IN THE BEGINNING…
They were scum and they knew it. Human debris from the shitty, bomb-cratered streets of a post-war British nowhere named Aston. Or as Ozzy Osbourne would tell you, not a trace of a smile on his melancholy jester’s face: “We were four fucking dummies from Birmingham, what did we know about anything?”
It turned out they knew just enough to change the world. Those crucifixion guitar riffs, nailed in with such heavy relish, framed by storm-gathering bass and head-rattling drums, together making a sound like that of a body being dragged from a river. Those eerie singsong vocals, as dramatic and pitiful as the sound of a swan dying. Full of cobwebbed yearning, of self-harm and picked scabs and the shriek of lost souls. The three of them zombie-walking around the stage in their preposterous crosses and moustaches, while the fourth self-combusted at the back, mouldering in his own poisons, the quad combining to ensure a fifth element: the pockmarked face of the most brutally deformed style of rock ever allowed to push its way, stinking and blood-cowed, among us.
They emerged from the shattered fragments of several local Brummie bands. By the time they were ready to begin rehearsals, a sax player named Alan ‘Aka’ Clarke
