Taking over Birmingham and Black Country art venues and museums for the past month Home of Metal has been educating the nation and beyond about the region’s Heavy Metal heritage. Not content with hanging out in these spaces the Home of Metal Black Country Weekender will be hitting a space indoor and out near you at the beginning of September promising: a mobile cinema, Heavy Metal Bingo, a silent metal disco and much more. We’ve picked a few of our favourite events… CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

Wilderness is a pioneering new festival of music, food, theatre, literary debate and outdoor pursuits, which is set to redefine the festival experience for 2011. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

I suppose it must have liberated my ideas about what a ‘song’ could consist of: it didn’t have to involve singing. There were other examples of music with speech rather than song – the long spoken sections in The Shangri-La’s ‘Leader of the Pack’, Mike Berry’s ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly’, and then a whole slew of spoken country songs such as Wink Martindale’s ‘Deck of Cards’. Around the same time I had become fascinated by the sheer strangeness of Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’, in which he pioneered the idea of ‘sprechstimme’ – speech-song. More recently, of course, there’s the whole vast treasury of hip hop-poetry and music in a more visceral form. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

Festival season has well and truly commenced and Parisa Razaz headed to Wireless; London’s biggest annual live music event, last weekend. There’s no camping and as a result each of the three days has a distinct sound and crowd. Friday was pop, Saturday dance and Sunday rock. Wanting to avoid the drunken teeny boppers on Friday and to not be hung-over for Monday, Parisa went for Saturday… CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

The first thing that strikes me about speaking to the Metal God™ is the warmth of those dulcet Brummie tones. Greeting me with a hearty “Alright, mate”, I am at ease. With Rob Fucking Halford. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >