Something Completely Different

In the British Isles*, Celtic Music is distinctive enough to have carved out its own identity, which Trollheart has admirably explored in his "Sing An Irish Song" thread :- https://scd.community/index.php?topic=50.0

*Just in case anyone is geographically confused:
(https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/img-assets/meta-images/british-isles.x6889d706.png?w=1200&h=630)

Unlike the US, which is big enough to have quite distinctive sounds per region, England is not divided up by deserts, mountains, or many hundreds of miles, and so it has a pretty homogenous musical culture. Of course there's pop, rock, punk, jazz,etc. but those genres aren't sub-divided out into regions afaik.  Back in the 60s contemporary media tried to play up a distinction between Swinging London and the Mersey Sound, but otherwise the regions and cities of England don't get much credit for their homegrown musicians. Here's a thread that could change that, by giving a shout-out to England's various cities.

First up, Birmingham ! Hometown of both jimmyjazz and the Moody Blues:


And from nearby Salford (by which I mean that it is also North of the Watford Gap ;) ) that unique eccentric, John Cooper Clarke :-


Any other musical powerhouse cities of England that deserve more credit than they typically get?

Quote from: Lisnaholic on Feb 10, 2025, 03:50 PMAny other musical powerhouse cities of England that deserve more credit than they typically get?

Well.. you know how I feel about Canterbury, though to be fair, not everything in or everyone from the Canterbury scene happened in or came from there.

Still, Canterbury was the first thing that came to my brain 🙂

Plus I've been there!

How dare you talk about Birmingham without addressing its two biggest musical heroes!
Blue Sunday - no that's not it. Um, white Saturday? Blue Monday? Ah! Red Passover! No, no NO!

"Black Sabbath" (that's the one!) - Black Sabbath. From, um, Black Sabbath.

And say 'elo to Jeff and the boys too.

"Birmingham Blues" - Electric Light Orchestra. From Out of the Blue

There's also, obviously, Liverpool and Manchester, both of whom have their own special sound, and I believe Newcastle is where these guys hail(ed) from:

"Run for Home" - Lindisfarne

Also from "the Toon" - Tygers of Pan-Tang, Venom, Prefab Sprout and Bryan Ferry/Mark Knopfler

^ "Say 'elo to Jeff and the boys"  :laughing:

Thanks, TH: that's exactly the kind of info that I was hoping to uncover: all new to me where those bands came from.

You also taught me that Newcastle is known as "The Toon". That's where Animals came from as well, but Eric Burdon didn't do his hometown any favours with:


"We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do" 

Quote from: Guybrush on Feb 10, 2025, 05:01 PMWell.. you know how I feel about Canterbury, though to be fair, not everything in or everyone from the Canterbury scene happened in or came from there.

Still, Canterbury was the first thing that came to my brain 🙂

Plus I've been there!

Shame on me for not thinking of The Canterbury Scene.  :-[

I'm glad you've paid it a visit, Guybrush. It's a nice city, especially round the cathedral area iirc.

105 Archbishops can't be wrong!  :laughing:

Good thread. I know I am biased but Birmingham definitely doesn't get the recognition it deserves in this country for its music output. Bristol, Sheffield and Leeds probably deserve more credit too.

Bristol has a long history of Trip Hop and Sheffield was the place of Bassline in the 00s. Things tend to get overlooked if it's not guitar music.

As for genres not being divided into subregions, Birmingham has Bhangra and as posted above, those cities have their things. Obviously Heavy Metal is a Birmingham thing too. I like how it came from the metal factories and one of the key moments was Tony Iommi inquiring his finger working on metal, which changed how he'd play his guitar.

Yes he invented a whole new way of playing, downtuning his guitar so he could play it with the injured finger. Speaking of him and Sabbath, I had a piece written about the title track where I postulated that Ozzy could have been singing about the fear of having to spend his life in the steel mills or coal mines ("What is this that stands before me? Figure in black which points at me") - wish I could find it. It was entirely wrong, of course, but made some good points about young men having little hope of avoiding the city's industrial jobs if they didn't get out. Oh well.

Found it!
V V V

It's come to my notice that the opening lines of "Black Sabbath", though seeming to describe an encounter with the Devil (and confirmed by Geezer Butler) could be, even subconsciously, recalling the horror of the factories in Birmingham.

In the sixties, especially in an industrial town like Birmingham, opportunities for work would have been very limited. Unemployment would be high, and those who did get work could really only look forward to a life on an assembly line, working in the heat and the dark, like ancient blacksmiths at a forge, sweating the day in and boozing the night out after the whistle went to end the work day. Tony Iommi certainly worked in one, which was where he had the famous accident which led to his distinctive guitar playing, itself a benchmark for the slower, down-tuned riffing that would characterise doom metal. Ozzy also worked, among other jobs, in an abattoir, quite fittingly. You have to use your imagination, of course, but it's not hard to see these factories, huge, stern, dark chimneys belching thick black smoke into the air, turning everything grey and black, and spreading a pall of darkness across the city, as a sort of gateway to Hell. If you consider that as a teenager this was all you had to look forward to, this was your future, then the opening lines do make a sort of twisted, scary sense.

