I couldn’t get a ticket to see them play, so I spent the weekend doing Sabbath-adjacent stuff. I went to Castle Bromwich Gardens to hear legendary Birmingham sound engineer Johnny Haynes talk about recording their first ever demo tape (he even brought the original mic) and visited the one-off exhibition — mostly photos of the Prince of Darkness doing his trademark gurn. Lest I need spell it out: I worship at the shrine of Black Sabbath.

That weekend we celebrated the homecoming of our Prince for what would not only be his final gig, but his final anything. His death was a gut-punch, not just because I love his music, but because he was unapologetically Birmingham. For my entire life I’ve known that to be a Brummie, like Ozzy, is to be a punchline. His behaviour may have earned him a nihilistic nickname, but his accent made him a joke. We Brummies are ridiculed for our cadences and our city mocked for lacking ambition. People forget — or perhaps never knew — that it was once a cradle of innovation and manufacturing. From the industrial to the digital revolution, we were creators.

So people hold their noses and sneer as they drive through on their way to somewhere else. Our city’s stereotype is only compounded by the ineptitude of Birmingham City Council who have managed to bankrupt themselves, close the public libraries, defund the arts, and cause a plague of rats by way of a never-ending bin strike. These days, even the Balti Triangle has lost its edge. And Birmingham’s self-sabotage often makes it fair game for mockery.

We Brummies know this, and defend what was once a mighty city even while laughingly apologising. We’ve developed a protective sense of humour and a fierce loyalty to our roots — just as some of us deny them by concealing our “most hated” accent. Michael Buerk hid his in order to pass through the RP corridors of the BBC, and few would realize that silken-voiced actor Anton Lesser hails from Britain’s second city. I dropped my own singsong inflection for a while (until my sister told me I “sounded posh” on the radio). But never Ozzy.

It took a while for me to find him: I grew up in the Eighties, when Black Sabbath were out of favor, Ozzy having left the band due to “erratic” behaviour. I lived on various Birmingham council estates being something I later learned the middle classes called “underclass”. Benefits class. Criminal class. We had a Social Worker and hid from debt collectors. To be working class was an aspiration. The Nineties — the last good decade — did offer girls like me the potential of upward mobility, but I was playing a game I didn’t understand with a lousy deck of cards. Without money, access to culture was limited, and I didn’t yet know what I wanted. The furthest into music experimentation I’d got was the soundtrack to Miss Saigon and a copy of Harry Connick Jr’s album We Are In Love, when one day my sister came home and declared she was now into rock and heavy metal. Perhaps I might like to join her?

She introduced me to her new friends, boys with eyeliner and bum-length hair, girls in corsets and Doc Martens. As a bookish computer nerd with trauma problems and no affability, I realized I had discovered my people. We united by not fitting in. These black-clad kids weren’t the devil-worshipping, baby-sacrificers we’d been warned about; they were the bullied, the weirdos, the gentle souls with geeky interests, gallows humour and malformed social skills. None of us had thrived in a regular school environment. All of us were poor. But we found each other and the music found us.

They took me to see Metallica at Milton Keynes Bowl, and over the coach’s sound system played me songs from bands composed of people just like us, singing about the fury of the disposable classes. It was here I first heard Ozzy Osbourne wailing Geezer Butler’s deceptively simple lyrical angst about poverty, mental health, the exploitation of working-class bodies, rebellion against organised religion, and the political class’s terror of self-expression.

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It was all oddly familiar. Butler’s father was a military man turned engineer. My dad, though a remarkably intelligent man, had left school at 16 to work in a factory like his father and grandfather, part of Birmingham’s then-still-booming manufacturing industry. He hated it, and promptly joined the RAF which recognized his talents and trained him in engineering. While stationed in Cyprus during the “Bloody Christmas” civil war, he experienced trauma he never talked about, and coped via alcoholism which eventually impeded his ability to hold down a job after the military. He was killed, aged 44, during a street fight with teenage boys. He had had a lot to be angry about, and I, five years after his death, did too.

“People think I’m insane/because I am frowning all the time,” sang Ozzy, whose father was also a factory worker. He had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of school bullies, and attempted suicide several times. And now, here was my personal pain, manifest in Ozzy’s vocals. To the polite, the posh, or the moralizing Christians he sounded terrifying, but I only heard reassurance. I transformed overnight, adopted the black uniform of my clan, and felt safe for the first time in years.

