marks above)
(Yes, the mark adding plug-ins been disabled for behind-the-scenes reasons out of our control – hopefully we can get it going again.)
#35 – “The problem is it’s become a joke for the kind of next layer of the media, filed under “dumb things about the 80s”.” – I’ll unabashedly cop to dismissing it in EXACTLY this fashion.
36 and 47 – Smoke on the Water was a #4, if I have to think of a ubiquitous metal tune from my childhood, it’s that one.
One that stands out from my childhood is Mountain’s “Nantucket Sleigh Ride”.
Anyone remember “Weekend World” with Peter Jay and later, Bwian Walden?
Will at 37: that is so true – I also come from the South East and it seemed to be a pretty straight correlation working-class=soul/funk/hip-hop-any other music fans=indie. If you encountered any young heavy metal fans they were(generally) just a tiny sect of the same sociological group as the indie fans but generally pretty inconspicuous to say the least.
However travelling to other parts of the country to watch football etc you’d be having a few beers on the way home (for obvious reasons maybe not in the actual place you’d been at the game!)in various small /medium sized towns and be surprised to see loads of obviously working-class heavy metal fans.I remember going to a game in Leeds and having a few drinks in Wakefield and actually chatting to some such lads and the town (well city but its town-sized!)seemed to be full of them.
West Country market towns were full of them too (actually those type of
places throughout the rest of England if they were more than about 40 miles* from London all seemed to be), I suppose I should have had an inkling of this as I had a part of my family down there and my cousins-working-class football and speedway-following mechanics/coachbuilders etc had been into Led Zeppelin/Deep Purple as far back as I can remember (probably 1972 again!)and although I was discovering Slade, Sweet etc these were just weird names that the oldest one used to have records by in his bedroom.
And as I would later realise so different to the working-class culture
of the south-east – I think there’s the makings of a decent essay there “MUSICAL DIVIDE:THE CHASM BETWEEN THE SOUTH-EAST AND THE REST OF ENGLAND”…
*note for non-British readers 40 miles might not seem far but approximately about 20 million of England’s 50million plus population live in this area
And of course along with Prince’s “1999″ this had a second lease of life at the Millenium.
I could say quite a lot here about the huge popularity of Iron Maiden and U2 amongst my Dulwich College mid-1980s peers, and the factors to which I attribute this.
On reflection, though, these notions can wait until we get to 1988/ 1991…
One thing that I do vividly remember about being at a London public school in 1986, was that most of the early-blooming musos in my year were really really excited by the rise of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, to an extent that I suspect only Melody Maker journalists were in the wider world. I think that this was due to a feeling of having missed out on the excitement of punk, and wanting to follow something similar. The next year, the same boys fell for the Beastie Boys in a big way, even being suspended from school for stealing the badges of Volkswagens.
37/57: I remember there being a certain number of metal fans in my corner of suburban London, although obviously they were as of nothing compared to the massed followers of Luther. Certainly, there were dramatically many more metal heads per capita out in England proper…
(Re assorted): I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the most disillusioning moments of my life was popping my head into the Kerrang office and hearing Belle & Sebastian on the stereo.
@MikeMCSG, 49. Thanks, I understand your comments at #44 now! Blimey, the offending party is truly hilarious. (But the youtube video has thousands of appreciative comments and relatively few dissenters. I guess I am/we are a tough crowd by comparison!)
Seeing this now has made me think a little more kindly of Tom’s genre as coalition/broad church party idea. To have supported and voted for the grunge party, and then get *those guys* at #1 (in your name, as it were), really is a little like the exquisite torture of being a hard core leftie, who worked hard to elect Labour etc., who suddenly finds they have a load of Blair (in Baghdad no less) to deal with that *they* voted for/worked for.
