Abstract
A heavy metal behemoth rises nearly 20 feet above Victoria Square in central Birmingham, UK. It looks down, or would if a faceless and inert six tons of iron could see, at the statue from which this city-centre pedestrian square takes its name: Queen Victoria. Her long reign coincided with the industrialization of Birmingham, the world’s first major industrialized city. ‘Iron: Man’, erected in 1993 in a now postindustrialized city, was originally named ‘Untitled’ by sculptor Antony Gormley. With its oxidized rust-coloured exterior and Tower-of-Pisa tilt, ‘Iron: Man’ is a homage to the devastation of Birmingham’s once thriving heavy metal industry.
[T]he furnaces roar and glow by night and day, and the great steam hammers thunder.
(Burritt, 1868, p. 5)
Iron Man
(Black Sabbath, 1970)
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Discography
Black Sabbath, ‘Black Sabbath’, Black Sabbath (Warner Brothers, WS 1871, 1970)
Black Sabbath, ‘Iron Man’, Black Sabbath (Warner Brothers, WS 1871, 1970)
Black Sabbath: Paranoid, Classic Albums [DVD] (Eagle Rock Entertainment, EREDV675, 2010)
Black Sabbath, ‘War Pigs’, Paranoid (NEMS, NEL 6003, 1976)
Black Sabbath, ‘Wicked World’, Black Sabbath (Warner Brothers, WS 1871, 1970)
British Steel, Classic Albums [DVD] (Eagle Rock Entertainment, EE19002, 2001)
Haiford, ‘Made in Hell,’ Resurrection (Sanctuary, 06076 85200-2, 2000)
Judas Priest, Sad Wings of Destiny (Gull Records, OV/1751, 1976.)
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© 2014 Deena Weinstein
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Weinstein, D. (2014). Birmingham’s Postindustrial Metal. In: Lashua, B., Spracklen, K., Wagg, S. (eds) Sounds and the City. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283115_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283115_3
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