Cross posted from Brum Blog. Please leave any comments there
This evening I went to a talk at the Council Chamber. This is the room where the city council meets to do business. It looks like this. The talk was titled "A Civic Gospel For The 21st Century" and was given by the historian and broadcaster Tristram Hunt, author of the book Building Jerusalem. He was introduced by the leader of the council, Mike Whitby, with follow on comments from Jerry Blackett of the Chamber of Commerce (who had a very nice tie) and Chris Game of Birmingham University (who has a very impressive beard).
Here's the summary of what the talk was about, taken from this press release:
His lecture will ask whether we can we recreate the civic gospel of Chamberlain's Birmingham, when it was known as the best governed city in the world. How can the business community once again play a strong role in civic affairs? What impact does the city's diversity and changing social make-up have on how it is governed? What new freedoms and powers does local government need to take the city forward?
While the talk was very interesting and raised some important questions about the relevance of Birmingham's Victorian-era regeneration to its current period of major change, that's not what I'm going to write about. What interests me is the talk itself.
I attended as a guest of a friend who works in the local history department of the Library. He gave the impression he could "slip me in", the subtext being I perhaps shouldn't be there. Of course there was no problem with my attending - anyone could have phoned the council and booked a place. They just needed to know it was happening.
The event wasn't very well attended considering the subject matter and the stature of the speaker (he's been on telly!) and I understand it hadn't been publicized very well, if at all. Just a few circular emails to the usual people in the usual departments. The press release from the council appears to have been issued on the 26th, two days ago.
The talk was, like I said, introduced by the leader of the City Council. I'm sure Mike Whitby is a good man. I'm sure he does what he does for sound and moral reasons. But I can't understand him. Sure, I recognise he's speaking a form of English but when I process the words that come out of his mouth I can't deduce any real meaning. Maybe if I spoke politics I'd get it, but I don't. Not many people do. From what little I did comprehend he appeared to be bemoaning the bad reputation councillors have and the negative reporting they get in the press. He alluded repeatedly to a battle that had occurred in the Chamber yesterday as if the audience would immediately know what it was. I had no idea, though I believe it was to do with setting the Council Tax. This is not a personal attack but from my perspective he was representing Local Government and I came away thinking I want nothing to do with Local Government.
Tristram Hunt's talk was, as you'd expect from a young media-savvy academic, very well presented. I wondered if him doing these sorts of events was similar to an up and coming band touring the country before making it big and expect to see more of him, if not in broadcasting then perhaps in politics. He struck me as very Cameron-esque, combining that belief in the virtues of free enterprise and business with an appreciation of the importance of what you could roundly call Society. I didn't necessarily agree with everything he said but I understood it and it made me think.
The follow-on speeches, reacting to Tristram's themes, were also interesting if short. Jerry Blackett came across as quite progressive making the point that local businesses realise that they need more from a city than low business rates - they need a city their workers, particularly their skilled workers, enjoy living in and are starting to realise they need to pay for this. Chris Game, using the position of academic with no vested interests, was very entertaining and I'd like to see him talk again.
The Q&A afterwards was a bit of a farce. A couple of relevant points were made but there was also a lot of single-issue grandstanding which kinda pissed me off. I wonder if this was due to the environment and the presence of Mike Whitby on stage where people felt able to rant about their specialist subject no matter how off-topic it was in the knowledge that Whitby couldn't stop them for fear of being accused of censorship. So there wasn't much of a debate about the issues under discussion, which was a shame as they were interesting issues.
Afterwards we moved to the Round Room of the Art Gallery for refreshments. There were multiple plates of sandwiches and canapes and plenty of wine. We stayed pretty much to the end and barely a dent had been made in the food (despite my best efforts).
So, conclusions then.
Over the last few months as I've been blogging about Birmingham I've become very aware that this sort of thing goes on a lot. There are many talks, conferences and the like which are open to the public and many of them are debating issues which are of crucial importance to the development of the city. I only know about them because I've either been looking or, more often, because I know people who have found themselves in positions where they come across them, usually within "the establishment". Often (though not always) these events constitute the "consultation" part of a project enabling the department or agency involved to tick the consultation box and get their funding. But no-one outside the usual suspects attends so no views or opinions outside of the establishment are heard.
Now, on the flip side to this, the danger of opening yourself up to the views of the masses is that the masses will give their views and once they give their views they expect something to be done about them. You can see this happening with the No. 10 Petition site where people are, rightly or wrongly, expecting their petitions to have some effect. Further to this is the cruel truth that there are a lot of idiots out there and giving them a voice is not always the most productive of actions. For further illustration of this see The Internet, department: Blogging, subsection: Comments. And this is something government at all levels is going to have to deal with. Currently, by accident or design, they're not.
But even if these talks continue to take place behind de-facto closed doors (which isn't such a bad idea if you want them to be controlled and useful) there's no reason why the results of them should stay hidden. To my knowledge this event was not recorded and there was no transcript. If it was there is no facility for that information to be made available to the wider population. Information, let's not forget, that the citizens have paid for. We paid for Tristram to travel here. We paid for the buffet afterwards and the overtime for the staff. And while the minds of those who attended may have been stimulated those who didn't see no direct benefit. I'm not suggesting they should be involved with the debate as it stood, but they should have access to the results of that debate, be it a video or audio recording or a document. Then they can take this and start their own debate elsewhere. This, to me, is the genesis of e-democracy or whatever you want to call it. Not so much having access to the current structures of power (which are not built to deal with it) but having access to the tools to build your own structures which can then react to the establishment on from an informed perspective. Give us the information.
This view of mine comes into sharp focus when you consider our elected leader Mike Whitby and his alien ways. I don't necessarily want him to change but I also I have no desire whatsoever to engage with him on his level. It's occurred to me that if I want to continue writing about the City then at some point I'm going to get dragged into these institutions and negotiate the waves of politics and double-speak and, frankly, bullshit, finding myself eventually drowning in a sea of nonsense wondering what exactly my point was in the first place. I don't want to do that. I appreciate that managing a city is a very complicated thing and requires a specialist language and attitude. I understand that idealism will only take you so far in this arena if you want to get anything done. But I know in my heart of hearts that I'm never going down that road.
But I also have a passion for this city and a desire to understand it, not from a political point of view nor an academic one, but as someone who lives here. In order to do that I need information and I need the powers-that-be to realise that giving me and everyone else that information in a structured but undiluted form is not a bad thing but a very good thing indeed. That way we can have a proper debate, distributed across the city, involving everyone. We don't need to be given a voice - we already have a voice. We just need the knowledge, the information, to give our voices some substance.
If you want to comment on this, please do so here.
Ooh, I do like snow! Christmas I can take or leave. Birthdays are nice but no big deal. But a forecast of heavy snow has me giggling like a kid and, for once, waking up really early so I can catch as much of it as possible. Maybe this is because I lived in Singapore until the age of eight and, reportedly, didn't get on with the heat. Snow was what I wanted and you don't get snow on the equator. You just get the same temperature 365/6 days a year.
Now Birmingham doesn't get a huge amount of snow. Yes, we get snow, but for some reason not in any large quantities. Maybe it all runs out before it reaches the middle of the country or something. Last year we got a light dusting and that was it. The year before there was an inch, maybe. On Wednesday six inches were reported to be due. Even allowing for journalistic integrity and lopping 2/3 off that it's still an impressive amount of snow. Then, the night before, the forecast showed heavy snow starting at 4.00am and continuing all day. I put out the alert on Flickr. Big snow coming. Set your alarms.
Thursday morning came and, despite only getting four hours sleep, I was up like shot at 7.00am. By eight I was in the city centre. Everyone on the commuter train was miserable. I'd forgotten what commuting was like. Poor fuckers, I thought. As luck would have it I immediately bumped into Matt who'd started out at seven, the hardcore bastard. We then proceeded to walk the city, shooting it like it was all new. Which it was.
From Digbeth through the Cathedral past Victoria Square under the library, along the canals, into Brindley Place, across Broad Street, towards the Peace Gardens and down to Smallbrook Queensway. With our cameras hidden under our coats we trudged through the storm, seeking out the shots and taking them. Come midday we were starting to lose it. Our feet were cold, our faces red and our eyes sore. But we'd gotten the goods and went our separate ways.
Matt's put his photos here, though he hasn't processed them all yet. Here's my set (slideshow probably best) which contains 75 photos. 75! It's like shooting fish in a barrel - everywhere you look the city is beautiful and new and the contrast is built in. The Flickr Birmingham folk are adding their photos to this thread and, in theory, using this tag if you want to wade through all of them.
Today it snowed it Birmingham. And it was good.
Okay, you'll have noticed I've been a little quiet these last couple of weeks, especially after all that noise about running a blog for Birmingham. Well, a spanner was thrown into the works of all that, but it was a really nice spanner. Possibly the nicest spanner I've seen for a while as a matter of fact.
As of today, and for the next three months, I'm a professional blogger. Which even this age when every company that matters has people on staff dedicated to blogging still seems a really weird statement, like being a professional tea drinker. So what does Pete being a professional blogger actually mean?
In short it means I'm getting paid a decent amount of money, enough to support my frugal lifestyle anyway, to write a weblog full time.
The title of the blog is Created in Birmingham and its remit is to survey all the creative activity in the city in blog form, from artists to writers to film makers to designers to musicians... all of them and the organisations and agencies that support them.
Which is why I've been kinda quiet of late as I try to figure out exactly what the hell that involves. I think I've got a handle on it though. Best to read the about page to find out more.
The main thing I want to do, though, is to make sure it's an actual weblog and not just a bunch of articles and interviews dumped online. It's quite different to the sort of blogging I've been doing here - I'm talking to people and relating their ideas in my own voice, something I never do on peteashton.com, and the tone is a little more formal - but I'm keen for it to have a narrative and a personality that runs through it as it develops.
In the meanwhile I will, of course, keep running this blog and I'm very keen to keep the Brum Blog going with the aim of eventually spinning it off onto it's own site in the new year. However, while I get CiB off the ground I'm going to be a little distracted, so bear with me.
So, yeah. Professional blogger!
Howabout that?
Okay, time for an update, for reasons that will become apparent.
