Ghost Factory

Much of the fabric of Birmingham’s history is, like the city’s modest river, the oft-culverted Rea, half-hidden or tucked away from sight. Occulted beneath flyovers and underpasses, the city’s past flows sluggishly beneath redundant factories and car parks. Unconvincingly disguised, and with the vaguest hint of rusting metal, it escapes as vapour from drains and manholes. It goes with the territory: this is a city where there is a strong tendency for destroying evidence of the past, of knocking things down only to build them again in rearranged form. As the city’s coat of arms proclaims in its simple motto, it is the Birmingham tradition – ‘Forward!’ The subtext is ‘Don’t Look Back!’ The past is bulldozed. Even so, modern high-rise Birmingham, brash and shiny though it may be, is replete with ghosts of the past, of industry, of once busy factories and workshops. The whole city is a ghost factory.

 These days there is a new-found reverence for some of Birmingham’s more iconic anti-heroes.  Peaky Blinders with its skewed myth-making has afforded the city some retro-gangster glamour, while established city brands like Black Sabbath have become the stuff of legend. Now there is even a Black Sabbath Bridge on Broad Street spanning the canal, where the likenesses of Aston’s own heavy metallists – Geezer, Bill, Ozzy and Tony – are immortalised on a bench (iron, naturally). Who’d have thought that in the halcyon days of my Birmingham Town Hall gig-going youth it would be faux-demonic Black Sabbath who would be chosen as the musical emblem of the city? My money would probably have been on the Moody Blues or Roy Wood.

In Victoria Square, the neoclassical Town Hall is just as I remember it, all pale stone and Corinthian columns, but its immediate surroundings have changed dramatically in recent years. A tram line now passes in front of it that follows a route through the Black Country to Wolverhampton, somewhere that seems exotically distant from this city centre ground zero. Between the town hall and the tram tracks stands Antony Gormley’s Iron:Man, a six-metre-tall leaning metal figure that pays tribute to Birmingham’s erstwhile industry, its original heavy metal heritage.

Head downhill from Victoria Square, past the stainless steel, baking foil roof of New Street station, past the aluminium-disc-clad blobitecture of Selfridges, through the Southside district and the areas that are now marked on maps as Gay Village and Chinatown. Soon you’ll arrive at the former industrial district of Digbeth, which nowadays is probably the closest thing Birmingham has to a Bohemian quarter. This part of the city is actually the oldest quarter, the location of the original Saxon village at a ford on the River Rea, around which the satanic mills of Victorian Birmingham would later cluster.

Digbeth High Street is in a state of flux, one side of it enclosed in chain-link. Gentrification might be too strong a term, but Digbeth is undergoing change: empty factory sites are being cleared to await new development. Tram tracks are being laid down; pavements are being widened and made pedestrian-friendly, flower beds are being set out awaiting planting. The side streets that slope down beneath the railway arches are lined with one-time industrial buildings that have morphed into event spaces – ghost factories stand at every corner. The wall murals that abound have already been here long enough to develop a patina of age. As I wrote in an earlier post, the transformation has already been going on for several years.

Digbeth is the location for Supersonic, an annual festival of experimental music that celebrated its twentieth anniversary this year. Supersonic is by no means a heavy metal festival but the spirit of Black Sabbath permeates like a benign, if mischievous, presence. Performances take place in two neighbouring buildings, one of which served as a warehouse in a previous life. Dark clothing is almost de rigueur, as are Sunn O))) T-shirts. Light-hearted doom is perhaps the oxymoron that best fits an atmosphere that I can only describe as feel-good apocalyptic. The music is loud but the mood is calm; the ethic is kind, inclusive and super-friendly. Perhaps it helps that this is Birmingham. Would it be the same in Manchester or London?

The Sunday night headliners Lankum play a glorious set of drone-laden alt-folk to an ecstatic crowd. Alternating between heart-rending murder ballads, frantic Irish jigs and dark sea shanties, the music veers from gentle to violent, from elegiac to almost frightening. In one of the between-song chats with the audience, guitarist Daragh Lynch mentions that he was delighted to discover that both of Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler’s parent’s were Irish and concludes from this that heavy metal must therefore be an Irish invention. We all laugh. But Birmingham, and especially Digbeth, did once have a sizeable Irish presence. It’s all part of Birmingham’s proud black, white and brown cosmopolitanism. The city was built on metal and people. Iron Man (Black Sabbath); Iron:Man (Antony Gormley) are both worthy tributes. While Birmingham’s iron has rusted to be replaced by stainless steel and aluminium, its people shine on.