Paradise Circus

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 37: Easy Listening

The commonly held view of 1960s popular music is that it was the decade during which the rulebook was torn up. Out of the dull austerity of the black-and-white 1950s the youth of the following decade exploded as one in a Technicolor riot of mind-bending drugs, free love and revolutionary fervour. If you can remember it, you weren’t there.

It was The Beatles who led the charge and provided the soundtrack, and nothing was ever the same again. As if to illustrate this point, Birmingham would give the world Heavy Metal by the end of the decade. But that’s another story.

What this version of 1960s pop history doesn’t tell us is that the rampaging youth were only part of the tale. There were also a lot of other people around in that decade, and many of them didn’t much care for The Beatles and all they brought with them. Mostly these naysayers were drawn from the older generation (and in the 1960s, this meant anyone over the age of 21), and it rarely troubles the history books that they too, just like their younger counterparts, bought and listened to a lot of records.

What did these people want from pop music? It certainly wasn’t sex, drugs and rock n roll played by long-haired oiks, that’s for sure. Indian spirituality? Womens’ Lib? Not their cup of cocoa.

No, what they wanted was simply something pleasant they could tap their feet to: in a word, they wanted something nice.

That something nice came in the form of string-laden arrangements of pop hits, songs from the musicals, and movie soundtracks. No rough edges, and no feedback. It came to be known as Easy Listening, and the undisputed King of the genre was Annunzio Mantovani, or, as he was more commonly and simply known: Mantovani.

Mantovani had shifted a lot of records before the 1960s even began. At one point in 1959 he had no less than 6 albums in the US Top 30 at the same time. This success continued throughout the 1960s, when he became the first artist to sell a million stereo LPs, and with scarcely a burned bra in sight. In 1970, ten years before his death and a full four years before Kraftwerk hit upon a similar idea, he released Music For The Motorway, a suite of lushness inspired by the mundane joy of motorway travel. Travel sweets and driving gloves. Nice.

In terms of record sales, Mantovani was a behemoth. Remarkably, none of his light-orchestral unit-shifting niceness would have been possible without the city of Birmingham.

In 1923, at the tender age of 18, Annunzio had cut his conducting teeth leading orchestras in the posh hotels of the city. The musicians he controlled were of a much older vintage and often included his father, Bismarck Mantovani (crazy name, crazy guy). Eventually, as with many Brum inventions before and since, the gifts outgrew the city of their birth and Mantovani was lured first to London, and then on to fame and fortune in the wider world.

Noice, bab.

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…

Continue reading “Go on, floor us: work on the Official Paradise Circus History of Snobs”

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 36: Looking Dapper

Hair is a problem. It sprouts from places you don’t want it to, shies away from the top of your head (for us older men), and generally needs to be kept in its place. Regular barbering, or hairdressing for the ladies, is vital—as is plucking, shaving, combing over and other general topiary. Worse, even if it’s perfectly in place when you leave the house one instance of hat usage or any physical activity can create a disaster of Johnsonian proportions.

Before 1928 there was no way of keeping hair under control: from Jesus, through Da Vinci to Wilfred Owen in the trenches of the Somme, all of society just looked a bit scruffy and unkempt. No wonder there was so much conflict.

But in that wonderful year Birmingham came to the rescue, as it always does. County Chemicals at their Chemico Works in Bradford Street formulated a pomade—an emulsion of water and mineral oil stabilised with beeswax—that once spread across unruly follicles truly made men look smart once and for all. They invented Brylcreem and the rest is neat, shiny, controlled history.

No idea how women manage mind you.

It’s 2am and there’s only Baileys left

You can be fashionably late to a party – arriving after the nominal start, when everyone is warmed up and in the swing of things, lubricated by the richest pickings from the drinks table, kitchen counter, or bath full of ice. But you can also arrive unfashionably late, when people are tiring, feeling jaded, and all that’s left to drink is a two year old bottle of Bailey’s.

I’m unfashionably late to the Library of Birmingham. Like a pub worker who had to clean down then jump in a taxi to catch the last hurrah of the night, I come to the LoB three weeks later, making a metaphorical 2am appearance at its launch party. The bunting and the zany have all gone. The spectacles that caught the lenses of the media and the instagrammers have slunk off, leaving the library naked with only its truth to present to me.

The foyer has the feel of an airport terminal, with desks for the checking-in (and out), escalators that promise to pull you up into the business end of things and a bespoke unbranded eatery that offers generic options at air-side prices. The only way is up, and I’m pulled into the feature rotunda that I’ve heard so much about. It reminds me of Waterstones in the Pavilions centre, the area which was sort of modelled to make it feel like a library. I feel these two design conceits clash – the bookshop like a library, the library like a bookshop – and I’m lost for a moment to make sense of where I am, what this is for. I’m jostled by a group taking photographs. I move on to find a place where I can work.

I found that Central Library was a wonderful place to read, study and write; Central’s work area, with its bashed up desks, was unambiguous and surprisingly user friendly. You had a chair, a light, a plug and you were insulated from the outside world – buried in the centre of walls of books, hidden from the light and the view. The LoB works the other way, throwing you out from its centre to sit in brightly lit study areas in gallery windows that throw attention not onto the job in hand but onto Birmingham. I’m Goldilocks now, trying to find a seat: this area is too hot, this private study room has no clear booking rules, but this area, at the back, is just right. I look out onto tower blocks and concrete car parks and I get a glimpse of Paradise Circus. The LoB is a reaction to those things, a rejection of that vision of a city and yet in truth she is hemmed in by them. For now.

Another thing, there’s an edge here that I’m not used to. Phones go off, bodies stiffen. There are sighs, people obviously relocating to remove themselves from disruptions. I see an argument developing about a booked computer even though others are available. There’s clearly an old library crowd (am I amongst them?) and a new one, and they are still finding ways to accommodate one another. All of them are learning the building, and the building is learning all of them. Soon the building will have to react to them. Somewhere a laminator is waiting to make some signs (set in Comic Sans) to stick up around the place, to clarify functions and to formalise the new codes of the new building, the ones an architect and a designer can’t plan for. The LoB will be all the better for that. It needs a few scratches, knocks and dents, it needs to become less popular, less of a destination, before it can do its job.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 35: That smell of eggs

Philosophically one can’t really understand a concept until you can give it a name. You might get a headachey feeling when walking down Oxford Road in Moseley in the autumn but until you’re old enough to describe it as ‘smelling like poppers’ you won’t really know why. Or you might want a name for the semi-circular gap at the front of a gig or speech between performer and audience that isn’t filled until the venue is, or you won’t be able to discuss the space itself. It’s called a ‘King’s Heath’ by the way, and the process is called intentionality.

So we are again indebted to Mr Joseph Priestley for naming that weird smell of eggs that lets you know that there’s a catalytic converter in the area—or that someone’s guts are playing up. It’s down to “vitriolic acid air” as he called it or sulphur dioxide, SO2, to those with CSE Chemistry.

Priestley, we can be sure, never denied it. But he supplied it. Hoorah for Birmingham!

John Rodgers: The heretic from Digbeth

In 2006 Nicole Blackman created a walking tour of Digbeth called “Stay Away From Lonely Places” that was inspired by the true and not-as-true-as-they-could-be stories of Digbeth- stories that I only half remember involving a lost ring, a Hell’s Angels Wedding, warring industrialists and the possible site of the first English Martyrdom of the Marian Persecution: John Rogers- bible editor, bible translator, bible commentator and martyr. Blackman reflected that “Marian Persecution” would be a good rock band name, I vividly remember on the corner of Floodgate Street and High Street Deritend reflecting that it would be a great name for a drag queen- you can take that fact to the bank. Blackman was unsure the Birmingham Civic Society had it right saying that Rogers had been martyred in Birmingham, it was Smithfield in London. Already Rogers’ story is getting away from me; I’ve spoiled it by giving away that he dies at the end burned at the stake.

John Rogers was born in Deritend, educated at the Guild School of St John the Baptist in Deritend (now the Crown Pub on the High Street) and at Cambridge University. In 1534, Rogers went to Antwerp as chaplain to the English merchants of the Company of the Merchant Adventurers. (Has ever a Guild of merchants ever been more excitingly named?)

While Rogers was in Antwerp he met William Tyndale and abandoned his Catholic faith. Tyndale had published his English translation of the New Testament in 1526 and together Rogers and Tyndale took advantage of the recent technological and theological breakthroughs: Caxton’s printing press sped up the process of production and dissemination; Rogers and Tyndale drew their translation directly from Hebrew and Greek texts and their project was driven by the quiet fires of the Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation.

Later in his life Rogers was radical against “pestilent Popery, idolatry and superstition” but he was also radical towards Protestants. When Rogers was asked by John Foxe to intervene with the case against Joan of Kent he said that burning was “sufficiently mild” for a crime as grave as heresy. With the ascension of Mary to the throne and the shift to Catholicism as the faith of the nation Rogers found himself under scrutiny. Following questioning Rogers was sentenced to death for heretically denying the Christian character of the Church of Rome and the real presence in the sacrament and was burned at Smithfields on 4^th February 1555.

All through telling this story I’ve had a still small voice nagging me saying “So what? Why should I care?”

The reformers were reacting to the corruption they perceived to be at the heart of the church in Rome. The reformers wanted to tear the Church apart and start again, they wanted to put the word of God at the heart of the Christian faith and put the word of God into the hands of ordinary people. It wasn’t about a priest in a pulpit mediating your relationship with the divine; here was an opportunity for you to open a book in your own home and read the words that spoke the universe into being, flip a few pages and there were the words that were spoken to Moses as the law, flip a few pages more and there were the words Jesus spoke to his disciples telling them to love their neighbour as themselves. Words not chanted by Monks on your behalf behind a screen, not intoned by a priest from a pulpit, a priest that could be corrupted with money but with words you spoke with your family on a day to day basis. The reformation was a triumph of literacy, of the printing press and the spoken word and John Rogers, the guy from Birmingham who burned both figuratively and literally for his beliefs, was one of the key players.

Birmingham Airport to Coach Station in pixel-width strips

I’ve been playing around with slit-scan photography lately and at the tail end of a long and boring coach journey I thought I’d try recording the journey into Birmingham as a slit-scan. The app I was using was limited to 2044 pixels so I couldn’t do the whole thing at once but these five pretty much cover the view from Birmingham Airport to Digbeth Coach Station.

(click for full size)

A bit of explanation is probably in order.

The camera (in this case an iPad) is held firmly against the coach window. Any movements are those of the coach itself. It was set to take eight 1x480px photos every second and stack them in a row. So what you’re seeing is sort of like a movie, and sort of not at all like a movie.

When the coach is moving quickly you see a lot of noise as the strips of pixels have little in common and when the coach is at a standstill you see the same image repeated over and over as a block. The inbetween bits, where the speed of movement marries up with the view, is where the interesting stuff happens.

For example, the houses on the outskirts along the Coventry Road:

Coach from BHX to Digbeth.jpg

Or these large office blocks in Sheldon:

Coach from BHX to Digbeth.jpg-2

As we get into central Birmingham things start getting noisier but we also get an unexpected visualisation of traffic flow. As the coach comes to a traffic light or congestion the blocks of colour emerge. I also liked this slow crawl around a roundabout (after overtaking a big red lorry), scanning the billboard like a desktop scanner might:

Coach from BHX to Digbeth.jpg-4