u.s hair metal #1 singles (very possible last uptempo u.s. rock #1 is among these):
van halen – “jump”
bon jovi – “you give love a bad name”
bon jovi – “livin on a prayer”
whitesnake – “here i go again”
g’n'f’n'r – “sweet child o’ mine”
def leppard – “love bites”
poison – “every rose has it’s thorn”
bon jovi – “i’ll be there for you”
jon bon jovi – “blaze of glory”
nelson – “(can’t live without yr) love and affection”
extreme – “more than words”
mr. big – “to be with you”
#1 hair metal albums:
quiet riot – metal health
van halen – 5150
bon jovi – slippery when wet
van halen – ou812
def leppard – hysteria
g’n'f’n'r – appetite for destruction
bon jovi – new jersey
motley crue – dr. feelgood
skid row – slave to the grind
van halen – fuck
g’n'r – use yr illusion ii
def leppard – adrenalize
aerosmith – get a grip
van halen – balance
van halen – best of vol 1
vampire weekend – contra
taDow, you forgot Boston’s “Amanda” and “Bad Medicine.”
Also: note how these bands hit #1 with ballads.
“amanda” seemed borderline (truth be told the van hagar’s borderline, esp balance, and aerosmith only really felt hair metal around permanent vacation), and i thought if i listed that then foreigner, journey, reo speedwagon, some other midwest mallrat aor i’m forgetting would qualify also. probably should’ve listed heart’s ‘alone’, thought for sure desmond child wrote it but no. i knew that ballads were the way to #1 for hair metal (was actually surprised how many weren’t ballads actually), but it’s striking just how progressively softer they get (almost listed ‘when i see you smile’ cuz it seemed too soft and noone ever bought waite’s makeover – i might as well list richard marx – but that thing sounds like ‘when the levee breaks’ compared to mr. big and extreme). in a better, more just world bon jovi records ‘heaven is a place on earth’ and it’s up there also.
Rather late to this but… wasn’t ‘heavy metal’ a Burroughs line? (I’m using Hammer Of The Gods as source material here, to my deep shame). Which probably predates Born To Be Wild. Plus I always guessed ‘heavy metal thunder’ in that instance was a literal bike reference.
And if metal vocals define metal (ie sound like stuck pig Plant) then this is is the first metal no.1.
I like dumb. I like Wild Thing. And I like good (ie quite rare) AOR – from Keep On Lovin’ You to Eye In The Sky to Hazard to Over My Shoulder. And good hair metal ballads – Alone can give me the shivers. But The Final Countdown is none of the above, just foil-thin metal, and – cough – affection for it is on a par with fancying She-Ra.
Re 50: Fudge were def proto-Tap, if that’s a definition of the beginning of metal. The Beat Goes On is one of the funniest albums ever – the entire history of music (not just pop) in 35 mins!
#65 I think you’re right about “heavy metal” as a literal bike reference. And yes, Burroughs wrote about the “Heavy Metal Kids” in The Soft Machine, I believe (1962). But if we’re going back that far, chemists have talked about “heavy metals” for a long time, predating Burroughs.
dudes it’s 1968 and they named their band steppenwolf – very totally a burroughs ref. apparently barry gifford (!) was the first to use it as a genre term but even there it’s used like it’s a common term – was ‘heavy metal’ the ‘glo-fi’ of 1968?
Coming late tot the party, but I’d still argue the toss in this song’s favour. A lovely piece of Hair Metal/Glam Metal/Cock Rock (and one can argue there’s a bunch of lads from South Wales who we’ll be meeting later who liked a bit of this stuff), and it is rather said that a wonderful, fun, subsection of music is now rather maligned.
As far as metal=provinces goes, I’m a metalhead, and I grew up in a small town in West Oxfordshire, and there were maybe three or four other fans in my year at school in the 90s. However, most of the metalheads I know are also from the small towns.
Love how Tom calls metal ‘vocational’. Fair point!
68, Yes – heavy metal is/was in the 70s and 80s anyway, a very provincial thing. And very popular in places like the midlands, west country, yorkshire.