"What is this that stands before me?"
asks Ozzy, and yes, it's the dark figure Butler speaks of having seen at the foot of his bed after he had been reading a volume of occult lore, but it could just as easily be the thoughts of a young boy, or a young man, as he stands in front of the huge, forbidding gates of the steel factory, gazing up at the stacks disappearing almost into the low, angry thunderheads hanging overhead.

"Figure in black, which points at me".
That could be the foreman, blackened with soot and ash and grime, wiping his dirty hands on his equally dirty trousers, standing at the factory gate and beckoning the youth forward, like a grinning (meant to be a welcoming, friendly or gruff smile but looking to a terrified teenager like a death's-head grin) demon inviting him to step over the threshold into Hell. Behind him, the dark interior of the factory, lit by occasional spurts of flame as tongues of fire from the forge or the smelter puff out, hissing and screeching like the wails of the condemned souls of the damned.

"Turn round quick, and start to run. Find out I'm the chosen one."
And despite an initial impulse to get the hell away from this awful place, the terrible, numbing, deadly realisation that this is it: this is where you will spend at least your formative years, the place to which you will go every morning and leave every night, only to return the next day. The place you will work, and slave, and probably grow to hate, but which will be your only hope of earning enough money to support yourself and maybe, maybe, if you're very lucky, provide you the means to escape from all this darkness, horror and drudgery.

Your own personal Hell.
Welcome, my son, welcome to the Machine.

The rest of the lyric bears this out, even if it's only my own loose and surely wrong interpretation:
"Big black shape with eyes of fire
Telling people their desire.
Satan sitting there, he's smiling:
Watches those flames get higher and higher."

And of course the final cry "Oh no God! Please help me!"

Even the end section fits:
"Is it it the end my friends?
Satan's coming around the bend.
People running cos they're scared
The people better get and beware!"

All of this, to my (rather twisted, admittedly) mind feeds into the idea of a young lad going or being taken to his first day at the factories, the crushing realisation that there is nothing else out there, that this is all there is, and this is as far as he will go. The factory opens up like a huge black mouth, flecked with flames and gouting smoke, ready to swallow up him, his desires, his dreams and his future.

And look further on into the album; you can make the same (probably wrong) assumptions.
Second track is "The Wizard" (kid wishes a wizard would spirit him away from this bleak, grey reality) then "Behind the Wall of Sleep", which you could imagine being the young man, exhausted after a day's hard work (and probably a night's harder drinking) catching some sleep before the morning dawns. "NIB" does NOT stand for "Nativity in Black", but let's ignore that and go with common urban myth regarding the song, and assume it does. The birth of a dreary, boring life from which there is no escape? Then there's "Evil Woman", which, while a cover, does warn of the dangers of being attracted to the wrong girls, something a youth working in the factories would no doubt be drawn to, while "Sleeping Village" writes its own interpretation and finally "Warning" also needs little analysis.

^That's a very comprehensive review, TH. Was that on MB?

"Big black shape with eyes of fire" kind of reminds me of those big steel furnaces; huge things where I can imagine the workers staring into the fires might start to see all sorts of shapes and images on a daily basis.

I don't think I have heard that song (although I am aware of their next of kin who are doing Jazz Sabbath or something) so I'm going off to listen to it now.

That's only a snippet. Full version can be found in my metal journal here  Highways to Hell Part 1: Nativity in Black (https://scd.community/index.php?msg=40971)

In fact I have heard the track Black Sabbath a few times but not enough times to pop up in my whistling repetoire. Indeed the tritone is heavy, and it's interesting that when the thing finally starts to fire up (excuse the pun) in the last couple of minutes, the guitarist dances all around that D flat devil note, but no longer touches it. The last six notes of that melodic riff are E flat, C, D, B flat, C and D. It's like the guitarist has escaped from the D flat and doesn't intend on going back there.
And then in the last minute the bass makes a final send off with its descending pattern, which gives all sorts of opportunities for rising counterpoint in the other instruments. Like the spreading of almighty wings.

Good job I haven't had a drink tonight otherwise I'd be really spouting absolute nonsense.

A great last couple of minutes  :band: 

That's a really interesting interpretation of a Black Sabbath song, TH: and your version certainly fits the lyrics.

You evoke the miserable prospects of growing up in an industrial town very well; I thought for a minute I was reading again This Sporting Life, by Leeds author David Storey. In that book, the protagonist hopes that the brutal world of professional rugby will be his escape route from the depressing factory life that you describe so well.

Also, in support of Saulaac's analogy about "eyes of fire" and industrial furnaces, may I offer, from Salford-born singer, Ewan McColl, this song:-


In the stinking heat of the iron foundry
My old man was made
Down on his knees in the moulding sand
He wore his trade like a company brand
He was one of the cyclops' smoky band

( Cyclops was the nickname for a furnace, with its one bright burning eye that molten metal poured out of.)

If you come from picturesque Bristol, in the West Country you have a bit of baggage to live down, I suspect. Completely unfair, but I kind of expect Bristol music to be fairly traditional, celebrating farmers or fishermen. However Metaphra blow that notion right out of the water:-


Unlike the other artists in this thread so far, Metaphra have remained pretty much a local band (if band is the right name for one guy+one girl), creating music variously labeled trip-hop/dubstep/electronica/drum&bass. I don't know much about those labels, but this track is well worth a listen imo.
Go, Bristol !