Before that, though, I should give credit to another inspiration for this Brum Blog thing which didn't really strike me until I'll started - Dirk Deppy's Journalista comics blog. Obviously the subject matter is completely different but I really like the way he structures each day's post into a little magazine that sucks in the links but keeps a sense of personality. (The massive events listing at the end of every single post I'm not so keen on but you can't have everything.) So, credit where due.
Two days in and I've hit a drought - there ain't nothing of interest to report today. This isn't too surprising since I'm doing this completely from the computer and not generating any news myself. The first two posts had the benefit of being able to go back and cherry pick the past. Now I've done that I'm just waiting for something new to come along. Given that my reasons for starting this enterprise was the paucity of online information for Birmingham and given that I'm trawling my usual hunting grounds it was bound to happen.
But all is not lost. While the actual content of those two posts wasn't exactly mind blowing I'm pleased with the methodology used for the Edwards blog roundup, the "photo of the day" was a nice touch and while the Mark McGowan story annoyingly found itself everywhere for a short while I feel I did add a bit of value to the piece by drawing attention to his previous work. Otherwise the second post did feel a bit like newsfilter rather than original blogging and I'm not so happy about that. A bit of news relaying is good but too much and you just become the same as everyone else, regurgitating the same old stuff.
Currently I think there's enough online resources to power a Journalista style post about Birmingham once a week, maybe twice at a push, which has the benefit of allowing time for some deeper research and reflection. Otherwise I'll start regurgitating the Google News feed and nobody wants that.
Actually, a brief word about that feed. While I'm sure it could be fine tuned (and any tips would be welcome) I'm currently monitoring any UK news items that mention Birmingham but don't have the words crime, stabbed, blues, alabama, death, murder, sport or football and even then it's a very depressing read with far too much sport. Footie aside (I just have no interest in it whatsoever so there's no point it clogging up my feed) I've often been perplexed by people's negative attitude towards the city compared to my generally positive outlook (people look at me odd when I say I've walked home through Digbeth at 2am for example), but then I never consume local news and rarely watch or listen to anything other than Radio 4. If your only source of news came from the Birmingham Post and Mail group you'd think you were living in a hell hole, albeit one very keen on football. This is not my city. Still, it has to be parsed.
The football thing is also mildly interesting in that most articles about the sport don't mention its name (thus making it impossible to completely filter out). It's assumed that you know who the players and teams are and why what they do is important. I guess this is reasonable since most of these articles will live in the sports section of the paper but on a jumbled up news feed it's like getting reports from an alien civilization.
(Note to self - add "paedophile" to that blacklist...)
So, in summary, bedroom blogging about Birmingham has its limits, at least until a decent blogosphere develops for the city. That's actually one of my aims for this project - that along with the few others I'm aware of who are thinking along these lines we might encourage more to join us. That would certainly fulfill the Community criteria.
As for me, I'm now thinking of other ways to fill the blog and that's going to involve getting off my arse and out there in the city. Which isn't a problem!
In the mean time, any recommendations of other places to look for regular local information, be they blogs or council stuff or whatever, please leave a comment or email me.
Okay, after those one, two, three posts on blogging about Birmingham it's time to actually start doing something with the idea.
Some notes before hand though.
1) I have no real concrete idea how this is going to work in the long term. This is not a problem. Currently my vision of Birmingham is limited to that which I know. As I start to write about and explore the city this will change and hopefully grow. So no predictions about content.
2) At the same time, no wild expectations on the outset. I don't expect to be doing anything radical to begin with - that will come with time.
3) No trying to set up a group blog. Given the above it'll be hard to lay down commonly agreed rules and guidelines so best not to bother. That's not to say some kind of collaboration might emerge in the long term though. Also, I've become aware of other people planning vaguely similar things. Hopefully we can spur each other on and develop a community that way.
4) There's a rather nice paradox to this whole thing. My motivation for starting this is that there isn't a decent site that tells what's going on in Birmingham. However, to produce one I need to know what's going on in Birmingham. But the reason I want a site like this to exist is because I don't know what's going on in Birmingham. Hello brick wall. Then, assuming I get over that brick wall and find myself knowing exactly what's going on in Birmingham, what is my motivation for continuing the site? (The latter is, of course, silly talk - I'll never know everything and it's always changing, but the former is something of a stumbling block.)
So here's the plan. I'm going to start blogging about Birmingham on this blog. This will initially be in self contained posts comprised of a few links, a bit of commentary, some news and other bits and bobs. Some of this I've been doing already (such as the occasional upcoming gigs posts) but there'll be more of it and it won't just be about music and photography. Okay, initially it's just be music and photography but I intend to expand out from that.
Each post will be suitably flagged (so non-Brummies can ignore it) and normal Pete-blogging will continue alongside. So don't all un-subscribe just yet. This is just an experiment, running for a month or so, to see if this might be viable and to force me to hook into local activity I'm not aware of.
If it is viable then I'll spin it off into its own blog, with all that entails, some time in the new year.
Actually, in a moment of pure coincidence, Diamond Geezer's recent Cultural Update for London is pretty much the sort of thing I was thinking about. (As well as being the best thing he's written for a while.)
It all starts, ooh, some time tomorrow I guess. right now!
I've been thinking a fair bit about city-specific blogging recently. More specifically about why there isn't a good general blog for Birmingham, whether there could be one and whether I could actually do one.
City blogs had something of a mini boom a while back with the expansion of the Gothamist and Metroblogging networks, both originating out of the US. While they have made some inroads into non-US areas it's been a bit hit and miss. Just dumping a structure in place and expecting it to develop doesn't work. Londonist appears to work well but it used to be an independent group blog called The Big Smoker before joining the Gothamist network. On the flip side the Birmingham Metroblog is pretty much a one man show.
Why did the Brum Metblog, relatively speaking, fail? Or more to the point, why didn't I, an established blogger who occasionally writes about Birmingham, join the thing? At the time it was because I didn't think I'd be able to commit to their 3 posts a week requirement but thinking about it, why should I? I have a blog with a healthy readership. It exists within various networks of blogs and in nicely indexed by Google. Any Birmingham content generally finds its audience through these communities. More to the point, Metroblogs are plastered in adverts but writing is voluntary. Someone's making a profit (however small) and it's not the writers. I wouldn't have felt like I had any ownership of the blog and since I have my own blog there wasn't any real incentive.
There's also the point that while I'm sure Gaz, the sole contributor to Metroblogging Birmingham, is a nice guy with his heart in the right place he's not exactly, shall we say, on my wavelength. With something like Flickr this wouldn't be a problem as photos are relatively neutral but blogs are about opinions, view and ideas. Sharing a platform purely on the basis that we live in the same city really isn't enough - there needs to be something more than that.
That's the thing about cities. They tend to be rather large with populations in the millions. While there does exist some sense of community and identity, the in depth perception of a city - its merits, relative safety, efficiency and so on - is a very personal thing. My Birmingham will be different to your Birmingham, even if they overlap a lot. Come to think of it my Birmingham next month will be different from my Birmingham today.
Leaving the perils of group blogging aside for a moment, the next question is whether there's actually enough in Birmingham to merit a dedicated blog. This isn't a stupid question. One of the reasons Londonist works and why there are so many London bloggers compared to Birmingham (1206 vs 60 according to Britblog.com which won't be accurate but it makes the point) is that it's London and in a different league. Birmingham has stuff but does it have enough stuff?
A cursory look at the traditional media outlets for the city wouldn't imply there is. BBC Birmingham is probably the best but other than the occasional article I don't find it particularly inspiring while icBirmingham, covering local rags the Mail and Post, tends to inform you how may people were shot and stabbed and how the football is going. Suffice to say it doesn't represent my Birmingham.
I think there is enough stuff going on in Birmingham but its happening under the radar. That's not to say it's all underground alternative weird stuff by any means. Take Artsfest, the massive, um, arts festival run by the council that's been taking place in the centre of Birmingham every summer for nine years. I'd never heard of it until someone on Birmingham Flickr suggested we photograph it. How could that happen?
Next question - can a blog hope to "fix" this? And is that the right question? Maybe a better question is what can blogs do well?
- The can filter information and pull together things that aren't usually pulled together. People are generally more complex than the genres, niches and other boxes we usually put things in and a blog will reflect that.
- They tend not to be slaves to their perceived audience or advertisers and will have a different system of prioritising subjects based on what the writer finds interesting.
- At their best they fill in the gaps, drawing out things that aren't getting attention elsewhere.
Strange how there seems to be a glut of decent gigs around this time of year. You could put it down to the Xmas CD market but that doesn't quite ring true on the small gigs scene.
Anyway, here are my tips for the next couple of weeks in Birmingham.
Tomorrow, being Friday 3rd, is possibly the best of the bunch - Enablers at the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath. I saw them in March and described them thus:
"Simonelli evoked a cross between William Burroughs and Captain Beefheart in my mind, yet with the craggy intensity of Tom Waites, maybe, and told his stories of, well, I'm not sure exactly as it was all a bit loud, but it was certainly something dirty, decayed and romantic. As the music rose Simonelli transformed into a psychotic preacher and we were no longer in the upstairs of a Midlands pub. We were transported elsewhere to a place of myth, an environment that is universal yet utterly connected that seam of Americana."They are very, very good indeed and I urge you to see them.
Sunday 5th is A Slice of the Pie at the Rainbow in Digbeth, a DIY-style night I've been meaning to check out for a while now. Here's the line-up.
Thursday 9th is Flaming Lips at the NIA and will be the first time I've been to a gig at that monstrosity. The F'Lips will be terrific, I'm sure, and there were still tickets available yesterday.
Sunday 12th is Dufus at the Jug who I saw last May and would like to see again. They're also on a European tour and are worth checking out. Bouncy folk-rock with squirly scratches. (I'm kinda-officially photographing them so I'll be the annoying cunt at the front getting in your way.)
[That Sunday is also the Birmingham Flickrmeet for November should you be a photographer in Birmingham]
Further in the future sees The Autumn Store mini-club night at the Sunflower Lounge on November 16th and the full Jeffrey Lewis Band at the Barfly on November 25th. And probably some more stuff.
