To salute Home Of Metal's new series of exhibitions across the West Midlands, a look at key items that tell the story of the metal movement
To celebrate four decades since Black Sabbath ushered in the modern era of heavy metal (sludgy, melancholic, grinding and defiantly anti-hippy) the entire West Midlands (near enough) has been given over to the sprawling Home Of Metal. Originally set up as an online folk archive of metal memorabilia, Home Of Metal is now a vast centrepiece exhibition in Birmingham, with other shows spread across various Black Country galleries. The programme takes in modern art, the region's industrial heritage, a huge academic conference, DIY guitar and fanzine making workshops and even a series of bat walks in Haden Hill Park (titled, naturally, Bat Out of Hell). With a tight focus kept on bands from the region (mainly Sabbath, Judas Priest, Napalm Death and Godflesh) it's a long-overdue tribute to an age where bands could invoke Satan, ride motorbikes on stage, record songs which were four seconds long and generally terrify polite society. Join The Guide as we journey up the M1 to tell the story of the music in just seven objects ?
An anvil
"Birmingham," wrote the historian William Hutton in 1781, "began with the productions of the anvil and will probably end with them." The birth of the West Midlands heavy metal scene is inextricably bound up with the centuries of heavy industry that followed Hutton's observation. Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath and Glenn Tipton of Judas Priest both worked in the steel industry. "The factory I worked in was a massive steelwork labyrinth, riddled with polluted canals, massive grimy workshops, foundries and steam hammers," recalled Tipton. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to realise why metal ending up sounding the way it did. "There were no safety regulations," added Tipton, as Iommi found to his cost: he lost the tips of his fingers in a metal press and had to relearn the guitar using leather-coated tops of washing up bottles as ersatz digits.
A Laney amp
Iommi's lack of fingertips led to other crucial mutations in his guitar playing ? namely the use of thinner, detuned strings. However, the key element of his seminal metal sound was the none-more-distorted Laney amplifier, first built by Lyndon Laney (then playing bass in Band Of Joy with Robert Plant and John Bonham) in his father's shed in Great Barr, north Birmingham. Iommi still uses a GH100TI, a monolithic 100-watt amp head that proudly boasts of "being equipped for out-and-out metal".
Lars Ulrich's fan letter
Before email, an international metal network was sustained from the West Midlands in epistolary form. Exhibits at Home Of Metal include Lars Ulrich's polite missive to Brian Tatler of Diamond Head thanking the band for looking after him when he arrived in England as an unknown fan ? Ulrich promptly returned to LA and formed Metallica with James Hetfield.
A denim jacket
Faded denim is right on trend for this year, although sadly the 2011 fashion incarnation doesn't include a variety of cheap embroidered patches stitched on to every available surface. "Every metal fan would have to choose their backpatch carefully," says Ken McCormick, whose patch-encrusted tabard takes pride of place in Home Of Metal. "I liked mine because it made old ladies tut." Also influential on the development of the metal look was Judas Priest's astonishing array of homoerotic studded leatherwear, which now forms the basis of a separate show at Walsall's Leather Museum.
Black Sabbath's logo
Tedious graphic design types are always quacking on about Josef-M�ller Brockmann et al but frankly those tasteful Swiss types are a bit of a one-trick sans-serif pony. Metal's grasp of fonts managed to be both wildly inventive and easy to replicate on clothing, and continues to regularly crop up in modern graphic design (Arctic Monkeys' new logo appears to be a straight lift from Black Sabbath's Master Of Reality album). A Wolverhampton art show running concurrently with Home Of Metal includes Matias Faldbakken's reconfiguring of the vicious Slayer logo, and Ben Venom's quilts constructed from iconic metal logos.
Napalm Death's zine
Despite actually being enormously popular, British metal has always traded on "outsider" status. The genre's lack of mainstream champions helped fuel a rudely healthy fanzine culture; stand-outs at Home Of Metal include the Sabbath bible Southern Cross ("Dutch picture sleeve singles special!") and Anti-Social, produced by the future founders of Napalm Death, aged 11 (sample cover lines: "Cassettes are fabbo" and "this costs 15p ? don't let them rip you off, ok?"). Suffice to say, these items ? handmade, deeply political, anti-capitalist ? now look about as quaint as illuminated manuscripts and magic lanterns.
A Judas Priest banner
Perhaps the most telling piece in the whole Home of Metal show is a banner by Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner, looking out on to the front of The New Art Gallery Walsall and declaring "I'LL CHOOSE MY FATE" in Judas Priest-quoting, fire-encrusted letters. A music scene that once frightened authority, was embroiled in court cases and accused by local documentaries of damaging teenagers' brains is now accepted as a legitimate, slightly cosy part of English folk culture
Events and exhibitions run at various venues to 8 Jan 2012, see homeofmetal.com for details
melissa etheridge and tammy lynn michaels chelsea handler and ted harbert halle berry and gabriel aubry charlize theron and stuart townsend susan sarandon and tim robbins
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