About Brum

Birmingham has been plagued by a spate of rumoured (and actual) venue closures in the past few years, and also been unlucky with others (memorably, the burning down of Eddie’s, near New Street Station, a great blow for fans of alternative music and a decent night out). However, Roy and Jaci Davis have just opened the doors to The Asylum, a brand new live music venue next door to The Madhouse (which they also run). Sporting a £60,000 soundsystem, a 400 capacity and the treasured smoking area, this venue - still unfinished! - is already looking like a shit hot, potentially permanent fixture for many bands’ UK tours. If you’re wondering what prompted me to write this… Well, I’m currently at the launch gig (”Clive Aid”) and the bands are rocking out! if you can hear a disturbance in the force, that’s the system in this place

I had a quick chance to speak to Roy and he tells me there are loads of gigs lined up, including one every other night in July! - so if you’re a fan of rock, metal and anything inbetween, keep your eye on this place as it bodes well for the future. I’ll try and get some time with Roy to put together a full article, but I’m so stoked that live music in Birmingham has a really good new venue, particularly as it’s being run by two people who have put so much of their time, energy and money into this venue - and they actually like the music and are dedicated to the cause!

Stay tuned for the full article…

(Also, apologies for my dodgy spelling before I revised this post, I typed it up on my phone’s tiny keyboard in the venue!)

Not got anything planned for Saturday the 31st of May? Well, give The Flyover Show a go. It’s on from 1pm to 9pm (but I’m sure it may well overrun) and… well, when was the last time you got to enjoy a dollop of wholesome fun in such a glamourous location as underneath the Hockley Flyover?

No, you can’t think of a time, can you.

Shameless cribbing from the event’s Facebook page now:

For one day only the entire arena under the Hockley Flyover will be alive with inspiring sights and sounds of ground breaking art and music. Jazz veterans, reggae legends, visual artists, hip hop and grime geniuses from across Birmingham and beyond will be there.This day long festival is a unique celebration of the very best from the city’s urban communities. National and international names, backed by a live band will light up the stage with exclusive performances. The city and the site is the focus of a specially created piece designed by young artists. Cherrelle Skeete, Francis Mott, Nehemiah Smith and Tan, will debut original pieces of music, dance and theatre. Graffiti artists and b-boys will paint pictures across the creative canvass of B19.

Don’t miss this chance to see world-class creativity brought outdoors for the first time to a forgotten corner of Birmingham. Be there to reclaim these derelict spaces and restore the artistic soul of the city!!

So, go and have some fun - why not? The weather will be lovely, the music (and beer, hopefully) will be flowing, and you can get a chance to listen to some quality musical talent and support local musicians and artists while you’re at it. Plus I’d put money on it that there’ll be loads of spots to park.

Firstly - did we miss Spring? Summer’s decided to queuejump once again this year, as my (exceedingly grown up and consummately mature) housemate said to me yesterday, “strappy top season’s upon us once again. Giggidy!” But anyway, I digress.

The Big Picture project’s been running for a while now, and it’s culminating in the grand competition today. For those who aren’t in the know;

It’s a project to create the biggest photo album in the West Midlands. Everyone can add their favourite pictures – family, friends, local landmarks, even your pets, we’ve made it easy to share your photos and tell the stories behind them.”

If you’ve got a good shot of somewhere in the West Midlands, go add it to The Big Picture project today for a chance to get it on a billboard… How cool is that?

Big Picture Day is Thursday 8 May – every photo added on that day will be in with a chance of appearing on giant billboards around the region.

Add your photo of the West Midlands to the Big Picture on Big Picture Day and it’ll automatically be entered in a competition — eight winners will be selected to get the full billboard treatment. There’s sure to be one in a town near you!

Upload to the web or text from your mobile — it’s up to you. To add a photo by MMS send it with BIGPIC first in the text of your message to 60300*.

Every photograph taken will form part of our world record attempt to make the biggest photo mosaic in the world and eight lucky winners will have their image displayed on their own billboard for everyone to see.

