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"Set the Stage Alight" from Weapon (now Weapon UK) is not just one of my favorite NWOBHM songs, it is one of my favorite songs of all time and has been so since I first heard it back at the end of the '80s on my cassette version of Lars Ulrich's New Wave of British Heavy Metal '79 Revisited. For a long time, it was the only song by Weapon I could find until the Internet showed up and I found the 2003 Zoom Club CD that gathered many of the band's early songs that were intended for a debut album to be titled Set the Stage Alight that never materialized. Pure Steel Records is now releasing Set the Stage Alight—The Anthology on vinyl for all you purists out there (along with their 2014 Rising from the Ashes album).

"Set the Stage Alight" remains the band's signature song but they also hit the NWOBHM nail on the head with rough and rocking cuts like "One Night Stand" and "Midnight Satisfaction" which pay homage to the greats of the '70s, like Uriah Heep, and inject the loose energy of the then-recent punk movement into the playing. Weapon were also a band looking for some commercial success so songs like "Take that Bottle" and "Bad Love" lean toward the simple, bluesy riffing and sing-along choruses of groups like Sweet.

Weapon caught lightning in a bottle with "Set the Stage Alight" and they wrote some other great songs as well making Set the Stage Alight— The Anthology an excellent representation of a band that should have enjoyed more success back in the day. Now you can plop the needle down wherever you like, put on headphones with the thick, curly wire going back the stereo and go back to 1980.