future nostalgia – Page 2 – Paradise Circus

No sad songs, an interview with Stephen Duffy

The excuse for talking to Stephen Duffy is the release of the first Lilac Time album in ten years, but that really is just an excuse: we could listen to him forever. Paradise Circus is more named after the Lilac Time album of that name than even the traffic island. That said, No Sad Songs is a wonderful collection that you should head out and pick up right now.

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“Yes, we have always been guilty of self mythologising,” Stephen Duffy tells me, so allow me to build my own. I’m talking to him not sitting on the grass near Nick Drake’s grave, nor in a dappled Digbeth pub where our words would be lit with dusty spikes of light though the stained glass, but over the phone. He’s at home in Cornwall, I’m in an almost quiet enough corner of a conference centre in London that will from now be forever Birmingham.

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Danny Smith: Disappearing World

This week, Danny writes a eulogy for Birmingham’s last independent bookshop.

Some things, like grotty flats, go with a bang: a big showy controlled demolition surrounded by smug men in yellow jackets who pretend that playing with explosives doesn’t give them trouser tents. Some things, like the Central Library, go with a fight: even if all that fight actually consists of is an echo chamber of social media, people showing each other photographs of what was and what could have been. And some things, like dear Readers World, slip off in the night like a pensioner on the morphine train to oblivion: creaky middle finger raised in rigor mortis.

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The Small Room On Big Wednesday

Editor’s note: Some time ago we started working on a story about Snobs. Darren sent us this to use. It’s lovely. He told us ‘No tongue in cheek here, it’s a straight up poem about meeting my future wife at the Big Wednesday night in the mid ’90s. Love Snobs and have great memories of the place’. This poem is quite a big part of the story we are still writing, but we wanted to share it with you now, the day after Snobs as we all knew it closed. If you have anything to tell us about Snobs use the comments, and let us know if we can nick your story for our own (Jon H)

The Small Room On Big Wednesday

He was a vertigo-liver, but for tonight he’ll spin.

‘Just gimme some more!’

The unworn denim sleeves are a counter balance,

but it’s so fast, he’s seeing the inside of a potter’s wheel,

covering a vase from within, painted with a smear of ruby spot lights.

‘Pass the peas, like the used to say, pass the peas…’

They never talk; he’s only heard her mouth ‘Alright?’ to him all summer,

but they know each others’ moves instantly:

a midnight jigsaw of skin, sin and soul.

‘Doing it in the park, doing after dark, oh yeah, Rock Creek Park…’

Just be in a fag cloud’s distance from the DJ booth and it’ll happen,

tattooed by the same violet beams – a regiment line appears –

feet in-line, dance formation conceived,

45-degrees to 360-degrees, trainers played the parquet floor like a stylus on a record:

‘It’s a family affair!’

He thinks this is the closest he will ever get to women;

he’s soaked, his skin has been crying out of happiness all night,

but thinks: ‘I can’t hug and sponge sweat on your dress.’

The boy will be thinking about tonight for years to come,

in a still, warm house with a dawn storm roaring outside,

after they are married.

Disappearing Brum

Marti De Bergi first saw the legendarily punctual Spinal Tap in a little club called the Electric Banana but advised us “don’t look for it—it’s not there anymore”. And the director of Kramer Vs Kramer Vs Godzilla is right, nostalgia is a fool’s game.

The gateway drug is TKTVP, street name ‘Talking about old Kids’ Television Programmes’. No matter how it makes those lonely first-year undergraduate conversations in the Union bar seem easier it’s just building up an empty existence propped up only by Shine compilations in your work cubicle. By my age, you’re drawn and haggard and fit only to frequent the back rooms of the seedier pubs in Moseley talking about bloody Tolkien.

But like a pusher, I’m going to attempt to give you false nostalgia for a past you needn’t have bothered to remember. Let’s see if you can develop a simulacra of a misty eye over these gone, or soon to be gone, Birmingham fixtures:

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The Paradise Circus Buildings at Risk Register

The ‘BUSK’ (Birmingham United Services Club) round the back of the Mailbox isn’t the prettiest of buildings, but it is in prime development territory. Since the great fire of 2006 Eddies has been rocking there, but now there are problems — due to a ‘Change in Ownership’ of the ‘Property’ — so we’re officially placing the building on PC Buildings at Risk Register.

Fires seem to plague buildings in nice areas that are well used or loved by uncommercial communities. It’s tragic when they go up in flames, only for structural tests carried out later to conclude that they are best knocked down. What’s lucky is that often firefighters are able to prevent flames spreading to nearby apartment blocks.

It’s a curse that can dog some of the city’s brightest entrepreneurs. Who would know just what delights would have become of the Villa Leisure Centre or the old Holte Hotel if they weren’t so damn flammable in the late 80s and early 90s.

It can happen to old bingo halls like King’s Heath Kingsway, or even beloved pawnbrokers like King’s Heath’s Cash Converters. If it can happen in these areas of high rented housing need it can happen anywhere.

Do help, add buildings to the register here…

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Lost Shops of Birmingham, No.1: The Andalusian Cafe

The Andalusian Cafe in Moseley was a couple of shop fronts up from the Prince of Wales. No one ever went in… we did.

