Oh man... I had that first Saint Vitus album. That one was really divisive amongst my friends... punk? metal? punketal? munk? Nobody could agree on what 'type' of music it was.... but we all agreed that the guitar sound was BRUTAL. And I draw a strong line in my mind between the NWOBHM, and other metal from the same era. It's like the NWOBHM forked and became Hair Metal (Poison), Van Halen-esque (Motley Crue, Sammy Hagar, Scorpions), Straight-up Metal (Metallica, Sepultura, Megadeth, Mastodon), and Black Metal (Mercyful Fate, etc). And then a bunch of us metalheads in Seattle started mumbling, messing with song structures, and playing with really grungy distortion... and inadvertently invented Grunge. For me and my friends, we were just being a modern Black Sabbath, but in cut off army pants and flannel shirts.
Reading the NWOBHM wiki the Bruce Dickinson quote hits the bullseye. They could have just called it anymetal. Just when you get the point where there really is a difference between hardcore and thrash metal, a wild Melvins appears and it seems you're to blame eh? Metal & electronic genres all confuse the hell out of me. NWOBHM was a fiction, really, an invention of Geoff Barton and Sounds (music paper). It was a cunning ruse to boost circulation. Having said that, it did represent a lot of bands that were utterly ignored by the mainstream media. Because of that it became real and people got behind it
I was watching a documentary about ... some band? ... and there was an actual clip of an interview with Geoff Barton who said exactly that, I wanted to write about these bands, and needed to give them a genre or classification so I could talk about them as a group... so I invented the term NWOBHM...