For more info, see The Big Picture’s web site. Also, Donato ‘Bostin’ Esposito is about to embark on his fundraising trek around Peru in support of the British Heart Foundation - go sponsor him at http://www.bhf.org.uk/sponsor/bostin, and buy the BHF charity t-shirt from the Bostin shop.

Right, excuse me, I’m off to dust down the barbeque in preparation for this weekend.

Donato Esposito’s the man with the plan - the guy behind Bostin and the supporter of everything good about the Midlands. The word ‘bostin’ is in itself a wholly positive gesture; “that’s bostin mate!” is roughly equivalent to “that’s really good / brilliant / really nice / smashing” and it’s been around for absolutely ages.

He recently commissioned a special England flag Bostin shirt in time for St. George’s Day, and I was lucky enough to catch a sneaky preview of it before they went on sale (and was pretty impressed). Donato’s also got a mean marketer’s mindset too, because he always seems to get some really good press out of his ventures - most recently, Bostin was featured in the Bromsgrove Advertiser (his brother’s pictured in the article modelling the England flag design) and he’s had tons of coverage and plugs from everyone ranging from regional press to Adrian Chiles (the BBC ‘One Show’ presenter and thoroughbred Brummie), who can oft be seen sporting one of Donato’s designs.

They are really quite cool T-shirts and really make a (wonderfully positive, for once!) statement when you wear them out and about. Go buy one from the Bostin shop, and start some conversations when you’re out in public.

(and yes, I buy my Bostin shirts just like everybody else, in case you were wondering whether this was a sponsored plug.

This time, prepare to welcome BloggingBrum to the world, a product of the creative mind of one Mark Steadman… What’s it about? “It’s a blog for Birmingham. That’s it.”

Succint. I like it. (Bonus points for having a picture of the Floozie in the Jacuzzi as part of the design!)

I’m always in favour of new outlets for the wealth of news and info that flows out of the second city - that’s why you’ll see me contributing to it in due course. In the meantime, blogroll it, bookmark the feed, and enjoy.

And as a little PS, here’s an odd thought which may strike a chord with all you WordPress users out there - why does WP have an ‘Uncategorized’ category by default? Surely it’s a little tautologous; if you didn’t want to classify a post, you would just refrain from ticking any of the boxes. Programmers’ logic overriding common sense once again…

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.)

Birmingham’s a bit of a higgledy-piggledy place when it comes to architecture. You have brash, modern buildings parked opposite 1980s ‘oddities’, which themselves are next to to clean lines and glass frontage of Starbucks and office buildings… And on top of that, you have the old, OLD buildings that were in Birmingham long before anybody else decided to move in and build the latest multi-storey hotel with a weird leopard-skin cover down one side (if you’ve seen the SAS Radisson, you’ll know what I’m on about).

This photo, taken by Bill Phillips, quite neatly sums it all up:

Image credit: Bill Phillips

I know from personal experience just how hard it is to take good shots in the centre of Brum, the contrast between light and shade around there is so extreme that if you have a less-than-great camera, you end up with half a screen of barely visible image and an overexposed remainder.

If you’re wondering where the above shot was taken, get off the bus at Colmore Row, walk to the left (heading away from Snowhill railway station), cross the road, then turn right 90°… Bingo.

Seen any other nice shots of Brum? I’d love to see them, so leave your links in the Comments.

In typical style, I’m fashionably late writing about this. Just like I was to the actual event. Note to self: update satnav maps (I drove straight to Brum from work via a route I don’t normally travel via - the bloody thing tried to take me the wrong way around two separate one-way systems, one in Wolverhampton and another one in Brum!) Anyway, I got there, and I wasn’t to worry, because people were there way after I said my goodbyes and headed home.

If you didn’t turn up on Monday night at the Dragon Inn, you missed out - around 30 bloggers and creative types descended on the pub for an evening of spontaneous conversation, anecdotes and other small issues… things like the future of blogging in and about the West Midlands, and how to promote the region outside of the clique of Birmingham bloggers (paraphrased from Podnosh’s Nick Booth, or Mr. Nosh as I think I might call him from now on).

