Birmingham, England Scene · 1968–1992
Scenes › Birmingham
Birmingham
In short
An industrial city that invented heavy metal and, twenty years later, invented a way to make it sound like the factories.
The scene
Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in a factory accident, slackened his strings and tuned down to make them playable, and the resulting sound became a genre. Judas Priest, from the same city, added the leather and the twin leads. Two decades on Godflesh replaced the drummer with a machine and produced a guitar tone like poured concrete — the same city arriving at heaviness twice, by different routes and for the same reasons.
What happened