The friends bringing metal music to the masses

David Savage (left) and John Ashby created a space for metal heads to gather

A record shop and a pub are building an underground metal music scene in Bristol.

Black City Records - a metal music record shop in Bristol - is the only store in Bristol nominated for the Love Your High Street Award.

Together with the heavy metal pub The Gryphon down the road, they are forming the "Bristol Metal Quarter", where a community can come together, make friends, and form bands.

David Savage, owner of Black City Records, said: "It's one of those scenes where everyone kind of knows each other to a degree. You get a lot of unity in it and a lot of friendships."

Mr Savage said he is running the "South West's only heavy metal record shop".

He was 14 in 1988, the heyday of heavy metal.

"I had £5 burning a hole in my pocket and this cover art just really took me, it was an Iron Maiden cassette. I bought it on a whim and now here we are," he said.

"I liked the music initially, but the more I got into it, it was the sense of community I enjoyed. I think the metal scene owes a lot to biker gangs from the 60s and it had that same kind of vibe, a familial vibe. You were forming a new family."

In 2017, Mr Savage moved to Bristol and stumbled across the Gryphon, a heavy metal pub run by John Ashby on Colston Street.

"The Gryphon was always one of the driving and pulling reasons to come over to Bristol," Mr Savage said.

'I nearly died'

Initially, Mr Savage worked in finance until he had a heart attack at 45.

"I nearly died," he said. "Then Covid hit and I was furloughed, I was off for nearly a year.

"I went back for one day and said 'I'm not doing this any more'. The dream has always been to open a record shop, since I was a teenager.

"I plundered all of my savings and opened pretty much as soon as shops were allowed to after lockdown, in April 2021."

In August, the shop was nominated for the British Independent Retailers Association's Love Your High Street awards. It was the only Bristol shop to be nominated.

"I think people can see how genuine it is and how sincere it is. I'm not here to make money, I'm here to not have to go to work," Mr Savage said.

"People will hang around and integrate themselves into the life on this street and down the pub and form bands and make friends.

"If you're looking for a friendship we've always got big, open arms."

Mr Savage opened Black City Records down the road from The Gryphon

Mr Ashby, who has been running the Gryphon since 2010, got into metal music after buying a record during his first year at university in Birmingham.

"It was during those early years that I decided that one day I wanted to own a heavy metal pub," Mr Ashby said.

"That 19-year-old's dream started to take shape. The rest is history. I'm now Bristol's only heavy metal pub."

When Mr Savage opened his record shop just down the road from the pub, the two became fast friends.

"The Bristol Metal Quarter came about when Dave opened this record store. I thought there's two of us now, I can call that a quarter. We're 100m away from each other's backs, we've got each other's keys," Mr Ashby said.

'We are heavy metal'

He added that he has noticed a resurgence of popularity of the genre.

"I think it's a lot of nostalgia coming through TV shows and films," he said.

"Things like Stranger Things, it was a big cultural show with the young crowd and they included stuff like Metallica.

"That will be an ear worm for many people who haven't been exposed to heavy metal before, they might end up going down a rabbit hole and discover other things."

He said often, people will come into the pub for their ales and discover they enjoy metal music.

"We are heavy metal, that's what we do," he added.