Sounds of Our Town: The Birmingham Edition

This zine arises out of a project run by three researchers - Sarah, Raph and Zel - from Australia. We've been asking the questions: Why should we preserve popular music heritage? What can the music made in a city tell us about its people and histories? What role might a city's popular music past have in strengthening its creative and heritage futures? Back in 2018, we received a small grant from Griffith University to support research into popular music heritage initiatives in places that have experienced industrial decline. We began with a focus on Wollongong, a deindustrialising city in Australia that had made various efforts to document and celebrate its rich music history. One of the key insights we took away from our visits to Wollongong was the importance of passionate, committed individuals in the community who were taking grassroots, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together approaches to telling stories about popular music's past. We also wanted to know what was happening with popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities overseas. In 2019, after receiving a more substantial pot of funding from Griffith, we expanded the scope of our research to include Detroit, USA and Birmingham, UK. Like Wollongong, Birmingham and Detroit drew our interest because they're deindustrialising cities with rich music histories and heritage initiatives that serve to reflect on those histories. We were interested in parallels between these places, but also in what made them unique. Alongside our earlier editions on Wollongong and Detroit, this zine - our final edition, focused on Birmingham - meets our aim to make some of the findings of our project more publicly accessible. In 2019, Zel travelled to Birmingham briefly in April and again in September for a longer period. This second trip coincided with the Home of Metal: Black Sabbath - 50 Years exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Zel spoke to volunteers involved in this project and other individuals in the city active in music heritage initiatives. Sounds of Our Town: The Birmingham Edition captures, thought photographs, some of Zel's time spent in Birmingham, as well as three contributions from our collaborators in the field of popular music heritage studies. Each of these contributions reflects on music, urban identity and culture justice. We invite readers to (re)visit our earlier editions of the Sound of Our Town zine for further context about the relationship between popular music heritage and the idea of cultural justice (The Detroit Edition) and how the Birmingham experience captured here by our contributors - Jez, Sarah and Paul - echoes in other deindustrialising cities (The Wollongong Edition). Taken together, this triptych of zines offers a compelling case for the potential of popular music's past to reinvigorate t the contemporary experience of life in the deindustrialising city.