From its birth in the post-psychedelic dystopia of late 60s Birmingham to the sun-baked California deserts and beaches, stoner rock is a scene with many stories to tell.
It begins, as do many tales of heavy music, with Black Sabbath – where the isolation and bleak social surroundings of the Midlands forced the disheartened youth into the arms of a experimental scene rife with musical abandon and liberal drug use. The flower power generation never made it far as Aston but a bastardised translation of their free-thinking ethos did. And so, to match the daily drudgery of life in Birmingham, the music they created echoed with vastly down-tuned guitars and slow, repetitive riffing. Sabbath weren’t alone, as over the Atlantic, Blue Cheer had already been scaring hippies with their feedback marathons and nightmarish covers of Eddie Cochran hits.
