Regarding Academy backlash: Well, we’re moving away from why every second pub in Digbeth seems to be opening for gigs, but irrespective – I see what you mean but I’m not 100% convinced. It’s worth recalling that well before The Academy was around, streetpunk bands always used to do better in terms of drawing people at The Old Railway and The Market Tavern than they did at The Foundry/Flapper/Eddies/etc. The pubs over that area have always been seen as a sufficiently gritty alternative for the type of audiences who refer to themselves as ‘The Punx.’ I’m not going to deny that they probably dislike The Academy more than they do The Flapper, but I don’t see how their rhetoric really impacts on this.

Regarding the main problems with the Academy being the building: To pull it down and have it somewhere else would certainly be a good thing. That’s what I’ve been saying, is it not?

I do suspect that there are quite a few problems that The Academy Group would manage to carry over if it was them re-opening elsewhere, though – aside from prices, I image lack of training (and, presumably, poor wages) contribute far more to the staff problems than the surroundings do.

Cheers,

Dave Harte

Regarding the Digbeth venues, I was thinking more of the bands and audiences than the landlords. There’s obviously a demand for more venues catering to niches that can’t or won’t play in the Academy (a punk band told me they couldn’t get their fans to see them at the Academy because it was too corporate). I might be stretching things but I wonder how much the Academy being there in the first place is a motivating force to playing elsewhere. Sometimes you need a visible establishment to kick against.

Your main criticism of the Academy as a shithole is eminently justified but, beer prices aside, that’s down to the building itself, surely? If it wasn’t a dank smelly pit then the staff might be in a slightly better mood. And no-one’s going to invest in doing it up when it’ll be rubble in a couple of years. If it was in a different building, either purpose built or well converted it’d be a fine venue.

# International chamber orchestras and recitals
# Local choirs and orchestras
# Organ lunchtime concerts
# World music
# Folk
# Jazz
# Pop
# Comedy
# Urban/R’n’B/Hip Hop events
# Opera

So I guess gigs come under that, though not, I’d imagine, in the same spirit as the Academy.

“if we’re looking at the West Midlands Conurbation as a whole is one venue really enough?”

In the name of providing something solid to base our conjecture on, I just had a little look at the websites of The Civic and The Adacemy to see to what extent the schedules of their 2,000 capacity rooms are full, and whether their programmes could theoretically be condensed into one.

Looking at the week beginning tonight, we can see that The Academy main room only actually has a gig on Thursday, and The Civic has none at all.

I wasn’t intending to go any further than that, but since this was obviously an uncommonly quiet week I pushed on to the following seven days. The Academy is much busier, with gigs on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday (with the caveat that this gig was part of a clubnight and featured bands who would more often be found playing much smaller venues), Saturday and Sunday. The Civic has no gigs, but is hosting a darts event on the Thursday.

My spreadsheet and I were developing a taste for this by now. A third week saw The Academy with gigs on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; The Civic with the Royal Philharmonic playing on the Wednesday, and gigs on the Sunday and Monday.

From this I would conclude that – although it might be a little bit tight at times – their seperate calendars could very easily be condensed into one.

I realise that a direct comparison is perhaps a bit too simplistic to be taken as the be-all-and-end-all (mostly due to the fact that loosing the main Academy means losing the smaller venues too, althought we’re not as hard up for those, are we? One might also argue it’s unfair given that opening The Academy 2 precludes opening the main Academy in a way that opening The Wulfrun doesn’t to The Civic, but I’m not sure I buy that – given the choice, I’m pretty sure the Academy overseers would always opt for a gig in the larger room and greater potential for profit thereby generated), but I do think that is salutary.

Would the Barfly have moved here if the Academy group hadn’t proved it worthwhile?

No idea. Now that this sort of thing has been demonstrated, though, I don’t see this as an ongoing point.

Would seemingly every other pub in Digbeth be turning into a music venue without the corporate behemoth to kick against?

I think that’s quite silly. There’s always a cycle of pub venues opening and closing. I don’t see some sudden Road-To-The-1-In-12 conversion to anti-corporate ethics very often being a factor in your average landlord deciding to hire out his back room.

***

Before someone leaps in with the inevitable strawman, I’m not opposed to the idea of a big venue in Brum. I don’t see the value of having one just for the sake of having one (or for the sake of some bizarre and abstract idea of city prestige) when the one you have is piss-poor, though. As it stands, there’s not a single gig that I’d rather see in The Academy than I would in The Civic. If the former shuts, I’ll be more than happy to watch them in better surroundings until somewhere new comes along.

***

What about the town hall, anyway? Isn’t that re-opening, and didn’t that have gigs on way back in the day?