Artsfest is this weekend in Birmingham. I'd never noticed it in previous years which was, in retrospect, somewhat foolish of me. Given that the Birmingham Flickrmeets group is officially photographing the event (photos will go here) this year I've naturally been somewhat more attentive and By The Gods there's a lot on! The program, which you can pick up in town, runs to 60-odd pages and it's jammed full of events covering an absurd gamut of mediums, styles and genres. I'll be there for all of it from Bangrafest on Friday night to the post-event Flickrmeet on Sunday evening.
I can't begin to recommend most of it as there's so much to get my head around but there are a few live music events I'd like to point you towards. In Chamberlain Square (the steps outside the Library) you can catch post-rock noisesmiths MotherTrucker at 1pm on Saturday, which should be wonderfully context-warping. A little later at 4pm in the same place I can also recommend The Devil And Casey Jones who are a lot of fun in fucking mental kinda way. Actually most of the bands on that stage should be good. On Sunday in Centenary Square (outside Symphony Hall) I'd urge you to witness The Destroyers at 2.30pm who, quite frankly, kick monstrous ass with their 16-piece gypsy-folk-esque extravaganza.
On Saturday, over in the-area-now-known-as-Eastside, Capsule and 7 Inch Cinema have gotten the keys to the old Curzon Street Station.
Sorry that needs an emphasis.
They've got access to THIS BUILDING:
Which alone is fantastic but they're also putting on loads of interesting stuff inside including the aforementioned Destroyers playing along to "traveling film shows" from the 1900s and Modified Toy Orchestra member Mike In Mono doing what I believe the kids call "a set". Details of Platform 9 are here (and worth printing out as it's not in the booklet.)
Above all, all of the stuff this weekend is free. That's free as in no-strings free. God bless socialism!
Now if you'll excuse me I need to finish work on TTV Contraption 2.0 (shorter, sturdier, more productive). There's a bit of a light-leak in my top-camera slot.
Some gigs and things I'm going to in the near future.
This Thursday is Jeffrey Lewis at the Jug of Ale, Moseley. The last time I saw him his guitar was about to explode and the History Of Communism had reached the Russian Revolution. Support is from The New York Howl and Will Tattersdill, aka Faceometer, who, as it happens, was supporting Lewis when I saw him in May 05 and I'd been wanting to catch him again ever since.
Next weekend, being September 2nd / 3rd, is the Moseley Folk Festival which sounds terribly tweedy but should, I think, be rather awesome. Most of the acts I don't know (not historically being a folk fan) but those I've recently seen (The Destroyers, Circulus) have impressed no end. Tickets are pricey (£38.50 for the weekend) but what the hell.
Way in the distance on November 9th is The Flaming Lips at the NIA. Tickets are £23.00 and are available here but watch out for the 37.5% booking fee, the buggers. Still, it'll be well worth it.
It's also my intention to check out A Slice Of The Pie, an intriguing gig/club/event thing held at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth on the first Sunday of each month. Here be some photos.
In photography land the Birmingham Flickrmeets group has started stretching its wings with a couple of impromptu meets. On Saturday we're doing a night shoot with tripods around the Brindley Place canals and then next Friday afternoon we'll be shooting the Midlands leg of the Tour of Britain cycle race as it ends in Birmingham.
The big one, however, is Artsfest, a weekend of free arts events in central Birmingham on September 8th-10th where the Flickrmeet group have been invited by the organisers to documents the event with press passes and everything. Which is, of course, fucking cool. The photos will be in this group after the event.
And that's about it for now.
Brief notes on the acts I saw at Supersonic, the music festival organised by Capsule at the Custard Factory in Birmingham on Saturday 22nd July 2006.
Una Corda - Very good set from the local post-rock boys (disclaimer - I live with one of them). They're always good value but the size of the stage and the sound, not to mention their obvious pleasure at opening Supersonic, really brought out their best. Good crowd reaction too.
Hanne Hukkelburg - A complete switch of gear with this eclectic Norwegian band (instruments included saxophone, flute, accordion, violin and a bicycle. Yes, a mic-ed up bike) fronted by a diminutive singer with a beautiful voice and powerful presence. I liked a lot, especially the divine cover of the Pixies "Break My Bones". Lovely.
Circulus - "Medieval Neo Acid Psych Folk" said Capsule and that'll do as a description. I only caught the end of the set but it was hugely enjoyable with an old-worlde hippy-nerd vibe and very danceable. I need to see them again
Michael Gira - Think Johnny Cash in a really fucking bad mood. Okay, that's a superficial description. Solo acoustic from the singer of Swans, one of the more aggressively negative industrial rock bands. This set was more subdued but still relentlessly dark and quite hypnotic. I was a little scared.
Modified Toy Orchestra - Previously experienced in November this was one of the acts I was most keen to see and they didn't disappoint. On reflection the performance is as important as the music itself but it's all tremendous fun with five guys in spiv-suits making strange noises with plastic toys they've fucked about with.
Broadcast - The legendary Birmingham band who epitomize that late 90's era of retro-electronica experimental bands that Brum produced and who I'd never seen before, something I was determined to rectify. I'm a something of a loss to describe them but the sound they made was great, creating strange noises with great control, while singer Trish Keenan exuded indie-goddess power and attitude. I was rapt.
Isis were the post-rock / metal band I was keen to see on recommendation and they didn't disappoint, giving me that anger and raw energy I love live (but can't be bothered with on record - go figure). They were evil, they were loud, they were absurd, they were intelligent. For half an hour or so I was in love.
Zombi - I only caught a bit of their set but liked what I saw. Initial impressions were 70's prog keyboards with drums, but it was more than that. The music was kinda techno-ish but the live drums really brought it all out in a kinda Math-rock way, maybe.
Rother & Moebius were the sort of act Supersonic was built for - two 70s electronica musicians who are legendary to the select group who filled the Theatre space. They were on about midnight and I was feeling a little tired so I lay down at the front and let their beautiful music wash over me while heavy metal raged outside. For a moment the ICA was in Birmingham and it was a good thing.
Shy Child - Another drums and keyboard act, this time more happy dancey than Zombi, they were the last act on and I liked them a lot. They're playing the Sunflower lounge on August 24th and I think I might check them out again in a slightly less frazzled state.
As you can see I liked everything I saw and I didn't see half the acts. Supersonic was tremendous and a credit to everyone involved.
On a personal note it was good to meet up with fellow photographer Stu (aka harri b) whose Supersonic shots are here. I got to play with his Through The Viewfinder contraption and think I might be hooked. Anyone got a defunct twin lens reflex box camera they don't want?
There were, as expected, hoards of photographers at the festival, most with their fancypants DSLRs and monster lenses. (Here's the Supersonic Flickr tag in case any of them feel like sharing.) I went with a manual SLR and 3200 speed Ilford film and it was good shooting bands in a very different way as I've gotten bored with gig photos generally. It was especially nice to be able to shoot in the dark at 1/60 f8! I also got a few comments as I stood at the stage changing lenses and winding on the film - "kicking it old school" was my reply. Here's hoping the results, due in a week or so, are worth it.
I also bumped into Suzi, my old chum from Uni days who I thought was in London. Turns out she's now in Nottingham and might be moving back to Brum, which was keen news. She's the theremin player I've mentioned on this blog in the past.
So, a top day and no mistake. I'll be there again next year for sure!
Saturday
Apparently it's the Dragon Boat Festival this weekend. I say apparently as I can't find any specifics online but Jez says it is and Jez knows these things because he is on the "has children" network. Always handy to know someone on that. It takes place on the canals around Brindley Place, starts about 10-ish and goes on until five. Not sure exactly when I'll get there but it should be cool and certainly good for the photographs.
In the evening it's Like Fxck, an intriguing music/arts event put on by the Project: X collective. Best to quote, methinks:
"Throwing off the shackles of traditional concert arrangement, the music will move constantly around three stages, with you, the audience in the middle of it all, inhabiting a totally custom designed and fantastical environment. More than simply a succession of unique and talented acts, the music has been carefully chosen and sequenced and then segued seamlessly into a cohesive and progressive whole, to take you on an emotional journey through the course of the event. In discussions spanning over one and a half years, attention has been focused on every aspect of the design and production of the event, and by acting completely independently, and co operating freely and passionately amongst the fifty confirmed participants, the group has been able to put artistic expression and integrity - and the feelings and needs of the audience - ahead of all other considerations."If it all sounds terribly pretentious and worthy I have a pretty good feeling it won't be - it's just describing these sorts of things tends to lead to that. Above all it's something different and thus worth investigating. Takes place at the Epic Skate Park in Moseley from 9pm - 2am. Remember it's designed as a seamless five hour show. Anyone else going?
Sunday
First of all there's the Birmingham Flickrmeet where we'll be walking around the Mailbox area taking photos of things. Since I'm organizing this I'd better attend. Good job it doesn't start until 2pm.
Then in the evening I was thinking of seeing Acoustic Ladyland at the Barfly but it's been rescheduled to Thursday. Probably for the best really. I expect I'll have a fair few JPEGs to sift through.
In the Future
Supersonic, Capsule's annual music festival at the Custard Factory combining avant-guard experimental with dirty metal, is on the weekend of July 21st and 22nd. I'll be going on the Saturday only (assuming I remember to get tickets...) Anyone else be there?
So I popped along to the Sunflower Lounge on Smallbrook Queensway for the inaugural night of Robot vs Dinosaur and it occurred to me that I don't often go to these sort of things, club nights based around a loose theme that don't take place in nightclubs, but this one seemed worth supporting, not least because if it does prove popular they're looking to expand into putting on actual gigs. The music promised to be a load of stuff I liked along with a bunch of things I suspected I'd probably like and proved to be fairly accurate, if quite hard to pin down. These genres of music can quite comfortably sit together but once you bring in any descriptives or examples, such as "electronica", "post-analogue" or "blippy bloopy noise" you start excluding whole chunks. It's probably best described as that weird but nice music you hear when you're sitting in your mate's living room, the guy with the "eclectic" tastes. Or if you are that guy, it's the sort of music you wished they played at clubs rather than going for the most tedious common denominator. Above all the music didn't operate in an exclusive manner. Aficionados could sit and chinstroke while the rest could treat it as interesting wallpaper, which is how it should be.
