This is the biggest month in the heavy-music history of the city known as the Home of Metal. Back in the ‘70s, pioneering bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were beloved of the city’s people but scorned by its institutions and establishment. It has taken decades of work by groups like the Home of Metal and the Birmingham Music Archive to bring the town to a point at which Sabbath are given freedom of the city and metal celebrated as a distinctive Midlands export.

Seeing that activism come to a head this month feels as intoxicating as a night out with Ozzy in 1971. The streets are packed with metal t-shirts, battle jackets, Sabbath exhibits, murals, and flags. There’s a party atmosphere everywhere and wall-to-wall media coverage. I’ve loved the chance to discuss this on the radio and in the press over the last few days (you’ll find links to a couple on my media page).

Later today, Villa Park will see the most impressive line-up in metal history as the world’s greatest bands descend on Ozzy’s Aston. For the first time since the 1980s, bands like Slayer and Metallica are happy to be support acts. The city’s bars will be packed, thanks to live screenings - excitement is such that Subside will show the whole event, host an afterparty till 6am, then start the screening again on Sunday for anyone who had to work during the event itself. The city will have Black Sabbath burgers served in jet-black bread and at least half a dozen different Black Sabbath cocktails.

As well as being a celebratory endpoint, though, this month is a crux for the city’s music. In celebrating metal’s past, the Villa Park event has little space to spare for rising local talent. The Midlands are currently overflowing with metal bands who’ve made recent breakthroughs or are on the verge of doing so. Top of a very long list are Conjurer, from Rugby, and Heriot, whose lead guitarist and vocalist, Debbie Gough, is from Birmingham itself (hardly a week has gone by recently without me finding fantastic local metal I didn’t know of - last week was Flesh Creep). Audiences feel young and vibrant too – very different in demographics from ten years ago. But the music industry that ought to sustain all this creativity is a mess - hollowed out by unscrupulous record labels, acquisitive streaming services, and rocketing costs that make small music venues into endangered species.

Metal thrives on adversity and we’re surely seeing this current golden age because there’s so much in the world to rage at - so much need for people to come together and let emotions go - but only if this month becomes a model for how the city should move forward - with continued investment in the cultural prestige and economic benefit metal brings the city, will the work of the current crop of bands grow into something unstoppable.

That’s why Metal in the Midlands, on Wednesday, in Birmingham Town Hall, was such a significant event. BBC West Midlands brought together four bands, three of whom are Bummies yet to release their first album, and gave them a major stage and a large, receptive audience. This venue is the impressive Georgian hall where major pieces in the classical canon (by Mendelssohn, Elgar, and Dvorak) were first performed. Sabbath played here early in their career too (1971 and 1972). But most of Birmingham’s heavy bands have never had the chance. And so the Black Sabbath legacy was being honoured by putting young bands back on this venerated stage.

First up was Cherrydead, alt-metallers, who switch between big soaring melodies and groove-laden heaviness, described as “a female-fronted metal band making music to express all the anger and sadness you can’t”. I’d decided I was going to make this a night of black & white photos, to suit the venue and nod to the tradition we were here to celebrate. But Cherrydead are such a colourful band I instantly questioned my choices and let one full-colour image in: