Popular music of Birmingham

Birmingham's culture of popular music first developed in the mid-1950s.^[1] By the early 1960s the city's music scene had emerged as one of the largest and most vibrant in the country; a "seething cauldron of musical activity",^[2] with over 500 bands constantly exchanging members and performing regularly across a well-developed network of venues and promoters.^[3] By 1963 the city's music was also already becoming recognised for what would become its defining characteristic: the refusal of its musicians to conform to any single style or genre.^[4] Birmingham's tradition of combining a highly collaborative culture with an open acceptance of individualism and experimentation dates back as far back as the 18th century,^[5] and musically this has expressed itself in the wide variety of music produced within the city, often by closely related groups of musicians, from the "rampant eclecticism" of the Brum beat era,^[6] to the city's "infamously fragmented" post-punk scene,^[7] to the "astonishing range" of distinctive and radical electronic music produced in the city from the 1980s to the early 21st century.^[8]

This diversity and culture of experimentation has made Birmingham a fertile birthplace of new musical styles, many of which have gone on to have a global influence. During the 1960s the Spencer Davis Group combined influences from folk, jazz, blues and soul and to create a wholly new rhythm and blues sound^[9] that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South",^[10] while The Move laid the way for the distinctive sound of English psychedelia by "putting everything in pop up to that point in one ultra-eclectic sonic blender".^[11] Heavy metal was born in the city in the early 1970s by combining the melodic pop influence of Liverpool, the high volume guitar-based blues sound of London and compositional techniques from Birmingham's own jazz tradition.^[12] Bhangra emerged from the Balsall Heath area in the 1960s and 1970s with the addition of western musical influences to traditional Punjabi music.^[13] The ska revival grew out of the West Midlands uniquely multi-racial musical culture.^[14] Grindcore was born in Sparkbrook from fusing the separate influences of extreme metal and hardcore punk.^[15] Techno's Birmingham sound combined the established sound of Detroit techno with the influence of Birmingham's own industrial music and post-punk culture.^[16]