The living room vibe a fairly accurate description of how the thing felt making the event a much more convivial than is usually the case. I was struck by how a gap was being filled for people who explore the interesting edges of the Birmingham music scene, giving them an actual club in the social sense. I'm quite interested in the establishment of nodal points within wider scenes which serve to filter out the crud (trust me, it's slightly more fascinating than it sounds) and this seemed to serve that purpose well. Any flyers for gigs picked up there would come with an implicit endorsement of quality, for example.
Personally I had some nice chats with Alex, Matt, Chloe and Seb who organised the thing with Ben, who turned out to be in The Hubble Constant and have one of my photos of them on their MySpace page. Some other connections were discovered on my return home which confirmed what I already knew - the Birmingham music scene is as intertwingled as world of bookselling, and in many cases overlaps.
So, a good night (with a fair turnout for a new event on a rainy Wednesday) which I'd recommend for a drink and a chat or some hardcore networking, whichever floats your boat. I took a bunch of photos, ostensibly for Seb to use, and I was fairly happy with a few which you can find here.
[Update: I've added another 10 photos which Seb wanted copies of. Same link]
Seb from Distophia writes to plug Robot vs Dinosaur, a evening of clubby goodness he's involved with.
Hardcore electronix, analogue madness, lap-pop, post-post-rock and clicks & cuts from the likes of: 13&god, add n To (x), aphex twin, arovane, autechre, battles, berg sans nipple, blockhead, boards of canada, the books, broadcast, brokeback, brothomstates, buffalo daughter, capitol K, caustic window, ceephax acid crew, chris clark, cornelius, cylob, daedalus, dntel, fizzarum, the flashbulb, four tet, germlin, holy fuck, hood, kid 606, M83, manitoba, matmos, max tundra, takako minekawa, modified toy orchestra, the most serene republic, mouse on mars, ninja cuts, the notwist, OOO, plone, polysics, polygon window, the postal service, prefuse 73, pulseprogramming, bogdan raczynski, ulrich schnauss, squarepusher, stereolab, tarwater, amon tobin, to rococco rot, tortoise, venetian snares, luke vibert, xiu xiu, susumu yokota... and whatever else we can find on our ipods."
I may well be there, probably in my Monkey vs Robot t-shirt because I'm that fucking obvious.
It's always good, I feel, to have one thing you feel irrationally passionate about on which you can rant and rave without really worrying about whether you're right or in the majority. As long as this thing is of no real importance it acts as a safety valve, allowing you to deal with the important stuff in a level-headed, fair way. At least that's the idea.
Currently I'm getting all irrational on the arse of Birmingham-based Tolkien fanatics. The grandaddy of this insanity is the Moseley Ent, a proposed statue of a tree made of steel to be stuck in the middle of Moseley High Street to celebrate the fact that Tolkien grew up there. Or near there. Or something.
Even allowing for my opinion of the Lord of the Rings novels as appallingly written garbage that spawned a torrent of "high-fantasy" evil (and a rather good trilogy of films, but even so) I can concede that there's a place for some kind of memorial or marker to the man, since he is an internationally known Brummie (even though he worked at Oxford Uni for 34 years, but we won't mention that) and by all accounts not a bad person. But a giant metal tree epitomises the insane blindness of fanaticism that his latter-day followers constantly exhibit in that they can't see what a stunningly stupid idea this is. Not only is it aesthetically horrible, it's a tree made out of metal!
Tolkien had, shall we say, major issues with the effects of industry on the countryside which means he had issues with Birmingham as a general concept since however you swing it Birmingham = Industrial Revolution. The city's coat of arms, while representing "art and industry" in equal measures, has a muscular arm wielding a large hammer protruding from the top above the legend "Forward". It doesn't take too much speculation to realise why young JRR left the place. Birmingham and the Black Country is Isengard. In his eyes we are orcs. Love you too, matey.
But what really really annoys me about the Birmingham Tolkien Idiots is how all this nonsense puts Tolkien-shaped blinkers on these areas, noting local places primarily for how they "inspired" the man. Sarehole Mill is said to be The Shire, except it's not. It's Sarehole Mill. Meanwhile the fact that there are two relatively tall towers in the area is incontrovertible proof that without Tolkien seeing this rare and unusual sight he'd never have come up with the concept of "two towers".
A great artist takes the mundane and the ordinary and makes it fantastic. This tedious celebrating of how Birmingham "inspired" Tolkien pretty much boils down to "Tolkien saw some stuff here and had some ideas, which he later wrote about in Oxford, but we won't mention that, nor that his ideas mainly stemmed from not liking what he saw."
The vast majority of people living in Moseley and the surrounding areas couldn't give an arse about what Tolkien was inspired by 100 years ago because they're part of a vibrant, living community that, frankly, has more going for it than the location of a bit of woodland which caused some bloke to think up Tom Bloody Bombadil.
And finally, what did Tolkien ever actually do for Birmingham? Not that we don't already, but wouldn't it make more sense to celebrate the Quakers, industrialists, artists and thinkers that made the city what it is rather than some bloke who saw some trees and a couple of towers and then fucked off as soon as he was old enough?
But no, we have to have a metal tree, because Tolkien was all about the metal trees.
Yesterday I set up a new Flickr group, Birmingham Graffiti and Street Art, because, y'know, vandalism is cool as long as it's pretty, and in the process put the standard "this is not Alabama" warning on the description. I think Birmingham is fairly unique in that it gets confused with its post-colonial namesake a fair bit, probably because the American Brum is not that large compared to New York or LA while the UK Brum is our nation's second city (no matter what the Mancs say) so given the geo-political weighting of the mother countries they're probably fairly equivalent. Only ours in more important. So there.
Prior to the glorious interconnected digital age in which we live residents of the two Brums rarely gave each other a second thought, but with advent of regionally-defined online social environments a spate of clumsy confusion arose with people offering their junk on Freecycle to folk on the other side of the Atlantic and getting all mixed up on Flickr. Hence the warning, which won't do any good because no-one reads warnings, but at least it's there.
Only... seeing it there a day later it occurred to me that I haven't seen a Birmingham Category Error for a while now. It could be I'm just not hanging in the places where Alabamians hang (though I am fairly active on the Brum Flickr groups - a Spring meet is being planned if you're interested) or maybe the fact that not only are they not the only Brum but that we're the more important one has seeped into their collective consciousness? On the whole the Birmingham bits of the net haven't been appended with "UK" so maybe this nightmare of rather insignificant proportions is over? Could this be an early indicator of the collapse of the cultural hegemony of the USA? We shall see...
Don't worry, I'm not going to keep posting these every week. Just until, well, can't say yet.
Anyway, should you be looking to stand in a darkened room and listen to music that is not crap in the city of Birmingham this weekend, here's what I'd recommend.
Friday, I'd go for The Motive at the Sunflower Lounge on Smallbrook Queensway for some jangly rock.
Saturday is Johnny Foreigner, KateGoes and Devil and Casey Jones at the Jug of Ale, Moseley. KateGoes is Kate Thompson's band who I enjoyed a lot in December at their first gig. Devil and Casey Jones are on my "to check out" list of bands I need to check out and Johnny Foreigner seems intriguing.
Sunday, there's an all-dayer at the Custard Factory orgainised by local zinesters Salvo It starts at 4.30pm, costs £4 (£3 with this flyer) and features nine bands. I hear rumour there's a BBQ as well.
Monday sees Bearsuit finally playing in Birmingham at the Flapper. I've been wanting to see Bearsuit live for ages now so this is something of a no brainer. £5, 8pm.
I may go to all of these, I may go to none of them, but I hope to take in a couple. Maybe I'll see you there?
Update: Definitely going to the Jug on Saturday.
Trivial Update: This was the 2,000th post I've written on this blog since June 2000. I just thought it worth mentioning.
Apologies for the short notice. I meant to inform of these earlier and forgot, but there are some rather keen gigs happening in Birmingham this weekend. At least I'll be attending them so if you like what I like you'll probably like them.
Friday my chums An Untitled Musical Project are playing at the Flapper along with Kid Captain and Sabotage Left. From what I know of the latter two it should be a nice shouty punky indie night. Kicks off at 8.30, £4.00 in (£3.00 if you print off the flyer.)
Then Saturday is fucking packed. First up is the free, as in FREE, gig at the Barfly Sanctury Club, part of the Gigbeth festival from 2pm to 9pm. The lineup is Misty's Big Adventure, Distophia, The Big Bang, Envy & Other Sins, The High Society and The Twang. Of these I can highly recommend Misty's, Distophia and The Twang. The others I intend to find out about on the day but "eclectic mix of local talent" would be a good tagline.
Then, if you fancy a quick dart up to the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath you can catch some post-rock action in the form of Enablers, Una Corda and Mills & Boon. The 'Corda are expected to be on about nine-ish and Enablers are, by all accounts, very good indeed. This one is £6.00 in and is a DIY-type event organised by Miss Lisa should you be the sort of person who likes to support DIY events.
See you there?
Third in an ongoing harvest of Birmingham-ish based musicians found on MySpace. If you want to be on this list then friend me.
The Big Bang do a stomping, throbbing rock thing with echos of 80s Matchbox. Apparently they're really good live.
Deluka are very interesting. Couldn't put my finger on them until the words "New York Punk" filtered through my brain, but even that's not quite right. Hmmmm... (ta)
The Nameless In House Jam Band. They jam. No two performances ever the same. Have the audacity to put a really long jam session on their MySpace page. Respect is due.
Destroy Cowboy - interesting shoegazer-type stuff with an experimental edge. Need to see live to be sure.
Thee Moths - this seems to be close to the Avrocar / Magnetophone style but with a hefty lump of guitar/folk thrown in. Very slow and atmospheric and quite beautiful. Hmm...
Chrissy Van Dyke - powerful female singer-songerwriter stuff at an intriguingly high standards. One to check out methinks.
Robin - more of the singer-songwriter stuff. Not quite sure about this one - some good moments...
Perception - grinding dirty grunge rock stuff.
