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Vice Blog

BIRMINGHAM - HOME OF METAL PART 2

Last week we told you about our pilgrimage to Birmingham, the official Home of Metal. You already read some interviews with guys from Ozzy's camp. We also ran into Nick Bullen of Napalm Death, who talked to us about grindcore in its amoebic stages.

Vice: You're one of the originators of grindcore are you not?
Nick Bullen: I suppose so yeah.

How did that all come around?
Logically really I suppose, just out of an interest in, eh, trying to express what you were hearing in your head really.

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Was it easy in Birmingham, at the time, to find people of similar interests?
Not really, no. One of the things about liking the more extreme forms of heavy metal and punk was that in Britain at the time they were looked down upon as being less important musically. That is why people who were involved in the early grindcore movement were in very disparate cities across the country but all knew each other, because you would have to write to each other. We were just lucky in Birmingham that three of us had the same idea.

So what were you listening to at the time that you thought wasn't quite the sound you were after?
The more extreme end of punk that developed in the early 80s in Britain, what was originally called hardcore thrash, before that term was taken on by metal. Discharge, etc. Simultaneously we were listening to a lot of the faster hardcore from America: Poison Idea, United Mutation, groups in Canada like The Neos…bands that were being influenced by Discharge in Scandinavia and to an extent some of the earlier Japanese groups. Also, we were simultaneously listening to more extreme developments in metal, I suppose the bigger groups like Metallica, groups like Death and then groups from Europe like Celtic Frost. You had to search far and wide to try and find music like that. We liked industrial music; we also liked post-punk, particularly bands like Killing Joke. How do you think the scene developed over the years, looking at it now?
It seems very healthy, people seem to get very inspired by it. It inspires them to be creative, inspires them to do something they'd like to do which is positive. Obviously it's solidified into a genre to some extent, which means that sometimes the element of experimentalism and more abstract creativity gets lost.

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How do you feel about the exhibition?
It's quite intriguing. I think the project itself, the Home of Metal project, is a very good project, because it combines popular art forms like music with social anthropology and hopefully by involving people it allows them to be as primitive as they want to be. I feel that if you kind of extend different strands of music out to people it's a positive thing, particularly perhaps for Birmingham where I think to some extent the development of its creativity, in terms of the history of music, largely gets overlooked. I think that's one thing about pre-grindcore, in the three or four years leading up to it, we had no interest in London—it never produced anything relevant to us.

Do you still follow the scene?
I follow the music, yeah, yeah.

Is there anything still coming out of Birmingham?
I wouldn't know so much about Birmingham, I'm not a 100%, I guess Anaal Nathrack. You follow any other genres of metal?
Predominantly grindcore because that's my interest in metal really. I've got a little bit of a soft spot for doom metal. I was really interested in St. Vitus when they first appeared back in the 80s. A lot of metal is predicated on musicianship and virtuosity, and I've no interest in that kind of approach. I think it's a little bit restrictive as well because it means that people can't express themselves freely. When I first started I only had one string on my bass.

JONATHAN ROCKWELL

photo by Ben Rayner