Rockers gathered in their masses in Birmingham the weekend of Ozzy Osbourne’s final gig, blinking in the bright sunlight like we’d just emerged from under our rock. I got headbanger’s neck from nodding to my fellow metal-heads as I exited New Street Station. My home city was transformed by a sea of Black Sabbath tees, and for once, our ancient subculture was on top.
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.
“I transformed overnight, adopted the black uniform of my clan, and felt safe for the first time in years.”
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 realise 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 favour, 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 realised 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.
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 recognised 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 moralising 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 behaviour.
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 humour 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 honour 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.