I really fucking loved living in London. From 2000 to 2003 I made my home there, gradually moving from Finchley in zone 3 via Mile End in zone 2 to a flat near Waterloo Station in zone 1. I remember once when Jez was down from Brum for some work thing and we met up for a drink. At the time I'd split up with my fiancee, was taking anti-depressants, would be shortly signed off work for stress and was drinking a fair amount and Jez asked something along the lines of "do you think it might be London that's the cause of all this?" The thought had never occurred to me. How could this be London's fault? This city is great!
And three years later I still stand by that. Whatever the many causes of my woes London wasn't one of them. Living in London, especially living right in the centre of London, is brilliant because you can walk everywhere. Bankside was on my doorstep, Soho a 20 minutes walk over the river and the City half an hour away. Because you're walking you can stick to the back streets and avoid the crowds and walking is the only way to see London properly. And when you start seeing it properly you start to appreciate the stupendous history of this place. London, frankly, rocks.
The thing is, while I still have a great fondness for London I'm 100% a Brummie these days. This is how my brain works. When I move somewhere new I pretty quickly become a native, probably because I don't have a "home town" like most people. I'm not really "from" anywhere so wherever I happen to be, that's where I'm from. It's all very Paul Young. Birmingham is where my passions lie at the moment. I've adjusted to the pace and the character of the city and gotten interested in the history and current culture of the place. Birmingham, too, is brilliant and I fucking love living here. The scale of the place, especially when you bring in the Black Country and Solihull, is massive yet it feels small and cozy (thanks in part to the disproportionally tiny city centre) and while it has a lot to be proud of in it's relatively short history the people are modest and self-depreciating, in a good way. It's a top place to live. And I know that if I ever moved to Manchester or Liverpool I'd initially be skeptical but after a year or so I'd be shouting from the rooftops about how wonderful it all is. I'm just like that.
I started writing about the weekend and this came out instead. It doesn't go anywhere and it's not about the weekend but what the hell. I'll see if I can write about the weekend tomorrow...
Like pretty much anything, the major stumbling block for the Outer Circle Book project is knowing how to actually start the damn thing. Having talked to my local history contacts (Hi Andy! Hi Marv!) it's certainly viable, interesting and potentially important but where to begin?
(This post is more to structure my thoughts than ask for advice, but comments are still very welcome.)
The main issue seems to be that I don't know what I'm going to have at the end of this. This is also the main driving force for doing the project - to see if something interesting can be revealed from an utterly tedious and soul-rotting bus journey. Looking at the map and staring out of the top deck window it doesn't look at all hopeful with long stretches of suburbia punctuated by bits that might only be interesting because of the drab context. And I don't want to just concentrate on the obvious stuff like the Cadbury Factory or Sarehole Mill. Neither do I want to be stuck on the main commercial centres and high streets. Yes, these sorts of things will come into it but it seems like a cop out. I'd rather investigate that nondescript looking house that happens to have a fascinating history. But there are thousands of non-descript houses. How do I find them? And so on...
Something in my character tells me that, when faced with something as daunting as this, the best thing to do is start at the beginning and work through it one step at a time. In this case that would involve visiting and recording every building and landmark on the route like some kind of doomsday book. This in itself would be an interesting thing to do and would give me a solid foundation of what's actually there to work on, but it's also an absurdly large task. We're talking 25-27 miles (estimates vary) and I have no idea how many houses that involves, let along other things like interesting letterboxes and signposts. Can I do this in 6 months? Is it worth spending 6 months doing this? Is doing this really some kind of displacement activity when I should be in the library finding out the really interesting stuff instead of robotically cataloguing a load of suburban metadata?
I think it is worth doing if only because I'll really get to know the route and will spend time looking at the details. And I think I need to have a good level of familiarity with the route in order to write about it. As I've said, the maps aren't much use for putting things into context because very little is shown on them and I brisk walk down the streets isn't going to tell me much more. When I do come to research the history of these places I'll need to be able to visualise exactly what I'm reading about or at least be able to pull up my notes and photos, especially as there doesn't seem to be a comprehensive contemporary account of the route. (Yet!)
So I'm thinking this is my starting point. Lots of legwork and information sorting (in blog form, naturally). That way patterns can start to emerge and my research can have a little more focus.
I've been thinking about my big project for this year and it's reached the point where I need to get it down before it morphs into something even more stupid and unattainable. So here it is.
I'm going to write a book.
Now, that doesn't mean I'm actually going to publish a book - just that the "book" model seems like the best structure to work with. Chapters, a vague narrative structure, a fair amount of depth, that sort of thing. And if at the end of it someone wants to turn it into a proper book then that'll be a nice bonus.
The book is going to be a travel guide to the Birmingham Outer Circle bus route, which is why it has to be a book because anything smaller will just be interminably dull. The basic format I'm planning on is as follows:
- Travelogue: accounts of visiting sections of the route from a personal perspective. Think Iain Sinclair, but only a little bit. They key here is "personal".
- Photographs: looking more at the quirky details than grand panoramas (partly because there's not much grand on the route).
- History: this is where it turns into something bigger. I intend to research each section of the route and discover how these areas came to be. This will involve going to the central library and diving headlong into the murky world of local history, but I know a couple of people who already swim there so at the very least I'll have a guide.
- Maps: Every good travel book has maps but I'll be looking at interesting ways of using them. An obvious thing will be to GeoTag the photos so they can be mapped around the route. It'd be interesting to do that with the words as well, not just have them reference a map but have that work the other way. There's also the fact that the route is circular without a beginning or end so maybe he book should be too. That kind of stuff (most of which isn't really book-like, but whatever.)
The plan to actually achieve this is fairly simple. The route will be dictated by where the Number 11 bus goes. I'll chop this up into 20 or so manageable sections (the route is 27 miles long) basing each one around a specific landmark, such as Bearwood High Street or Winson Green Prison. I'll then spend a day at each section taking photos and notes, followed by research, followed by a return visit. I'll then write a draft chapter for the blog, fully expecting feedback to fill it out. Then when it's all over I'll do a few trips around the entire route to give it some continuity and structure and edit it all into a "book".
After that, who the hell knows. Maybe it'll get published and I'll be able to retire on the earnings. Maybe I'll just move to onto something else. Whatever happens, it should keep me nice and busy for the next 10 months, and that's the important thing. I've been faffing around too much recently and need some kind of long term thing.
I'll be looking to start this sometime in March when the weather improves and have all the field work done before October when the weather gets shit again.
Wish me luck...
Full credit for the seeds of this project must go to Diamond Geezer, without whom, etc.
Another gathering of West Midlands musical activity noticed on MySpace. As always with this stuff taste is relative and your mileage will vary.
Sabotage Left I nearly saw once and maybe I'll actually see them one day. Nice fast poundy guitar shouty punky stuff going on there.
Long Day Gone do melodic guitar based rock that all sounds very familiar in a road house kinda way.
Pagan are a female fronted (and I wish that wasn't notable but it is, damn it) rock band with edges of metal. I keep thinking they should be heavier but that's probably just the pentagram.
The Culprit are from Stratford but that's close enough and do that harmonising metal thing.
Tobias again do the harmonising metal thing. I think the kids call it Emo, but what do I know.
Photo buck the trend slightly by coming from a more pop-punk angle and I think I can detect interesting things going on there.
The True Believers are kinda odd, with vocals sounding like 80s crooner-pop and a whole gamut of musical styles from electronica to country.
Morning View are of the acoustic songwritery vibe and need some photos taken, something I'll hopefully be able to help with.
H.O.S.T.I.L.E. describe themselves as "Progressive / Death Metal" and have a song called "Urine Love". Like a lot of this kind of thing it doesn't do much for me through the headphones but I'm sure it's enormous fun live.
I might be in an overly critical mood (music can be susceptible to that kind of thing) but not much really leapt out and grabbed me from that bunch. Of course this is all based on their music streaming from MySpace - live performances are bound to be different - so don't read too much into that. What's really becoming apparent is there's a shitload of yer basic rock and metal out there and while I support that it's not really my thing. Where are the Misty's, the Noise Noise Allores, the Magnetophones? Give me some quirk!
Also noted: Miss Lisa is putting on gigs of the post-rock / intelli-metal (I made that one up) variety. Zoot, who put on gigs at the Flapper, have a MySpace presence, as does Arthur of the Catapult Club who does gigs at the Jug and Bar Academy. And here's Capsule for all your Custard Factory needs.
Links to other Brum bands in the comments please, or just friend me.
Finished work early on Thursday and fancied a beer so I went to the Plinth gig, managing to catch all three bands because it started late. Didn't take the camera and wasn't in a reviewing kinda mind but, as usual, it got me thinking, mainly because the other two bands were, once again, utterly, irreconcilably different to Plinth. This happens a lot at the Thursday local band nights at Bar Academy and the Flapper with each band essentially playing their own gig pretty much in isolation to the other two. The audiences don't mix and the evening doesn't really have flow to it. And, as was pointed out to me by one band member, it would be nice for them to play with other bands who were on their wavelength rather than this often bizarre mishmash of styles. Don't get me wrong, I love a good mishmash, but not when it's as painful as on Thursday.
The first idea was getting three bands together and presenting them to one of the existing promoters. The next idea, naturally, was just putting gigs on ourselves. In the last few months I've started getting a pretty good grip on the Birmingham scene but what I've also discovered is that of the people I know we've got quite a network going on here that if tapped could produce some interesting stuff. And at the end of the day, it can't be that hard to put on a gig, can it? Sure, if I were to do it all on my own then, yes, it'd be a nightmare, but if we go in mob-handed?
The main driving force for doing this isn't just to provide a space for bands to play because there's a pretty good infrastructure already in place for that. The point is to do it in a way that creates something bigger than just going to a venue to see a band play some songs for 45 minutes. Something like the Moff Fest gig I went to in December.
As always, this is just an idea I'm putting out there. It won't necessarily come to anything but I have a feeling it probably should...
I'm getting "friended" by a fair number of Birmingham-based bands on MySpace at the moment which is super-keen though I'm having trouble keeping track of them all in my head, so here's a brief summary.
Morning View - Acoustic four piece. Playing a gig at the Actress and Bishop on Sunday Feb 5th and have asked me to take some photos of them.
