Birmingham's Town Hall hosts 'Metal in the Midlands,' featuring performances by local bands CHERRYDEAD and Meatdripper. The event celebrates the city's heavy metal heritage and showcases its emerging talent.
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00:00The stage that once funded under the boots of Ozzy and Iommi will welcome a new wave of metal from the very streets that first shaped the genre.
00:09Cherry Red and Meat Dripper will perform at Birmingham Town Hall as part of a BBC Radio WM celebration that aims to do more than honour the past.
00:19It's about giving the next generation a proper platform in a climate where those opportunities are getting rarer.
00:25So what does it mean to these bands to follow in Sabbath's footsteps?
00:31It's the biggest venue that we've played as a band and having big stars like Black Sabbath and playing here on this stage, it feels like a lot to live up to and it's quite exciting for us.
00:49Because you've got some really iconic names, you know what I mean? You've got a lot of pioneering bands, you've got Led Zeppelin, you've got Sabbath, you've got a really big Bowie fan, you've got Bowie as well in the 70s.
00:59Yeah, I think there's a bit of like, this is what the kind of expectation is on this stage.
01:06However, I'm like, we're really excited for it.
01:09Black Sabbath helped define an entire musical genre and did it from the back streets of Aston.
01:15But metal's not just history, it's still shifting, still growing.
01:20Acts like Cherry Red and Meat Dripper aren't copying the past, they're building on it, bringing new styles and new energy to a city that still bears the genre's fingerprints.
01:29With the music economy tightening and venues under pressure, events like this can make all the difference.
01:36So how does their sound connect or clash with what came before?
01:40We're quite inspired by the music scene here as well.
01:44I think there's always been like quite a cool site, garage and metal scene in Birmingham.
01:50And we're massively inspired by like our friends and everyone around us.
01:55So there's always going to be those kind of influences in our sound.
01:59What's powerful about this event isn't just the noise, it's the shift.
02:04This isn't the same old leather clad line-up.
02:06You've got women and non-binary musicians front and centre rewriting what metal looks like in 2025.
02:13And they're doing it on a stage layered with legacy.
02:17For Birmingham, this is more than a nod to nostalgia.
02:20It's a real-time remix of Civic Identity.
02:22So for the musicians involved, how does this fit into the bigger picture of the city's evolving sound?
02:29We inspire people to have that confidence and recognise that there's a safe place in the industry, in the scene.
02:36For more female musicians who are interested in metal, for example, to actually get out there and start making vans and start making music and broaden that kind of area of the scene that is currently lacking a little bit.
02:53So hopefully that's we want the Midlands riddled with female metal warts.