One of the reasons working-class kids want to be singers or footballers is because it’s free to try and, if you have talent, is a potential pathway to riches. Naturally, aged 18, I joined a rock band. Our three-chords-and-the-truth schtick carried us to the dizzying heights of Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun Hall, before we crashed and burned in a fire of mediocrity. But my ambition to no longer be poor did not die. I had learned from Black Sabbath that if you have something to say, you can just stand up and say it, and keep saying it even while you’re shouted down, so I kept trying until I succeeded. I took a different (less lucrative but far safer) path from Ozzy, who climbed to the top of the precarious ladder of fame, addiction and bad behavior.

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But he never rejected his home city or hid his accent, even as he bit the head off a bat and crashed his quad bike. He laughed at himself harder than anyone laughed at him, all the while winking to those of us who were in on the joke. Now I see that same proud sense of humor in a new generation of Birmingham’s working-class performers, from poet Bradley Taylor and artist Tat Vision to comedian Jo Enright (and if you didn’t laugh along with Alison Hammond’s chaotic interview with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, then you will never get us).

When earlier this year, Ozzy, aged 76, was offered the Freedom of Birmingham, he said, “Really, me? But I’ve been in prison!” This was surely more sardonic winking from a man who has sold over 70 million records. He knew that for many, once an underclass Brummie, always an underclass Brummie. But it also acknowledged, to me: more fool those who underestimate us. It was an honor to be a small part of his final homecoming in a misunderstood city, smiling at strangers, united by Ozzy. A working-class Brummie who took the punchline and turned it into a power.

This was a problem. For a while I tried a bleached-blonde mohawk — I looked like a prat, but you couldn’t fault the commitment. A chin-only beard was a nice idea, but I was not a hirsute teen and after several months’ growth I looked as though I had a tennis ball made of pubes stapled to my chin. But, of course, the obvious option for the wavy-haired metaller is to go full skinhead, and that is what I did: buzzcut, grade zero. 

In 1998, aged 17, three friends and I went to OzzFest at the Milton Keynes Bowl. It was a heavy metal festival organised by Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath; it had various luminaries of the metal scene playing, including Fear Factory, Slayer and Pantera. My scalp was freshly shorn. It was a blazing hot day; I was too young and self-conscious to want to show weakness by applying suncream, and, of course, I was drinking and smoking weed all day, because that is what you do at a festival when you’re 17. 

On my second or third venture into the moshpit, the physical activity, and the drink and weed, and of course the relentless sun on my gleaming bonce, became too much for me, and I started to faint. Fainting in the middle of a large moshpit is not a very good idea. Luckily, a group of skinheaded young men spotted me going pale, grabbed me by the arms, and cleared a path out of the crowd for me. I like to think they were doing so out of solidarity.

I’ve been thinking about metal lately, because recently, one of the formative albums of my youth turned 30 years old. Metallica’s self-titled album, also known as The Black Album, was released in August 1991. I graduated slowly from rock to metal in my teenage years, going from Queen to Guns N’ Roses and Pearl Jam, to Metallica and Faith No More, and eventually Pantera, Carcass and Fear Factory. It was probably The Black Album which did as much as anything to push me along that route. And Metallica were the first band I saw live, at Earls Court in 1996.

It’s probably not so true nowadays, but in my youth metal still had a hint of danger about it. Men wearing make-up and long hair was still mildly shocking to people who remembered the 1950s, and a lot of people still did back then. When the Columbine massacre happened in 1999, conservative voices blamed it on Marilyn Manson (and the video game Doom, something else I spent a lot of my youth playing). Not that long earlier, there was a serious societal concern that heavy metal was encouraging Satanism among American youth. Geraldo Rivera made a documentary saying that heavy metal encouraged devil-worship.

You can see why: the metal aesthetic is blood and skulls. If you go to a death metal festival, you’ll notice something: all the band logos look exactly the same. They’re bone-coloured, illegibly stylised writing on a black background. (Apart from the heroic Party Cannon, of course.) 