The counter staff seemed uncertain when asked for food, there was no menu and they went in to a fizz when we opted for a plate of food with Harissa; they had none and had to go to their mum’s house for a tube of the stuff.

The food did arrive. But just then so did a white van unloading domestic hardware such as fridges and washing machines which were trooped through the dining room and put at the back as we gobbled down what had to be the only meal ever served there.

I asked why it was called The Andalusian. It was explained they always wanted to go to Morocco and we didn’t get out a map to show them Andalusia was in Spain.

You always knew the cafe by its sign, the only words on it were ‘Andalusian Cafe, Tel’ maybe the owners ran out of paint before they could add the phone number.

It closed down soon after our meal.

By Richard Lutz

Go on, floor us: work on the Official Paradise Circus History of Snobs

Snobs is to close. Well, to move venue. Let’s not fool ourselves that Snobs is something that can move, it’s not the people, it’s not the atmosphere, it’s not the DJs, it’s not the carpet. It’s the place. Unless it’s dismantled mirror by mirror, mould spore by mould spore and moved to the Black Country Museum the new Snobs will not be the old Snobs. New young fresh people will have a good time but we will draw a line or be disappointed with history.

Before we consign the place to history’s wheelie bins let’s pause a moment and consider. We can build a complete and official history, a history of one night in Snobs.

Because:

If you go to the same place enough times, do the same things, and drink enough eventually every night blurs into one.
Every night at Snobs was a great night. Except for the bad ones, especially the bad ones.
Given that all the nights blur into one, everything that made Snobs great happened on one night, one ur-clubbing experience where all of your stories play out from 11-3am and then you get a Top Nosh.
It is possible and probable that everyone to whom you are connected now, even if you’ve only known them for a few years, has been in Snobs together at some point in the past 20 years.
There is no record of anything that ever happened in Snobs so you can make your own story.

So we want you to help, tell us your memories and we’re going to build a complete history of Snobs that happened on one night, that night when we were all there, stuck to the floor together.

(or link here)

Go on…

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Embarrassing Public Bodies

I don’t think I’ve ever taken a book out of the Central Library in Birmingham, nor used one for reference. I’m not really a library person. I used to copy CDs from there like everybody did before mp3s, and I’ve wondered around looking at the shelves, breathing the mites and the refreshing book dust. I’ve stroked the static and brushed the peeling selotape from the yellowing computers by the escalators. I’ve been frustrated by trying to use the photocopiers, toying with the intense flaccidity of the coin reject button.

I’ve done pretty much everything it’s possible to do in a library. And, like a good boy, I’ve done it all quietly.

But the prime function, no. While I love words I have an old fashioned compunction to own them. Imagine being in love with a story and having to give it away to be intimate with others who maybe wouldn’t love it as wisely and well. A library is nothing but a fountainhead of potential heartbreak. And Central Library had the potential to be the worst.

So maybe I shouldn’t care about what’s happening to Central Library: but I love the building, I love the size and the shape, I love the angles and the implausibility. I love the incongruity and placement most of all. Where-ever you stand it’s not possible to get straight on to its parallel lines. So whatever your view the building flows away from you, meeting at a horizonal distance, pointing toward the future and the past.

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“Meet me by Burger King at 2pm”: New Street, New Start for the social map of Brum

Every town has a rallying point. Growing up in Guernsey it was “outside Boots”. Perfectly located at the intersection of the three main pedestrian streets (and a killer flight of steps from the sea front), and with good drop off points, Boots was the rendezvous for all my teenage adventures, shopping trips and, well, rendezvous (nudge, nudge). In Birmingham, for me, it was the New Street station Burger King.

The New Street Burger King Sign — Image apologetically provided by @charlie_spotted via Twitter

Perfectly located at the intersection between two sets of entrance doors and the platforms (and a killer escalator ride from the Pallasades Shopping Centre), and with the added advantage of selling chips, Burger King was the kick off spot for most of my City Centre expeditions and this lists everything about all the advantages of this location of this busy joint.

So where will I meet now that New Street has changed? One of the downsides of rejecting any sense of being a ‘hyperlocal blog’ is that we no longer get invited to the opening of envelopes across Birmingham: we’ve not been inside and so I can’t tell you where the new rally point will be. This is, of course, as it should be. Over the next few months we’ll begin to redraw our social map and we’ll all collectively learn the new New Street. Many rendezvous points will be attempted and slowly one will emerge as the repeated favourite. We’ll test this place out and wear it until it feels comfortable and then folksonomically we agree where the optimal meeting point is.

A new meme will be born – I’ll meet you there at two.

Finale

Say goodbye to the Premiere video club, Old Walsall Road, Hamstead. This is at least the third premises for the ‘club’ along one stretch of shops on the edge of Brum—it first opened in the eighties when easy availability of ‘Driller Killer‘ and the movie ‘Shag’ (which seems to have vanished from existence) on VHS or Beta was upmost in the minds of the Great Barrians and quickly expanded.

Like the universe what expands must eventually contract, and the tapes are finally disappearing in a gnab gib.