Unparalleled Riches

The comments on the current state of the scene were very encouraging, suggesting there’s more quality, active musicians in the city than ever before and a number of hardworking and creative promoters as well.

So what improvements might be made to encourage some of the many talented and dedicated individuals and groups to progress further on a professional and national level?

Venues and Noise Abatement

We picked out Kings Heath’s Hare & Hounds as an example of what a good local music venue can be (great location, facilities, standard of acts and size of audiences) but felt there’s too few live music venues around for a city and scene of our size.

Recent issues between property developers, the council and independent venues such as the Fiddle & Bone, the Spotted Dog, the Nightingale and most recently the Rainbow and Moseley’s Price of Wales are all situations in which the city and the community have had the opportunity to act clearly in favour of culture over profit – if we are to have the courage of our convictions going forward, common sense prevailing in any similar situation is of vital importance.

Jon Cotton suggests that these issues could very often be solved by small grants for acoustic improvements to venues – possibly around £1000 per venue for simple materials and an hour or two’s consultancy with an acoustician.

Annual Festivals

We are fortunate to have some small, quality festivals such as Moseley Folk and Supersonic and efforts should be made to support them as needed as well as identify other existing and emerging festivals and support them too. On the larger scale, Gigbeth was admired but perhaps fell short of its full potential, whilst the value of ArtsFest is questionable due to its very broad reach and the policy of not paying artists.

Organisational issues aside, a Festival lives or dies on the quality of its curation – there is a lot of experienced promoters in Birmingham and they are a resource that should be tapped as much as possible by any future large scale efforts. As valuable as good intentions might be, its quality that ultimately counts.

Media Support

It seems bizarre that our local radio stations do so little to engage with the local music community. This is both our loss and theirs, since, as little more than pale imitations of much bigger national operations, their audience figures are dropping rapidly. So its to the grass roots that we might best look to the future. Rhubarb Radio is steadily expanding with well programmed and sequenced automated play lists offering a variety of moods at different parts of the day combined with programmes presented by fast developing local talent and all using West Midlands music. Support for Rhubarb and the likes of South Birmingham Community Radio should be encouraged and need not be financial.

Likewise in the world of print media, the Birmingham Post is down to a weekly and the Evening Mail, whilst its news coverage is ultra local doesn’t seem to cover local talent until they are proven on the national stage. Fortunately, we have Indies such as Area, Brumnotes, Radar and Night Times taking up the slack.

Focal Web Presence

There’s good stuff going on the web such as Live Brum (for listings), review and photos from Brum Live, long running bloggers such as Russ L, The Hearing Aid, the directory and blog at Birmingham Music Network, a terrific playable online library of music at the Pilot Project and archive projects such as the Birmingham Music Archive and Home of Metal.

That said, I still feel something is lacking which could be well filled by something modelled on Created in Birmingham. CiB rarely mentions music for the good reason that if it covered every decent new album, gig or video, music would completely swamp the other content. Is there a case for a sister Music in Birmingham site?

Facilitation, Not Control

Its very tempting to try and fix things with big, top down initiatives, but often they fail to deliver and given the current financial climate, there’s not likely to be much public money around for a while. Andrew Dubber suggests that the smartest thing that could be done now is to identify and support already existing and naturally forming scenes and connections, and draw goals and strategies from those communities’ own ambitions.

Proud to be Independent

A lot of very exciting music and events are happening through the efforts of people taking initiative and responsibility for their own success. We should be proud and encouraging of this rather than waiting for an authority figure from either the public or private sector to come along and validate our efforts with an official seal of approval. John Mostyn goes so far as to suggest that a small pot of public funding should be used to encourage the term ‘Unsigned’ to never be used within the City in any way, shape or form by anyone… ever.

Cherish Diversity

The diversity of our music and culture may have slowed progress towards a cohesive and structured scene or community, but maybe that very diversity has the capability to power us forward to a time of unparalleled musical output and cultural harmony.

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By Rich Batsford

Rich Batsford is a booking agent and a composer/performer of meditative solo piano music and reflective songs www.richbatsford.com

• Plus+ International Design Expo
• Flip Animation Festival
• Gigbeth

Plus+ kicked off today at Fazeley Studios, Digbeth.  I’m heading over in a bit and am not really sure what to expect other than the much-discussed tart cards.  I suppose I’m looking forward to catching a talk or two and just having a mooch about.

Flip is over in Wolverhampton at the Light House and consists of three days of animation goodness – screenings, portfolio dissections, talks and all sorts, with a closing party hosted by Colour.

Gigbeth kicks off with the conference tomorrow and carries on through to Saturday evening.  There’s loads of info out there for anyone wanting to look.  May I direct you to:

• The programme
• Jon Bounds’ round-up (featuring a link to his Gigbeth MySpace marathon)
• Info about 4Talent’s stage, featuring CiB’s Pete Ashton between the other acts
• Rich Batsford has blogged about playing the 4Talent stage and also at Drop Beats Not Bombs later in the evening
• Rhubarb Radio will be broadcasting live feeds from some of the stages

Created in Birmingham doesn’t tend to cover comedy very much although, as people have pointed out, there’s no lack of creativity going on with it.  The problem is that, although I come across plenty of listings, there’s been no-one (that I’ve found) writing passionately and consistently about the city’s comedy scene.

Until now – enter Who’s Laughing Now?:

With news, listings, features and a kind of curation area for YouTube vids, it’s been launched to coincide with the Birmingham Comedy Festival and is the brainchild of Rich Batsford and Simon Harper.

Rich explains on his own blog that:

The site has been created with the intent of developing the comedy scene in the area and is more or less an open forum – we are very happy for all local promoters to send in previews of their events.

We are also on the lookout for other writers or budding journalists who are interested in publishing reviews through the site. Whilst there’s no money on offer, its all good experience and we would expect to be able to get free show tickets for our contributors when they are reviewing a show. Are you interested? – please contact us

I’m really chuffed to see this and think there’s a whole heap of potential here, so good luck to them.

• Tuesday 15 July – Glenn Wool & Carey Marx
• Thursday 17 July – Zoe Lyons & Scott Capurro
• Friday 18 July – Reginald D Hunter & Jason Scott

I’ve even heard of a couple of those – Scott Capurro, for example, is fantastically offensive and worth checking out if you’re thick-skinned enough.

Tickets are a tenner each and booking info is on the left of this page.

More photos from the evening on Matt Murtagh‘s website.