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If you listen to heavy metal lyrics, especially the 1980s and 1990s, Metallica-heyday era ones, they’re usually about things that Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer fans would recognise. Monsters, battles, that sort of thing. Three Metallica songs are about Cthulhu, the sleeping elder god from HP Lovecraft’s fiction. “Enter Sandman”, one of their biggest hits, sings about “Dreams of war, dreams of liars/ Dreams of dragon’s fire/ And of things that will bite.” They have a song about werewolves.

And the Satanic panic people were partly right: there are lots of songs about devils and demons. Slayer, one of the popular beat combos I saw on that warm Milton Keynes afternoon, has a pentagram logo and lots of songs with titles like “Angel of Death”, “Hell Awaits”, and “Black Magic”. Oh, and “The Antichrist”. You could see how that might mislead people into thinking that they had a thing for this Satan character. Lots of metal is aggressive or violent in content: bands with names like Cannibal Corpse or Bloodbath, songs with names like “Hammer Smashed Face” or “A Skull Full of Maggots”.

But from the inside, metal feels nerdy and warmhearted. Metal gigs have always, to me, had the sort of vibe of a classic car meet or a real-ale festival: a place for slightly socially awkward people to find a social group outside the mainstream. The aggressive image it projects is at odds with the rather gentle souls you actually meet doing it. This was particularly made clear to me when I went to Download festival in 2015 and asked lots of metallers for their musical guilty pleasures, and came back with lovely photos of pierced, tattooed, bearded thrashers holding up whiteboards saying “C’est la Vie by B*witched” or “Katy Perry, Firework”.[1. I recommend the Spotify playlist we made of everyone’s choices. It’s really pure and wholesome and fun.] And everyone was super lovely. 

Philly Byrne, the lead singer of the well-respected thrash metal band GAMA Bomb, agreed: there’s a nerdy stripe to metallers that you don’t get quite so much in other genres. “The thing I say is that metalheads in reality are librarians,” he says. “There are things you can just be into, and that’s fine: with dance music, it’s fine to just be into it. But with metal it’s expected that you’ll know lots and lots. You’ll have knowledge and experience. You’ll collect old LPs, you’ll get patches on your jacket. It’s more like real ale fans or cinema nerds: they’re quite dad-ly, they have a soft edge to them.” 

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Metal is, in fact, full of the sort of people who play Dungeons & Dragons (another Satanic Panic victim!): nerdy, often (but not always) male, somewhat obsessive. And similar to Warhammer, the fire-and-death ethos is at odds with the geeky, friendly reality. (The metal band Bolt Thrower, incidentally, sang mainly about Warhammer. It’s like a crossover episode of my favourite things.)

You don’t get into metal as a teenager if you want to be one of the mainstream cool kids. You get into it if, like me, you’re not quite sure if you can pull off being one of the mainstream cool kids, so you look for a solid identity elsewhere. Those skinheaded lads who rescued me from collapse in the moshpit were probably gentle-hearted nerds trying to find their way in the world, like I was.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t awful people and bad things in metal. The Norwegian black metal scene has two actual murderers (1, 2), and the aggressive image spills over into reality on very rare occasions. More prosaically, it’s quite insular: a certain amount of gatekeeping goes on over who counts as real metal or who counts as a real fan. I remember ambiguous feelings when “my” bands, bands like Metallica or Faith No More, appeared on TFI Friday or Top of the Pops: on the one hand, the normies get to see how great they are; on the other, they’re mine. But on the whole, it’s a place of gentle souls, a place for the awkward and weird who didn’t quite fit the mainstream. 

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Plus, metal is one of Britain’s greatest exports. A disproportionate number of the first real heavy metal bands – Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Mötörhead, Saxon, Venom – were or are British: often from working-class Midlands backgrounds. Understandably that has meant that it is predominantly a white genre – but only predominantly. “I’ve played all over the world,” says Byrne. “I’ve played in Japan and South America, I’ve played to an audience of Navajo people.” There’s a popular Mongolian metal band, the HU. There’s a thriving K-pop/metal crossover genre, led by BABYMETAL. It’s a global phenomenon, born in urban England in the 1970s.

