For those about to rock ...

Black Sabbath in 1970 (from left, Geezer Butler, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward)

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Tourists pay homage to Liverpool, home of the Beatles. Throngs of clubbers came to Manchester to buy a piece of music history in the form of a yellow, green or red brick from the demolished Hacienda, the city’s legendary club, which once reverberated with the likes of A Guy Called Gerald, Graeme Park and the Happy Mondays. Yet few make the journey to Birmingham, the birthplace of internationally revered heavy metal bands including Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Napalm Death. This might change with the exhibition Home of Metal, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, a celebration of the city and the surrounding Black Country, home to some of the biggest names in rock.

From heavy metal’s beginnings with the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin in the late 1960s, its appeal was as a sub-culture of alienation. This theme is underlined in the exhibition, which places the music in the context of the region’s industrial decline. Metal’s international reach grew in the 1980s and 1990s and bands such as Iron Maiden came on to the scene. Later the genre benefited from the globalisation of media, particularly the rise of the internet. Yet despite the fact that teenage girls can now buy pre-faded T-shirts emblazoned with metal-inspired slogans, and Ozzy Osbourne is a national treasure courtesy of MTV documenting his dysfunctional family life, heavy metal’s attraction to the legions of fans across the world is that it retains the aura of a subculture.

Home of Metal traces the music back to its Black Country origins. A joyous mixture of leather jackets, social history and stage props, it also has a large range of memorabilia sourced from fans. Listening posts are dotted around the museum, where visitors can hear interviews with Brummies fizzing with nostalgia, describing teenage devotion to bands and the rituals of preparing for gigs.

“Heavy metal has become a globalised phenomenon and we forget where it’s from. Its origins get lost. [Birmingham] can be a tough place and has a bad reputation. It’s seen as an industrial no-man’s-land, grey and drab,” says Johnny Doom, a heavy metal DJ for Kerrang Radio. Yet he believes glory-seeking is anathema to the local character. “Birmingham people are humble. They don’t shout about it. They can be mellow and self-deprecating.” Which is a shame, he reflects.

A clocking-in machine at the entrance signals a key strand of the exhibition – the decline of industry (the region is described as a “labyrinth of heavy metal works and foundries, echoing with the sounds of chainmakers, nailers and pit engines”). In a filmed interview, Rob Halford, lead singer of Judas Priest, reflects on his schooling: “I’d be ... trying to do English literature and the classroom would be shaking because of the machinery.”

Judas Priest guitar badge and poster for a 1982 concert in New York

Chris Coekin, a photographic artist, explores the links between manufacturing and heavy metal in his exhibition Manufactory, a series of staged portraits of industrial-scapes and sound-scapes, on display in neighbouring Wolverhampton Art Gallery, also part of the Home of Metal season. Coekin believes the music replicates the sound of factories. “The noises of factory floor are important, as are the men shouting; they are an integral part of the atmosphere,” he says.

These industrial roots are crystallised in the display in the Birmingham museum, which focuses on the early life of Tony Iommi, guitarist and founder member of Black Sabbath. At the age of 17, as a sheet metal worker, he suffered an accident when a machine sliced off the tips of two fingers on his right hand. The budding musician believed his guitar-playing days were over until a friend introduced him to the music of guitarist Django Reinhardt, who lost the use of two fingers in a fire, inspiring Iommi to give the guitar another go using plastic tips on the ends of his fingers – his “thimbles”, as he calls them. His thundering chords gave such songs as “Black Sabbath”, “N.I.B.”, “Paranoid”, “Iron Man”, “War Pigs”, “Into the Void” and “Children of the Grave” their dark edge.

Jim Simpson, Black Sabbath’s first manager, recalls fondly the genesis of heavy metal. Once the band “found their heaviness, it was a moment of light. The sound seemed revolutionary – it wasn’t a development of something that already existed. It was a quantum leap. Lots of people think it’s a turgid noise but its musicality is complex.” He likens it, perhaps surprisingly, to the 1930s Count Basie jazz orchestra. “A group of men moving together – it sounds simple but it’s incredibly complicated.”

Stereotypes of metal fans as smelly teenage boys drinking snakebite and black (the potent, sickly local cocktail of lager, cider and blackcurrant squash) are misleading, insists Doom. “There are lots of different types of metal fans. There are a lot of young Iron Maiden fans influenced by their dads. But there’s a new generation who want to be different. They want to be fashionable. They want to like Katy Perry and heavy metal. The [constant factor] is that there’s always a new generation who want to play loud music, who are full of angst. It won’t die. People are always going to be reading Edgar Allan Poe and exploring dark fantasy.” He adds, “There’s a lot more to heavy metal than Ozzy Osbourne’s heavy drinking ramblings.”

Heavy metal was a formative influence on artist Mark Titchner, a former Turner Prize nominee. “The imagery and artwork of albums was very influential, particularly the theatricality of Iron Maiden’s airbrushed albums and then early Metallica.” His latest works are on display at the New Art Gallery in Walsall, a third part of the Home of Metal exhibition, and include a video portrait of Nicholas Bullen, founding member of Napalm Death, and a banner carrying the Judas Priest lyric “I’ll choose my fate” taken from the song “You Don’t Have To Be Old To Be Wise”. The artist says the vocals in metal music are “very creative. They treat words as distorted and broken up, changing the sense.”

Despite metal’s complexity, its attraction, he says, is more primal than cerebral. “It’s a way of liberating your voice ... it can feel like riding a horse into battle.”

‘Home of Metal’ runs until September 25; www.homeofmetal.com