Might have been a reflection on the different type of entertainment on offer. So, for example, you live in let’s say Taunton in 1980. You aren’t going to have any fancy electro clubs on your doorstep, or metropolitan scenesters forming bands (a la Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield). But you are going to have plenty of gigs/live music to go and see, and no doubt Saxon and Girlschool will be in town on their latest tour.
The South-East was of course much more proximate to London and so not subject to the same factors
Re 69: Growing up in the middle of Surrey I had no venues or ‘fancy’ electro clubs either, but we did have the radio which is how I got to hear stuff. So did Taunton, Shrewsbury, West Runton and other metal strongholds. Plus the second biggest conurbation in Britain is metal’s heartland. So it isn’t quite that simple.
Possibly metalheads are an extension of the rockers/teds who held out against the Beatles, Stones et al in the 60s? Were they a noticeable presence in small town Britain and the Midlands?
READER VOTING HAS BEEN RESTORED (nb you still need to be logged in to see and use this)
#46 That big synth riff sounds more like Prog to me, I can imagine Rick Wakeman playing it wearing a cape.
I can remember Mike Oldfield being surprised one of his songs was called metal (something off Crises I think); he said he’d just always called heavy guitars rock. The link between Prog and the metal is obvious, especially 80s stadium metal: the showmanship, the great riffs, the bad hair, the bad costumes, and epic songs (though rarely 20 minutes long).
#51 I was turning ten when Final Countdown came out in Australia. It was one of the first songs I recognised as a chart hit.
While I was aware of songs on the radio from quite young (Golden Brown, Stop the Cavalry etc), I just knew them as individual from an electronic box, not as part of some chart or broader narrative.
In 1987 I started listening to Take 40 Australia, and the Final Countdown was one of the earliest songs I knew as being a popular song. In fact, it was on the first commercial tape I owned – Smash Hits 87 – whose track listing in all it’s full glory was:
01 Respectable – MEL & KIM
02 Witch Queen – CHANTOOZIES
03 He’s Gonna Step On You Again – THE PARTY BOYS
04 Nothings Gonna Stop Us Now – SAMANTHA FOX
05 He’s Just No Good For You – MENTAL AS ANYTHING
06 Locomotion – KYLE MINOGUE
07 The Final Countdown – EUROPE
08 We Gotta Get Out This Place – THE ANGELS
09 I Heard A Rumour – BANANRAMA
10 Love & Devotion – MICHAEL BOW
11 Walk Like An Egyptian – BANGLES
12 Take Me Back – NOISEWORKS
13 Funky Town – PSEUDO ECHO
14 Slice Of Heaven – DAVE DOBBYN WITH HERBS
15 Sugar Free – WA WA NEE
16 Suddenly – ANGRY ANDERSON
Such was my very important first step into music collecting.
taDOW, how is Steppenwolf a Burroughs reference? I always took it to refer to the Hermann Hesse novel.
The Prog to Metal Arc:
ELP
Focus
Gong
Yes
Genesis
Marillion
The Mars Volta
Mastodon
Cradle Of Filth
Children Of Bodom
Nile
that list begins with king crimson! they invented metal and prog!
actual real metal begins with judas priest though
Marillion to Mars Volta is an insane jump. Or rather, yay the 90s!
I think talking about this in terms of metal misses the point. I was a metal fan till the mid-80s, when my allegiances shifted to indie, but my group of friends included a lot of metal fans. They didn’t like Bon Jovi, but they respected them, and some of them bought Bon Jovi records. Same with Def Leppard. Van Halen were the inventors of modern metal (ie metal that wasn’t recylced blues) and were venerated. Quiet Riot were considered proper metal. Coverdale’s past earned Whitesnake kudos. There were violent schisms over Motley Crue. But not one of them thought Europe were a metal act: they were a pop act with long hair. No one even cared about Europe’s existence.
If there’s a hair metal continuum that runs Aerosmith-Halen-Crue-Ratt-GNR and so on, I think there’s a parallel one, filled with the “metal” bands who weren’t really metal, one that features the likes of Europe and Extreme, with Jovi floating somewhere in the middle, JBJ clearly realising that to keep a career you needed the metal core onside, but to keep the career enormous, you needed the pop fans too. Extreme and Europe only realised the second part, to their cost.
