Rockers gathered in their masses in Birmingham the weekend of Ozzy Osbourne\u2019s final gig, blinking in the bright sunlight like we\u2019d just emerged from under our rock. I got headbanger\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t 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\u00a0(he even brought the original mic)\u00a0and visited the one-off exhibition \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve known that to be a Brummie, like Ozzy, is to be a punchline.\u00a0His 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 \u2014 or perhaps never knew \u2014 that it was once a cradle of innovation and manufacturing. From the industrial to the digital revolution, we were\u00a0creators.<\/p>\n
\u201cI transformed overnight, adopted the black uniform of my clan, and felt safe for the first time in years.\u201d<\/p>\n
So people hold their noses and sneer as they drive through on their way to somewhere else. Our city\u2019s 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\u2019s self-sabotage often makes it fair game for mockery.<\/p>\n
We Brummies know this, and defend what was once a mighty city even while laughingly apologising. We\u2019ve developed a protective sense of humour and a fierce loyalty to our roots \u2014 just as some of us deny them by concealing our \u201cmost hated<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s second city. I dropped my own singsong inflection for a while (until my sister told me I \u201csounded posh\u201d on the radio). But never Ozzy.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cerratic\u201d behaviour. I lived on various Birmingham council estates being something I later learned the middle classes called \u201cunderclass\u201d. Benefits class. Criminal class. We had a Social Worker and hid from debt collectors. To be working class was an aspiration. The Nineties \u2014 the last good decade \u2014 did offer girls like me the potential of upward mobility, but I was playing a game I didn\u2019t understand with a lousy deck of cards. Without money, access to culture was limited, and I didn\u2019t yet know what I wanted. The furthest into music experimentation I\u2019d got was the soundtrack to Miss Saigon and a copy of Harry Connick Jr\u2019s album\u00a0We 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019t the devil-worshipping, baby-sacrificers we\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n They took me to see Metallica at Milton Keynes Bowl, and over the coach\u2019s 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\u2019s deceptively simple lyrical angst about poverty, mental health, the exploitation of working-class bodies, rebellion against organised religion, and the political class\u2019s terror of self-expression.<\/p>\n It was all oddly familiar. Butler\u2019s 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\u2019s then-still-booming manufacturing industry. He hated it, and promptly joined the RAF which recognised his talents and trained him in engineering.\u00a0While stationed in Cyprus during the \u201cBloody Christmas\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople think I\u2019m insane\/because I am frowning all the time,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n One of the reasons working-class kids want to be singers or footballers is because it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re shouted down, so I kept trying until I succeeded.\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s working-class performers, from poet Bradley Taylor<\/a>\u00a0and artist\u00a0Tat Vision<\/a>\u00a0to comedian\u00a0Jo Enright<\/a>\u00a0(and if you didn\u2019t laugh along with Alison Hammond\u2019s\u00a0chaotic interview<\/a>\u00a0with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, then you will never get us).<\/p>\n When earlier this year, Ozzy, aged 76, was offered the Freedom of Birmingham, he said, \u201cReally, me? But I\u2019ve been in prison!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n