About Brum

I suppose one of the advantages of promoting Birmingham and the West Midlands is that you hear about some stuff before others… I received an email from the PR department at the Town Hall, promoting their forthcoming festival under the “English Originals” moniker… I’ve been known to be a little partial to a bit of English Folk music (thanks to my Dad for that influence), so I might even pop along and check them out.

    Johnny King I commend the Town Hall for putting on an event such as this; English Folk Music has been neglected for a long time, which is sad considering there’s so much richness, culture and heritage carried in the music. Many other countries overtly celebrate and promote their folk music, so why are we, as English people, so averse to enjoying it more? Granted, I can’t listen to folk music for hours and hours on end, but there’s something very compelling about songs which, aside from the tireless efforts of a minority, remain solely as songs passed down from generation to generation with no written record.

The BBC’s always been good about promoting folk music, and they still maintain their coverage of Folk Music on broadcast radio, TV (the Folk Awards comes to mind) and the Web. However, even their coverage has been diminishing, with fewer and fewer plays on regional and local radio. A shame, but not necessarily inevitable. So, it’s good to see this kind of event being organised in Birmingham, at a really great venue – there’s some free gigs and even a film screening, apparently – can’t argue with that. The event is billed as, “a celebration of English folk music traditions with invited artists from all four corners of the country performing, as well as free gigs and a film screening. The whole ethos behind the festival is to dispel the misconceptions many people have of folk and put on show the many cross-genre collaborations and cultural partnerships developing within folk music in England.”

I’m down with that.

That said, the best part of the email has to be the supplied pack shots, including the lovely reclining Lisa Knapp:

What a press shot!

Also, hot on the heels of Creative Republic’s launch, the Birmingham Music Network site’s undergone a redesign and is now available to the public. (Hat-tip to Boy Wonder Records for the heads-up.)

I had to laugh when I read this BBC article – Major city ‘flash mob prevented’;

Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre said it stopped a major ‘flash mob’ exercise involving dozens of people. But members of the group said the event, in which people froze for five minutes, took place and images went on the social networking website Facebook. The Bullring said it prevented a “major blockage”. A spokesman added that the shopping centre “could not afford customers not being able to get past”. A spokesman for the ‘flashmob’ said they had not intended to annoy people.

And then it gets better:

The Bullring’s general manager, Tim Walley, said on Saturday lunchtime that security had spoken to a group which had assembled outside and was told they would reconvene in smaller groups in the shopping centre.  He said: “We saw one of them with a loud-hailer. “We couldn’t afford customers not being able to get past. We’ll be looking at 180,000 people coming to shop on a Saturday.”

What’s a flashmob? Well, ‘a flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.’ What’s so harmful about that? I was shopping in the Bullring last Saturday, and let me tell you, there was PLENTY of space for people to walk around – more than enough space for a few dozen people to do five minutes’ worth of Pythonesque comedy. If they’d been juggling fire or whipping round on rollerblades to the music of Starlight Express, then fair enough, I’d probably expect them to be moved on too – but standing still? How square do you have to be to not find that a bit of harmless fun (and amusingly odd?)

If I’d been in Birmingham this weekend, I would’ve taken part myself, Flashmobs are really nothing more than a bit of painless, hassle-free fun which provide great entertainment value for observers. In what way is it obstructive or harmful to shoppers? I think we can determine from this that the Bullring security staff (and the managing director) could be accurately described as humourless, revenue-driven employees who seek to disrupt peoples’ fun at every opportunity possible.

We need to have weekly Flashmobs in the Bullring from now on.