Do I detect a touch of score inflation over the past few years? I can certainly accept that TFC is silly but in a good way, but is it really on a par with Space Oddity, Are Friends Electric, Jailhouse Rock, Help!, Day Tripper, etc., who also got 7s?
I always like to think that The Final Countdown as a sequel to clouds across the moon, and the galactic battle having moved to Earth has destroyed it and thus we are scurrying off to Venus to retreat.
I will come back to this thread vis a vis my own metal past. Just safe to say I was the singer in a band called Stormchild for a while (until they threw me out for refusing to wear leather trousers).
And I would certain;y agree that The Final Countdown is as good as the tracks you mention (except Jailhouse Rock with is an 8 or 9 for me).
A little bias towards your own time is surely unavoidable.
MichaelH @77: that’s an astute comment, but the trouble is that none of us in the Anglo countries knew anything about Europe apart from this track. I still have no idea what their other songs sounded like, particularly their stuff before this, but can only assume that they were metal and that this was an aberration. Their guitarist objected to it as such, apparently (shades of Berlin and “Take My Breath Away”).
If all we knew of Van Halen was “Jump”, we would no doubt be saying they weren’t heavy metal either. David Lee Roth’s subsequent “California Girls” and “Just a Gigolo” would have provided further evidence. But do those examples really mean that they weren’t, any more than this means that Europe weren’t?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qajDhtnpBhA – here’s the first single from their previous album. Hard rock, yes. Metal? Possibly. Borderline I’d say. No sign of TFC’s pop nous though.
Thanks, Tom. Sounds like standard-issue early-80s metal to me; I used to listen to plenty of stuff just like it. I wouldn’t have called it top-drawer metal, but it’s metal all right. “Hard rock” would have signified quite different vocal styles, guitar solos, the lot.
(actually that solo is definitely metal)
As for the mark, what can I say? I really like it. Rather than marks creeping up it’s partly a reaction to a run of more or less dreary #1s though: was nice to have something with a bit of ridiculous gumption to review. Think of it as a 7 in the way King Of The Road, Quinn The Eskimo, In The Summertime, Yes Sir I Can Boogie and Pass The Dutchie are 7s if you like.
Oddity aside you’ve picked a lot of the songs I underrated though! (I get another tilt at Jailhouse Rock I believe so a rare opportunity to revise the mark…)
The observations about metal and its fans make a lot of sense.
One of my best friends at school was a metal-head who was ridiculed by some for favouring Korn and Limp Bizkit (so imagine my bemusement when in my first year at college both groups became astoundingly popular).
This friend was opinionated about what was heavy and what was not.
He didn’t share my appreciation for Nirvana (not metal enough) and anything too overtly indie we tacitly agreed to disagree about.
He seemed honestly surprised when I admitted to ownership of Pulp albums.
However it was my metal-loving friend who pushed me towards my favourite ever group by loaning me some tapes of Manics album tracks.
Previously a band who I liked better for their image than their songs
the Manics appeared to have something in common with Guns n Roses but equally just as much in common with the Jesus and Mary Chain to bridge the gap.
A few other groups we could agree on Smashing Pumpkins (who I always think of a making a kind of baroque metal), Placebo and Therapy?
This to me points up the curious commonality between metal and indie fans and how it occassionly mingles as does the fact that two of the few weeklies still on the shelves are Kerrang and the NME.
I think Europe having been totally ignored in the UK before TFC is why I can’t think of them as metal. I don’t remember them being in Kerrang!, though of course they might have been. Certainly, I’d never even heard of them till TFC, and by virtue of my friends, I usually knew what was happening on the scene (albeit, that as they’d got older, they moved away from mainstream metal towards Nuclear Assault and the hardcore crossovers. Ot the hardcore continuum, if you prefer).
PS Also, this parrticular single shouldn’t be discussed as a metal song, regardless of the rest of their career – that’s what the opening line of my first post was meant to imply.
PPS Having listened to the previous single, I’d say this is False Metal. It’s got the skkkrng guitar, the wailing vocal – but the chord progressions are all pop. No sign of the devil’s interval.
#76 I kind of agonised over including any grunge or thrash in that list. I suppose I could have included Faith No More. The 90’s seemed quite a chasm although Steve Hillage was still active, I believe. Plenty of proggy metal in the noughties though.
84, and “Are Friends Electric”, sort of…
86: doesn’t the ‘ardcore/hardcore continuum refer to a nuum centred on hardcore as in rave music from the early 90s?
70: Obviously “heavy metal thunder” wasn’t referring to a type of music but I have read that from the use of it by Steppenwolf (in a massive public-consciousness invading hit containing much that became to define the genre) onwards there existed a vague connection to a useful shorthand for hard rock.
And of course it was just ONE of the signifiers (although signifying virtually alone) appearing in 1968 which when taken in context pointed to 1968 as the year when the ingredients that made up the metal brew all came together.
apparently barry gifford (!) was the first to use it as a genre term
#67 Don, are you sure? When and where? The earliest I know of in print is Mike Saunders in Rolling Stone in mid ’70 and in Creem in his May ’71 review of Sir Lord Baltimore – not that I’ve seen those reviews, just heard of them.
acc. to wiki in some electric flag review for rolling stone in 68, describes them as “Nobody who’s been listening to Mike Bloomfield—either talking or playing—in the last few years could have expected this. This is the new soul music, the synthesis of white blues and heavy metal rock.” it sorta credits metal mike w/ cementing the term, bangs/creem w/ popularizing it.
1968 seems to have been the “first” year for a few genres that never really died
FUNK: although people often cite “Papas Got A Brand New Bag” in 1965 as the first funk track (but that’s almost like saying “You Really got Me” was heavy metal ie an extremely tenuous and abstract connection to the respective sounds the genres came to symbolise).
But by 1968 we had the sound that dominated black dance music up until at least the mid 80s when after existing in tandem with hip hop for a few years until it finally died as a sound of young blacks.
REGGAE: about as near as such things can ever be to one year indicating a definite starting point for a genre (as opposed to the ska and rocksteady that went before)
RAP: a bit more controversial but the Last Poets are invariably cited as the first rap group and they began performing in 1968.
re my 92: it should have read “although signifying virtually NOTHING alone”…don’t usually bother correcting my many typos but that one makes the whole thing complete gibberish
Re: #88, this sounds familiar – Nirvana were the key band in terms of my group of friends at school getting into music in a big way and their crossover appeal in terms of Kerrang!/NME meant that some of us went the indie route and some the rock (I was largely the former though partial to heavier stuff at times).
Looking back it was perhaps a transitional era for the genre, the big names were those who had roots in thrash (about which me and my friends knew nothing) and who helped lay the foundations for nu-metal – bands like Rage Against The Machine, Fear Factory, Pantera and – later on – Sepultura’s Roots album and Korn’s first couple of records. I could never fully commit myself to the metal lifestyle – I never really liked the look for starters – but I admired it in a way and I always found myself annoyed at the snobbery displayed in the indie weeklies towards the music and its fans.
I’m not sure what the early/mid-’90s equivalent of Europe-style pop/stadium metal would have been – Def Leppard and Bon Jovi still had hits around ’91/’92 but beyond that I’m stumped.
early 90s pop/stadium metal you say?
extreme, warrant, TIGERTAILZ (not that they got as far as a stadium, but deffo pop bless ‘em)…
debatable whether one could count thunder/quireboys/little angels/dogs d’amour as 90s pop metal, they were pretty much over once Nevermind came out…
What about RHCP and The Black Crowes? Not exactly metal but probably capable of filling some stadiums just before, around and still after the time of ‘Nevermind’. Depressing to think that RHCP were still some 10 years off their commercial peak at that point!