The Arm - starts out sounding like standard post-rock noodling metal but then a vocorder-thingy comes into play and I grin.
Captain Dangerous - This all sounds very familiar and I'll kick myself when I put my finger on it, possibly tapping the same vein as The Rumble Strips, and it's all good stuff. They seem to be touring around the country a fair bit and the next Brum gig isn't until April.
The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank Project - I'm still not sure how much my mileage is varying with this bunch who are playing on that tightrope of comedy rock. I think I'll need to see them live to be sure. On Feb 4th in fact.
The Magnetic Four have a nice chugga chugga to their indie rock thing and appear to play in Brum every month or so.
The Motive made me sit up and take notice with a blatant Stooges homage but they build upon that nicely and I'm still taking notice.
Devil and Casey Jones describe themselves as "That fight that happened between Neil Finn and Big Black. You know, the one refereed by Frank Black" and for that I'm prepared to like them a lot. As a bonus I also like their music and should be going to see them at the Flapper on Saturday.
Betty and The Id are just downright intriguing. The music is of the dreamy 60's psychedelic variety but I suspect their live show could be something special. They possibly slip into the Misty's spectrum of the local scene and that's a good thing.
And that's all in the last fortnight. Blimey.
Anyone got a clue what's going on here?
It's a perfectly ordinary street lamp on a residential street in Bournville with no access without ladders and stuff but on the top is this orange light (which I've not seen lit) not dissimilar to a flashing roadworks warning light. Um...
All week I'd been hearing reports of snow in parts of the country surrounding Birmingham but nothing here and it was getting rather annoying. Birmingham traditionally gets the mediocre weather, rather like merging a bunch of lovely paintings together to produce a grey splodge, and it seemed like again we'd miss on the beauty.
But lo! Lunchtime today I noticed the clouds had a yellow tinge to them followed by a brief flutter, which turned into a heavy flutter, which turned into a storm. So, as per usual, it's out with the camera and on with the coat...
The storm stopped and the settled snow started retreating and I thought my plan to go out again with the camera at night would be ruined, but come dusk the snow picked up again, and it's still going. It's my intention to pop out about midnight and see what's what...
The Birmingham Outer Circle is a thing of myth and legend, with the number 11 bus doing a full loop around our fair city in a little over two hours. Songs have been written about it (well, a song, and you can't make out the lyrics that well) and folk often do the entire round trip for a wheeze.
However, if should be noted that using the number 11 bus to go to and from work, when you live on one side of the city and work on the other, is a fucking pain in the arse, a brain melting slug of a journey that will rob you of any spirit you may have had when you got up at some ungodly hour to catch it.
That said, if you're able to keep your wits about you there are some intriguing kitch-worthy sights in the Yardly area. Once I've got over my 11 aversion I'll have to return with a camera.
I have a rule, well it's more a guideline than a rule as I can't always enforce it, but I always endeavor not to move house during the warmer months of the year. The reasoning is that wherever you're moving to will always seem much nicer over the summer and it's only in the autumn and winter that you'll see it for what it really is. This guideline was instigated in 1998 when my then house-chum James and I moved into a flat in Balsall Heath sometime around July. The clement weather meant we didn't really comprehend the implications of the following features of the flat:
1. Being above a butcher's shop. A butcher's shop is essentially a big fridge.
2. Having a flat roof, ie no insulation.
3. Metal window frames that don't produce a tight seal. Kinda drafty.
4. Freshly painted walls may look nice when you move it, but what are they hiding?
5. No central heating. Warmth provided by small individual electric storage heaters plugged into the mains. Also, an electric meter that is topped up using a prepaid card scheme.
By late November we were living in a very cold and drafty box. Attempts to stop the drafts by sealing the windows in plastic sheeting encouraged mould on every external wall (meaning most of them). We left after 6 months and didn't even dispute not getting our deposit back.
It was a bit of a shame because, other than the psychotic neighbour and dodgy landlord, it wasn't a bad place to live. Balsall Health is one of the predominantly Asian inner city areas of Birmingham which some might call a slum, but I kinda liked it because it was quite a tight community. The Pakistani shops sold pretty much everything you needed plus stuff you'd never heard of before and there was always some kind of activity going on, but it was never particularly threatening. But the flat was shit so we got the hell out and moved to Bearwood where the landlord was impressed by my casing of the joint, checking external walls for evidence of damp and inspecting all the windows for drafts. Fool me once...
Anyway, this autobiographical ramble is just me trying to justify a hugely vacuous post. Autumn is here. You'll remember I moved into The Bournville Flat (that is it's name for it is legend) back in May which meant I've gotten used to it during the long, hot summer months. And boy was it hot in my attic room, but Bournville was lovely - lots of bike rides, sitting on the green drinking tea and incredible sunrises. Bucolic would be a word. And now it's autumn - the sky is grey, the temperature is low and it's all quite different.
Unlike every other place I've lived I knew what I was getting into when I moved here since I'd known this flat for years. I knew, for example, that the kitchen gets very cold while the rest of the flat stays toasty thanks to the building-wide, included-in-the-rent central heating. So when I'm sitting in the kitchen with my hoodie up covering my pre-winter-shaved head* huddling by the cooker to warm myself on the pan of boiling pasta I'm cool with that. It's not a problem. There are countless plus points to outweigh the chill, such as being able to keep vegetables out of the fridge for a start. See? Positive. All good.
But the shift is seasons does have an effect. It turns the area into somewhere else and it always catches me slightly unawares. This new Bournville is subtly different to the one I'd gotten used to. No more sitting on the steps in the morning sun with a cup of tea, that kind of thing.
The most disturbing aspect of this shift is it reminds me more of Kingstanding that anything else since I spent the last two winters there and the weather is similar. Soon enough I'll adjust and the peculiarities of Bournville in this season will become normal to me, but right now my mind is looking for comparisons to build coping strategies and Kingstanding is all it can find.
I'm sure it'll all be okay come November. I just need to learn to nest indoors a bit more.
* Like a small mammal I tend to grow my hair out over the winter to keep the warmth in, but I don't like it to get too long. So every when the cold first hits I make sure I have a good shave. That way when the first frosts come I'm well covered but not too covered.
The Cadbury factory is testing a new claxon today. It sounds like an orchestral brass section, quite rich and warm. It's bloody loud though. Hopefully it won't be used too often, though I suspect I'll get used to it if it does. There was a nice warning posted in the newsagents which caught my eye, which was good of them. If I hadn't read it I might have thought the CBSO was warming up on the green...
Brenda, who comments on this blog, is looking to sell or rent her flat in Moseley. it's a 2 bed for £400pcm or if you're flush £130k outright. Here's a map. I don't know what it's like and have no idea what Brenda would be like as a landlady, but I do know renting a flat in Moseley for that sort of money is a pretty rare thing. So spread the word. Email brenda[at]b13.co.uk for info.
Anyone else need an announcement? If you comment here, this blog is yours for the next few days. Let us know what you're up to offline. Email me or leave a comment.
We just had the maddest sky here in Bournville tonight.
It's been humid and hot all day today, not in a terribly oppressive way, just like the weather wants you to be aware of it in a gentle prodding kind of manner. A thunderstorm kicked off about 6pm but must have been really localised because everything on ground level was glowing in the evening sun. Naturally there was a rainbow, a double one that what completely visible from end to end. We thought that was the highlight but we were wrong.
The storm clouds moved off to the south but really slowly given that we've had no wind all day. To the north of the flat the sun was setting into blue skies, blasting its dying beams directly into the dark clouds which reflected them onto the brickwork of Bournville. It was quite magical.
And then in the last few minutes of daylight this happened.
Wowzers...
It's not often you can be pretty much certain you're responsible for something neat happening. You might have been involved but the complexity of things in general means it's hard to take the credit. That said, I'm pretty sure this is my doing. It's not a particularly major thing, but it's kinda neat. So please excuse the ego. I don't mean to boast, honest. It's more a celebration really, a pumping fist, if you will.
Last year you may remember I posted up a request for a searchable small gigs database feed site thingy, a listing of gigs happening in my local area that I could filter to my needs and get RSS feeds out of. Something more useful that the kludgy sites already in existence. The general consensus was that, while a keen idea, building, maintaining and updating such a service would be far too much like hard work and nothing really came of it.
Birmingham has a pretty vibrant music scene but it's not particularly well structured. This is probably a good thing as it allows for a lot of variety and spontaneity, but it's a bugger to keep track of unless you're in the middle of it. In the last 18 months I've been keeping tabs and getting to know the lay of the land, but it's still quite bewildering.
At some point I became aware of Upcoming.org, a pretty bare-bones site created by Waxy Baio that lets you list events you're planning to attend. These are then merged with other people's listings creating a snapshot of things happening in your area, or "metro". It's pretty popular in the States, as you'd image, and metros like New York give a good idea of how it's supposed to work. I liked the idea but was disappointed to see the Birmingham metro was completely barren, rather like the page for Bury St. Edmunds, in fact. No listings at all, ever. Then it occured to me. This is the listing service I was thinking about. It's already been built and no-one's using it. It's there for the taking. So I grabbed a couple of forthcoming events listings and stuck them in. Bingo, a searchable small gigs listing that produced RSS feeds.
Next I sent a message to the Misty's Big Adventure mailing list ostensibly asking people if they could recommend any gigs on the list but with the secret agenda of spreading the word without hyping it. A few more hints were dropped here and there and before you knew it the feed was having the gigs added to it here and there, sometimes in bulk by someone with the same altruistic motives as myself, sometimes by people who were actually planning to attend.
And now, within a few months, the Birmingham metro listing looks like this. Neat, huh?
Here's some cool things you can do:
- Forthcoming gigs organised by Zoot - simply done by adding the Zoot tag to each entry.
- Gigs at Bar Academy
- Gigs where Plinth are playing
- Gigs I'm planning to attend
- and much much more
And almost all of those things produce RSS feeds, which means you can get then in your feed readers (eg Bloglines) or syndicate them onto your site, as I have on the main page, right hand column, under the photos. It would be really easy to build a page representing Birmingham based on these feeds and I might well do that at some point.