(more…)

Unless something dire happens to obstruct my attendance, you can find me (along with a bunch of other friendly locals) at the second Brum Bloggers Meetup. I’ll give you fair warning now… It’s nestled just at the top end of the Gaybourhood (as my lesbian housemate calls it, and the name just happens to have caught on in our house, so that’s our name for Hurst Street). Whenever she nips down to The Fox on Hurst Street, I like to say that she’s ‘got a thirst for Hurst’, but I get odd stares and I suddenly feel the need to leave the room. You decide on that one.

To be fair, The Dragon Inn is actually nestled in The Arcadian Centre, so it’s almost separate - to get to the Arcadian car park, you just drive down (up?) Hurst Street and the entrance is there. Parking costs, according to the company which runs it, are about £1-£1.20 an hour, so put aside a fiver for parking if you’re driving there (like I’ll have to).

Now, for the brave, here are the event details:

Name: Brum bloggers Meetup 2
Tagline: or the first Birmingham Social Media Cafe?
Host: Birmingham Bloggers UK

Type: Meetings - Club/Group Meeting
Date: Monday, February 18, 2008
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Location: The Dragon Inn

Address:
Hurst Street
B5 4TD
Birmingham

Map: View

See you there!

Now, before we get started, I’m by no means a Microsoft shill (the Ubuntu sticker on my laptop should indicate that, that’s another discussion entirely however so let’s not go there). But, one thing I do like though are the pockets of resistance within Microsoft’s ranks; one such division is the development team who work on stuff like the Live project - Live Maps being one of the jewels in the crown. Obviously tons of money was poured into the project to make it a competitor for Google Maps, but it’s actually got some pretty standout features.

Someone told me that they’d revamped the interface, and he has - it’s now got far more “bird’s eye” views for the UK than it did previously. More interestingly, it’s got quite comprehensive bird’s eye views for all over the centre of Brum - but they’re at least two years’ old Still, if you’ve never been to Birmingham, it’s an easy way to get a much better idea of what the city looks like. I even did my route from my house to the Bullring in a spare five minutes

To get you started, here’s a link which’ll zoom you right in to the former Birmingham Eye (in front of the ICC, on Broad Street) - if you move left, you get to a large roundabout, also the location of UCE’s Birmingham Conservatoire (well, now BCU’s Conservatoire, but I still don’t acknowledge last year’s namechange) and, to the left of that, Victoria Square - but the beauty is you can always switch to overhead mode and get the street names! Top tip with Live Maps: you can change your orientation too, so you get a completely different perspective which can also help you look round tall buildings - click the N, S, E or W letters to rotate your view.

I’ve also collected together some of the city centre landmarks into a collection on Live Maps called Christopher’s Brum Landmarks, so you can spend a while browsing round and seeing what’s what and what’s where, as such - there are far more comprehensive listings and I encourage you to search around the subject (the ‘Explore Collections’ feature in Live Maps is your friend here!) but these landmarks should get you started. There’s a really comprehensive compilation of landmarks which someone has uploaded onto the Keyhole forums (and Live Maps has spidered, and can display) - to view it, click through to Birmingham Folder.kmz on Live Maps, or click here to load it directly.

I put loads of landmarks into my own Google Earth collection, but as I couldn’t get them to save in a single .kmz file I just kept them in Google Earth’s temporary files - but then lost them all when I upgraded Google Earth. I’ve not gotten round (as yet) to fully recreating this list, so apologies for the awful gaps in the Live Maps collection (I’ve not even put a pushpin into my own University faculty building! (it’s the TIC inside Millennium Point on Curzon Street)). However, I’ll add more landmarks to my own collection as I get time to do so, but as I’m avoiding doing work right now you’re all quite lucky - that’s an hour of quality time I just put into aggregating that list of landmarks!