LOOSIE No. 1 (Or One for the Nomads)

Not that I’m angling for membership, but I’m sure living out of a backpack for four months makes you an eligible nomad. Searching for the illusive silver lining in that deflating realisation, I thought it might be a good opportunity for a musical pilgrimage. Just as the Soulquarians tried to bleed Hendrix’s spirit from the coven down to the skirting boards at Electric Lady studios, so did I harbour the ambitious hope of scraping about in Birmingham for an offcut of brilliance, some form of spiritual link to a stranger’s memory that I could brag about on here. This was against my better judgement mind. I listened to ‘Illmatic’ in New York and failed to catch a contact off the genius. I guess there wasn’t much common ground on my site seeing English trip to break the ice with ‘Illmatic’. But God loves a trier. Eternity is a long stretch without some entertainment. 

You’d think being in Birmingham would enhance the sound of Black Sabbath. But if you can’t tell by my tone allow me to pop your balloon. You go to Lourdes for the holy water miracles; you ride a bus in Brum and get water damaged headphones from a little shit with a super soaker. But I’ll take you back five minutes before the fatal mistake of getting on the 67. You’re immobilised in a stasis of creeping dread and anticipation as the lonesome bell of the self-titled track ‘Black Sabbath’ echoes out across heavy rain. Then suddenly you’re crushed by that monumental Iommi riff as Ozzy howls in frantic despair, snared by a satanic, iron clad gaze. I can say with my tongue well out of my cheek that this track is genuinely chilling. You replay the track in Central, but as you step out of New Street station (and off the set of Star Trek) you come face to face with the Sabbath mural and you’re cut by a sense of inauthenticity, a deafening absence of ‘the doom’. I’m an easily impressionable man. One season of watching saw me turning up to lectures dressed in the piss-visioned undershirt button up combo of Greg House. That is to say all I would have needed was one single transformative instance, a split-second double take as my mind’s eye saw a gothic castle in the Beirut House of Fraser, to buy into the pilgrimage. But, alas, it does not pull my pint.

In truth I get glimpses. The older, gothic buildings in central (ignoring the technicolour vape advertisement on the ground floor), the 5:30 mist crawling over the canals and sliding along wharf alleyways, the Del Toro Hellboy underbelly by Moor Street. Perhaps the most fitting instance is an old church, dressed in moss and dappled with weathered alfalfa, standing stark and stoic against the encroaching Bullring. I was sat in Vietnamese Street Kitchen chewing on a Boon Cha ha Noi (courtesy of Obama) and inspecting said castle, embracing its quiet, unsettling mystery and alluring incongruity, although I almost suspect this to be an exaggeration, the interruption in the gentrified skyline promising secrets that it has never known.

And yes, I do recognise that the Birmingham of Sabbath is an irrecoverable still in time, I’m not an idiot, I’ve seen Peaky Blinders. I like to imagine that maybe they were inspired by escapism rather than reality itself. It speaks to a certain degree of desolation when Satan is your saviour. ‘N.I.B.’ is a transportive, groovy little number where Satan falls deeply in love (Skinner would say ‘Don’t mug yourself’). The heavy funk riff feels like a debauched, footloose dance with the Devil as Geezer Butler (maybe there is a God if you can christen a child that) warps his bass like a Rorschach test. In this ‘Meet Joe Black’ minus the saccharine and patois scenario, Sabbath pave their yellow brick road, a nuanced Satan off to the side watching on like a spare part doing bricky work experience. N.I.B. is an open acronym. Maybe it stands for ‘Not Inspired by Birmingham’.