I haven’t been to a metal gig for a while. Partly that’s getting older, partly it’s been the bloody pandemic, partly it’s because my job’s changed and it’s harder than it used to be to pretend that I write about music, so can I have free tickets please. And of course it’s parenthood: for a brief period I managed to get my son, then three, to say his favourite song was “Black Star” by Carcass, but now he’s seven and likes George Ezra. (My daughter likes Faith No More, so there’s still hope.)

But now that the UK is opening up a bit —Bloodstock went ahead only last weekend! — maybe I ought to get involved again. After all, Metallica are still going strong. The only trouble is that, as I learnt researching this piece, headbanging these days gives me a headache and my glasses fall off. And, of course, I still have the wrong sort of hair.

I don’t regret the moshing, which was fun, though I’m mildly embarrassed about the tits. Now a parent myself, I do feel bad for the friend’s dad who drove us all to Wembley and whose gig I spoiled by disappearing. It all came rushing back while being made to watch the rock-themed 2020 kids’ film Trolls: World Tour with my own little girl.

The villain is one Barb, Queen of the Rock Trolls, whose dastardly plan is to unite all the troll nations forcibly under the dominion of rock music. Barb’s obnoxious-yet-fragile character reminds me a little of my own adolescent metal-fan days, screaming in ecstasy at the pint-sized Axl Rose and his leave-nothing-to-the-imagination white shorts. But the (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) depiction of heavy metal as the musical villain in Trolls: World Tour, gets the metal aesthetic both absolutely right — and also absolutely wrong. In depicting loud guitar music as in search of world dominion the film identifies, accurately, the way metal plugs into a High Romantic era of imperial grandeur. But it also misrepresents the cachet that High Romantic aesthetic has (or rather doesn’t have) in the modern world.

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High Romanticism was baked into heavy metal from the start. Consider the irresistible temptation metal bands feel to play alongside that most High Romantic band format of all: a symphony orchestra. In 1969 the proto-metal band Deep Purple wrote, rehearsed and performed Concerto for Group and Orchestra, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in a gala concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The score was lost in 1970, but that didn’t stop noise-loving musicologists from recreating it, and a re-run was staged at the Albert Hall in 1999.

The same year, American thrash band Metallica performed their own symphonic rock happening with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the live album S&M (Symphony & Metallica). Listening to S&M, the only real surprise is that “Master of Puppets” was ever played without a full orchestral backing; but the affinity between metal and symphonic music goes far deeper. You only have to listen to the last five minutes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (composed 1824) to see what I mean: the whole mood is metal.

I’m sure there’s a proper music theory term for what I’m describing, but as my music theory education ended around Grade 5 I’m borrowing the term ‘metal’ to describe an aesthetic that’s both intensely serious and determined to throw the whole sensory kitchen sink at you. (Deep Purple, incidentally, were famously committed to throwing the sensory kitchen sink at their audience, which resulted in their 1972 accession to the Guinness Book of Records as the ‘World’s Loudest Band’.)

In symbolic terms, the Albert Hall — constructed 1871, at the zenith of Britain’s imperial era — was the perfect venue for Deep Purple’s foray into symphonic kitchen-sinkiness. A crowdfunded monument to Victorian engineering, public-spiritedness and looted imperial wealth, the Albert Hall’s inception fused elite seriousness with nationalism and popular culture in quintessentially 19^th century high style.

A century later, though, the empire that helped bankroll the Albert Hall’s construction was dissolved, and the steel industry that forged its columns on the way to extinction in Britain. And yet heavy metal was forged at this fag-end of Britain’s industrial/imperial arc, amid the warehouses of Birmingham, in part thanks to an industrial accident. Aged 17, guitarist Tony Iommi lost two fingertips in a sheet metal factory, and changed his guitar style to accommodate the injury — in the process giving birth to the sound that would come to define Black Sabbath (formed 1968).

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In one sense, then, the birth of heavy metal music is both a product of Great Britain in its industrial pomp — as well as being a semi-ironic, semi-nostalgic, working-class comment on that bygone era. In metal, class and culture fuse in complicated ways, but perhaps Bruce Dickinson (singer in perhaps the most Union-Jack-festooned metal band of all, Iron Maiden) was onto something when he observed in a BBC Hard Talk interview in 2012 that working-class people are culturally conservative. For along with its Hammer Horror humour and darkness, metal conveys a straight dose of imperial-era seriousness. And among the heavily ironic and post-nationalistic contemporary elite, this makes the genre more than a little embarrassing.