Currently I spend a few minutes every week or so updating the Zoot and Catapult Club listings but with any luck I won't have to bother even with that as the community takes over.
Just think, a few months ago this was a barren wasteland and now it's a sprouting grass-roots, non-commercial, user-built community thingy. And I kick started it.
See if you can do the same for your "metro", why don't you.
Another bike ride along the canal towpaths. Along with the route along the River Rea into town this makes up most of my cycling right now, both for recreation (ie getting off the frigging computer and out of the house) and just getting places.
Canal-based photos now have their own Flickr set which will be added to. Trees, water and rust. Lovely!
Today I discovered the Brandwood Tunnel which is very cold and creepy, as canal tunnel entrances often are.
Brrr...
Looking things up, I've discovered that Stratford-on-Avon is only 25 miles away by canal. That's do-able. Andy G reckons he'll be getting a bike soon. I know Matt and Marv have bikes. And Jez. And Lauren. Maybe we should have an outing. Fifty mile round trip with a break for lunch anyone?
A storm had been threatening all day and when it hit there was a massive thunderclap, like the sky had been torn apart. A few minutes later chum Matt phoned to ask if I'd just had a tornado tear through Bournville. Nah, I laughed back, just a thunderstorm. Stop exagerating! Um, they had in Moseley. He was walking through the streets as he talked, trees had been uprooted, houses smashed up, debris everywhere and, oh, Jez's house had been hit. Broken windows. Not secure. And they're on holiday.
I left a message for Jez and Nat, jumped on the bike (remembering to take my camera of course) and sped over there with a sense of chidlish glee. This was going to be cool. As I entered Moseley there was no sign of damage. Turning down Forest Road there was a bit of a traffic jam and then at the top of Church Road a makeshift police barrier blocking traffic. Uh oh. I passed through this and was suddenly confronted by the kind of eerie calm that happens after mild devastation. Trees in the street, leaves and tiles everywhere and people milling around looking dazed. Though not too dazed to take photos. Although that might just been a coping mechanism. When confronted by something really odd, take photos of it. I know that's what I did.
After a bit I knocked on Matt's door. He'd been at home when it happened and said everything went dark and he saw stuff flying around that he thought were leaves but which turned out to be tiles. Being American he has an instinct for dealing with this kind of thing so he shut all the doors and stood in the hallway while the tornado hit. I, of course, would have opened the windows for a better view so it's probably a good thing I wasn't there. He'd only had one window broken by a flying tile. He was very lucky. In fact Jez was very lucky. A house two doors down (which I inexplicably didn't photograph) had its whole roof torn off.
I finally got through to Nat and got hold of their keys from a neighbour. They had 17 broken windows, about six of them completely obliterated. The entire ground floor was covered in glass including all the kitchen work surfaces. It seems the tiles had been shot through the windows like cannonballs. While it's obviously not nice to be away when your house is attacked by nature it's a good job they weren't at home. I have this image of the kids playing in the living room as the tiles and glass hit them at 100mph and it's not a nice picture.
Since Matt and I just had to keep and eye on the place we figured out a rota and I set to work clearing up the glass because what else can you do? The clearing thing seemed to be a common reaction as everyone in the street automatically started sweeping up the debris. From kids to pensioners, everyone was picking up stuff and creating large tidy piles of branches, wood and tiles.
Police response was very rapid, but then there is a station about 100 yards away. Fire engines were also there pretty sharpish as were the council tree surgeons with their tree-shredding machines. In fact most of the debris and blockages were cleared by the time I went home at eight.
As news spread via the word-of-mouth vine it emerged that the tornado had run from Kings Heath down to Small Heath so this was only a fraction. I texted ex-housemate Sam, who works in Small Heath, and she replied thus: "We were driving in it! Nightmare, bins and trees flying, buildings down, cars with trees in!" And there was I in Bournville getting all excited about the guttering overflowing...
In all a very odd afternoon. I thought it was going to be cool but it's was just wrong and rather confusing. Of course it wasn't a really bad tornado and I'm sure those from other countries will be scoffing at our over-reaction to a little bit of severe weather, but this kind of shit isn't supposed to happen here. Birmingham weather is notoriously mediocre and boring - it's either raining or it's not raining. A fucking tornado is just utterly discombobulating.
Updates: Matt's posted his tornado report.
This is the house two doors down from Jez that lost its roof
My mouse started to die over the weekend which, given that it was quite an old mouse that prior to my excessive usage had been used in an office-type environment, wasn't too surprising but still rather annoying, so I popped into town to get a replacement. I decided to cycle in and, thanks to the shockingly useful Sustrans online cycle route map, took Route 5 of the National Cycle Network into town. It looked pretty good on the map, following the river Rea through Cannon Hill Park and then nipping through some back streets into the heart of the city.
And it started off so well - I felt I was in the countryside - until I realised it was a Bank Holiday Monday at the start of Half Term. One forgets these things when one doesn't have a proper job. There was a massive "fun" fair in the park slap bang on the cycle path and people having "fun" can be so obstinate. And then, having passed by the flat in Balsall Heath I used to live in circa 1998, I discovered that the Pride festival that had so wonderfully enlivened our regular drinking haunt on Saturday night was still going on with Hurst St closed off and reasonably full of revelers and incredibly loud sound systems. But I refused to get off my bike. This is an official cycle route, dammit, and I will cycle along it.
All that paled into insignificance when confronted by the Bull Ring shopping "experience". I've managed to avoid actually going into it until now but Apple had to put their lovely new boutique in there didn't they. I was puzzling over why young people feel obliged to hang about in shopping centres of all places but then as a teenager I could always be found in the Whitgift centre of Croydon every Saturday afternoon.
And then home again. I can't give an accurate time due to my figuring it out for the first time and excessive pedestrian interference, but it's a certainly a more pleasant journey than the A34 from Perry Barr. Next I'll be trying the canal paths - Dr Andy says there's an interesting feature a few miles south - and I might even remember to take my camera this time.
I've been cycling for a little over six months now and feel somewhat inspired to write about it. Specifically about cycling in North Birmingham. When I bought my first bike last October and started cycling in a city for the first time in fifteen years I was a little cautious, especially in Birmingham which is the UK's motor city. Everyone drives here, doubly so in the more industrial north. There are no real cycle lanes to speak of other than a few token gestures from the council which are of no use to anyone so I'm sharing the roads with cars, lorries and a shocking number of white vans. I figured I was going to more at risk than most so I plastered myself in hi-viz reflective clothing and put my life in their hands. Still, if I did die at least I'd saved a lot of bus fare money.
As it turns out I've had exactly one near miss and that was my fault for dawdling on a roundabout. More to the point, the van that "nearly missed" me merely slowed down and honked at me repeatedly. I wasn't exactly in danger - just being an annoyance. Other than that, nothing. And it's not like I've been avoiding the main roads. It's just main roads up here. Not having anything to compare it to I figured I was just riding sensibly (I used to ride a motorbike and had defensive riding pummeled into me by other bikers) and being very visible.
I was therefore somewhat surprised when I read this post on Honeypears' LJ where Heather reckons that her florescent jacket had made her more of a target in Glasgow, and double so when Jeremy commented that she wears a minimum of reflective clothing when cycling in Oxford. Glasgow I imagine is kinda like Birmingham though I don't know for sure, but Oxford is cycling central. That said, I remembered Jeremy and Damian (another Oxford cyclist) telling me horror stories about biking around there, describing it as some kind of war zone. And cycling in London really is a war zone of mythic proportions. But north Birmingham is nothing like that. I wonder why?
The first theory is that there are quite a number of blokes around here who wear hi-viz jackets. Being an industrial area the hi-viz is pretty much the uniform for someone who has a physical, sometimes dangerous job. When you see a bright yellow jacket it's likely to be on some hard-nut geezer who would twat you if you looked at him funny. And because these chaps tend to live in this area as well as work here, folk treat them with some respect. Not because they're likely to twat them but because they do important jobs like refuse collection and roadworks and there's an awareness here of what that involves. I get treated much better in shops when I'm wearing a hi-viz. I don't think that'd happen in, say, Winchester.
The other theory is that there just aren't any other cyclists around here. I tend to ride very fast and I'm always surprised when I overtake another rider. I can do a ten mile trip and not see another bike. If I'm not the only one locking up at Tescos it's something of a shock. So when cars and trucks see me on the road it's something they don't see everyday so they take extra precautions. In a cycle-heavy city like Oxford all the drivers are used to bikes and have built up prejudices against them, but here they've got nothing to go on. Add this to the notion that I might well be a hard-nut and they keep out of my way, giving me some respect even.
It'll be interesting to see whether this still applies in south Birmingham which is more studenty, less industrial and more libera-middle class, yet still has a lot of cars.
(Having thought about this for ages I was prompted to write it after reading Currybet's piece on buying a bike which while not relevant does have a very funny Kraftwerk joke)
Andy's already written about this but what the hell, it's good blogfodder.
I've been doing a lot of webwork this week and, as such, hadn't left the house other that to stock up with milk and fags at the Co-op, such is the curse of the home worker (vis the title of Dave's blog) so when Andy suggested a movie it seemed like a top idea, even if spending a couple of hours in a dark room isn't necessarily the best way of "getting out". Since I'd been working nights I suggested an early showing, say 11am, and given there are fuck all decent films out at the moment plumped for The Machinist, a dark and disturbing movie about sleep deprivation, guilt and the awfulness of existence staring an incredibly emaciated Christian Bale.
So we buy out tickets and wander into Screen 4 which while not the shitty living-room sized screen you sometimes get is certainly the place they put the odd and the arthouse at the Five Ways multiplex. Since it's an 11am showing it's just us an a few random blokes in their late 20s, early 30s (for a palace of dreams, the cinema can give a quite brutal shock of reality) and we settle in to suffer the adverts.
Which are all for kids stuff. Cereals, toys, hyper-hyper animations shouting out at my fragile brain in widescreen at top volume. It's most disconcerting. Andy wonders if we're in the wrong screen, but I reassure him - the film and the adverts/trailers are on different reels and at this time of the morning it's not out of the question that the underpaid teenager running the projector just got it wrong.