It’s not just the patriotism that offends today’s rationalistic status culture. Metal and symphonic music are both also jacked directly into the European mythological mainframe, where the old gods still lurk. Nowhere is this so visible as in the pivotal role played in the High Romantic symphonic canon by the most myth-laden, po-faced and profoundly metal composers of all time: Richard Wagner. For his crimes, Wagner is more than a touch ‘problematic’ in modern terms. He’s also so metal there’s even a fan Twitter and blog dedicated to counting the ways Wagner is metal.

Wagner drew his inspiration from Europe’s rich tradition of pagan myth, paving the way for countless metal bands to follow suit, borrowing liberally from Germanic and Norse myth alike to equal parts stirring and comical effect. While it’s hard to tell how seriously to take Swedish band Brothers of Metal (the official video for Prophecy of Ragnarök is pure LARP in the original nerds-in-costume sense), perhaps seriousness is beside the point.

Metal’s High Romanticism is not just a musical crossover, but a poetic one too: Iron Maiden made a surprisingly catchy 13-minute musical version of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Nor is it just an English thing: the German metal band Rammstein is soaked in Goethe allusions and even straight reworkings, for example this rock version of Erlkönig.

The seam of heavy metal dedication to heroism, mythology and sensory overload winds through Wagner’s Ring via another source of ring-themed mythology and metal inspiration, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This isn’t just a question of thematic influence: in 2013 Christopher Lee, who played Saruman the White in the 2001-2003 movie trilogy, also released the deeply strange but also strangely marvellous symphonic rock concept album Charlemagne: By The Sword And The Cross at the age of 87.

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So the taproots of metal run all the way through the good and bad of Europe’s imperial and industrial era, to that era’s poetry and deep mythological substrate. In this sense, metal is profoundly conservative, in a far richer way than today’s actually-rather-Whiggish Conservative Party. (The late Roger Scruton, incidentally, liked a bit of Metallica.)

Metal is also conservative in the sense of taking musical skill seriously. The best metal guitarists are astonishingly virtuosic, and often possess a grasp of music theory that would shame a concert pianist — or, as in this video of Tina S Cover absolutely shredding a metal arrangement of the presto agitato from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, facilitate pretty exceptional performances of a concert pianist’s repertoire. (For a classical/metal solo crossover in the opposite direction, here’s Facundo Lopèz of GEODA playing death metal on a flamenco guitar.)

So why does it all seem a bit, well, camp? 52 years after Black Sabbath was formed, I found myself watching the band’s legendarily wild frontman Ozzy Osbourne voicing the raddled father of Barb, Queen of the Trolls, in Trolls World Tour. You could read this as a sad end to a once-powerful genre, but I prefer to think it attests (like Christopher Lee, Brothers of Metal, or This Is Spinal Tap) to metal’s ability to hover always at the edge of self-mockery, without ever becoming entirely silly.

Metal may look from one angle like sonic overload and half-camp sincerity with a side order of ridiculous costumes. But seen from another angle, it’s the last resting-place of a heroic style that once held cultural pride of place in symphonic music, and was widely popular from the elites downward.

Modern tastemakers have no patience for such elevated sentiment. When they’re not being skewered by The Kids as ‘Britpoppers’, our rulers decry greatness as patriarchal delusion, national identity as a vector for colonial depredations, mythology as a delivery mechanism for fascist sympathies and all sources of shared cultural meaning as dangerously exclusionary threats to egalitarian individualism. The Britpoppers’ monument was not a new Albert Hall but a big tent full of tat: the Millennium Dome. Under such leadership, small wonder heavy metal has to smuggle its Wagnerian aesthetic beneath a studded-leather cloak of high camp.

And still, despite being five decades old, with many of its pioneers either dead, in recovery or voicing animated trolls, metal still likes to think of itself as countercultural. In the ever more intolerantly progressive and anti-intellectual 21^st century, perhaps it still is. For against that backdrop, perhaps the stealth-reactionary aesthetic of heavy metal is still, well, just a little bit metal.