Then the trailers, which again are for every kids movie due out soon, from the kinda interesting (Willy Wonka, Robots) to the utterly shockingly awful, and it being Easter there are loads of them, and endless stream of wrongness considering what we're about to watch. The trailers end, the tedious Orange "advert" with that guy who isn't Kevin Spacey does its thing and the title card comes up.
Turned out while all the computers in the system, from the national website to the ticketing tills, said The Machinist was showing, the typed out schedule for the staff had this sub-standard Pooh cash in listed so that's what they showed. And there's something beautifully absurd about this - how wrong can you get? You order a Bourbon and you get Sunny Delight.
It actually all worked out okay because we then had a couple of hours to waste before the next showing and there's nothing better than having to creatively fill time, plus it was a nice day and I really needed outside stuff, so we wandered around Brindley Place and the canals (some photos) and all was good before returning for our desired dose of misery and pain.
The Machinist is okay. Visually it's stunning but the actual plot seemed a little linear to me. The reveal at the end, while not obvious was a little 2+2=4 and it didn't seem to be trying to say anything interesting or deep. Maybe that was the point - that there isn't really anything to say about guilt other than how it eats you away. I dunno.
Today I had fun exploring the minor specialist bus routes of Birmingham. This was not a planned activity - it just kinda worked out that way.
I'm currently working at the Land Rover factory in Solihull. I don't usually name the places I'm working at but given the size of this place to say "car factory" and "Solihull" and expect to remain obscure is pointless. This place is huge, about the size of a small town. Imagine the largest urban industrial site you can think of and triple it. This is bigger. And other than that I'm slightly reticent to talk about it. They have a quite aggressive no-photos policy there so I don't think they'd take too kindly to me rambling on about how the production line works online. So instead I'm going to talk about my bus journey.
To get there I usually take the number 57 which winds it's slow way up through Small Heath and along the Coventry Road. This morning, however, a bus was sitting at the stop in Moor Street with the number 850 on the front. I've not seen a bus numbered in the 800s before and other that being as curious as you can be about a strange bus at 6.45am having had only four hours sleep, I just assumed it wasn't for me. Then I noticed the destination, which of course I can't exactly remember now, but it was definitely "Works something". There are many strange place-names in Birmingham (Nechells, Washwood, Gilbertstone, Queslett, Tat Ban and the quite fruity Walmley Ash, to picks some at random from the A-Z) but nowhere called Works. Could it be a special service timetabled to coincide with the starting of a new shift at the Land Rover factory, rather like those extra busses that don't run in school holidays? It could indeed, and so I got on it (with some trepidation as the driver was visibly very tired and might have been just saying yes to get me out his hair before driving me to some other Works on the opposite side of town). The funny thing is, there were only four people on the bus. It took exactly the same route as the 57 only it stopped at the factory gates which are about a mile from the terminus of the 57, so I'm guessing a 57 had just departed taking everyone else on it. On the plus side it was a really old bus which meant it had radical things like leg room and relatively comfortable seats. I shall try and catch it tomorrow if only to find out what the destination is called.
The end of the day is always a challenge as you try and figure out where you are in relation to the entrance. Since the plant is basically a mile long stretch of huge anonymous grey warehouses (the largest half a mile long) surrounded by loads of roads that twist and weave, getting your bearings is kinda impossible and the last two times I'd been there it'd taken me a good 20 minutes to get off site. Today I got a lift from a co-worker, a genial chatty bloke, who dropped me and another co-worker off at the entrance. On the wrong side of the plant. A mile away from the bus stop. As the crow flies (remember the windy roads).
However, all was not lost. We spotted a bus stop and tried our luck, which appeared to be in. Here was another Works-specific terminus for the somewhat randomly numbered A6 service. This one is a bit more regular, running mornings and afternoons from the plant to Solihull then on to Kings Heath and was, again, a really old bus. It wound a long route through the housing estates around the plant before suddenly appearing in Solihull town centre which I'd forgotten was so close. Two more busses and I was home in a little over two hours. I do try to limit my working in Solihull as much as possible.
I've been thinking about basically ripping off Diamond Geezer and taking a ordinary but odd bus journey somewhere in Birmingham and this could be the perfect filter through which to do it...
When I first worked in Birmingham as a bookseller from 1998-2000, three of my colleagues shared a flat in Bournville. Now, Bournville is a rather strange place. All areas of Birmingham have their own characteristics and quirks, especially in the south, but Bournville is like a nature reserve, only it's urban. There are no pubs, off-licenses or major commercial developments, gardens have to be kept tidy, none of the eyesores of modern life (satellite dishes, etc) are allowed and in order to live there you have to abide by strict rules of conduct. Thankfully within walking distance is skuzzy Stirchley which seems to make up for the absence of vice in Bournville itself, but it really is like arriving in some idyllic village in the middle of the Cotswalds. All very nice and yet at the same time all rather wrong.
But anyway, Andy, Andy and Dave moved into this flat on the edge of Bournville Green over one of the shops. The flat backed onto the Cadbury factory and had no immediate neighbours thus was the perfect venue for a party. And so, as 1998 drew to a close, a rather large number of our peers from the world of bookselling and elsewhere descended on sleepy Bournville for a nice cozy soiree that turned into something much much more.
Permalink | Posted in A Life of Pete, Autobio, Birmingham, Friends on Monday, January 3 2005 | Comments (4) ?subject=[Weblog] 030105: NYE in Bournville" title="email me about this specific post">Email
Normally when I go to gigs at the moment I don't really know what to expect and so I'm kinda reluctant to drag other people along just in case it''s shite. However, next month there are a couple lined up in Birmingham that I can safely say should be pretty darn good.
First up on September 11th is Yumi Yumi playing the ColdRice night at Bar Academy. I saw them a week back and loved them so come along to that. Crashing space is available at mine (the club closes at 2am).
The week after, on the 18th, Jeffrey Lewis is playing at the Jug of Ale in Moseley. I've been wanting to see him for ages and was very pissed off when I missed his Birmingham gig in the spring. There are a couple of tracks on my mp3 blog at the moment so have a taster. While I'm not making a deal about it, my birthday is the day after so if you need an excuse to come along that's as good as any. I'm not sure if I'll be crashing at mine but it's a normal pub gig so getting back shouldn't be a problem.
Let me know if you're interested!
Andy and m'self are off to ColdRice in Birmingham this Saturday evening for strange musical fun. If you'd like to come too we're meeting in the Sunflower Lounge at nine.
THE PRISCILLAS
(London, UK)
The ColdRice London invasion continues! The Priscillas look cool and mean. They'll grab you by the ears and rock you until your change shakes from your pockets. They have very big hair and sing about brain surgeons, broken hearts and junk food. Formed late in 2003 in London, the four Priscillas graduated with honours from the Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School and then spent a salubrious term at the Academy of Tragic Melodies (the Shangri-Las' finishing school, in case you didn't know). Now Jen, Kate, Guri and Mavis have taken time out from chewing gum to leave audiences reeling across London with their fast, fun punk and anthemic harmonies. They've got attitude. They've got talent. And they've got BIG hair.YUMI YUMI
(Kumamoto City, Japan)
Two girls from Kumamoto City in Japan were in London on an extended holiday. Fortunately for us they decided to bring their guitars and, "to satisfy a dream", play a few London venues. The reception was overwhelming.
Clearly the public's choice, YumiYumi must be seen live! It's the X-Ray Spex, Bangles, B-52s, Go-Gos. It's all hurried, cute, hungry, driven, rifftastically tuneful, slightly fuzzy and sung in the sort of broken-English you wish the girl next door would speak in. Crrrrrashing drum beats, electro bleeps, loud bits, quiet bits. it's the sound of kitchen sinks being joyfully thrown-in, not barrels being scraped.
The Sea Life Centre in Birmingham is quite spectacular and I would highly recommend going. Do make sure you go when it's not crowded though as the swarms of kids did detract from the experience. It needs to be done in silence to really appreciate the displays so go first thing in the morning (it opens at 9.30am) and not during the school breaks. Jez wrote a good overview of the place a couple of years back so go read that. I took a load of photos, which was harder that expected due to the darkness of the tanks and the flash bouncing off the glass, and these really don't do the place justice, especially the tunnel which currently houses giant turtles.
Permalink | Posted in Birmingham, Photography on Saturday, April 17 2004 | Comments (24) ?subject=[Weblog] 170404: Sea Life Centre, Birmingham" title="email me about this specific post">Email
So there's this article in today's Guardian about how the new Bull Ring shopping centre has pushed Birmingham up 10 places to number three in the "best places to shop in Britain" charts, which is nice in a non-consequential page-filler kind of way. What caught my eye was the sidebar vox-pop which includes an "on the scene" report...
Despite the development, there is still a proliferation of ugly buildings. Just past Debenhams' elegant glass control tower-like building, is a knot of 1960s and 1970s drab concrete. Here, you can "eat like a king for £1.50" at Mr Egg's restaurant. Around the corner, Buffalo Bill's takeaway is burnt-out and boarded up.
That'll be Smallbrook Queensway and Hurst Street they're talking about. While the ribbon of concrete along the Queensway isn't very nice at all, that area is pretty vibrant in it's own way housing China Town, the Hippodrome Theatre, Nostalgia & Comics (Brum's only real comic shop), numerous pubs and bars (including The Fabulous Sunflower Lounge which is quite fabulous, actually) and the start of the gay quarter. And of course there's Mr Egg.
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There's a big ferris wheel thingy in Birmingham at the moment. I was walking past at dusk and took some photos.
Permalink | Posted in Birmingham, Photography on Sunday, November 30 2003 | Comments (19) ?subject=[Weblog] 301103: The Birmingham 'Eye'" title="email me about this specific post">Email
It's hasn't really sunk in yet, but then I arrived after dark and didn't really see much so I could be anywhere really. I did get a quick look at the new Selfridges building in the Bull Ring from the bus and it didn't look as big as I was expecting, though still quite impressive. Tomorrow I'll be going into the city centre job hunting so it'll probably hit me then.
I'm back living in Birmingham after three+ years away. And it's mine, in that I'm paying rest for half of it, the first time I've paid rent since February. This chapter of the big adventure is finally over and the next one begins. And it's all very exciting.
