444 Club on Friday

For the benefit of all those Birmingham-based, gig-going, uplifting gormandizers out there (Heyyy now, Daddy-O...), The Courtesy Group - Al Hutchins' awesome band of Scrotnig noizemeisters who've been mentioned here on many an occasion - are supporting London-based up-and-comers XX Teens at The Rainbow in Digbeth tomorrow evening. XX Teens sound like a lot of fun - plus I'd like to see the mighty CG playing a non-Curate's Egg event - so I'll endeavour to get my pert wee Irish arse there. I think you should, too.

It's one of Kamikaze Events' 444 Club nights, in which new acts share the spotlight with local bands. Alongside The Courtesy Group, there'll be sets from Magnificatz and Betty & The ID.
Plastic Noise DJs will be, um, DJ-ing. They look as though they'll be fun, too. I purloined this wonderful image from their Myspace page:


That looks disturbingly like a mindmap of what I listen to while I'm driving.

Anyhow, here's the flyer:

Brum Tig: I'm "It" Now

I've been tagged by my new pal, the smart and feisty local Blogging journo Joanna Geary. I suppose I should explain what the Hell that means.

Jon Bounds of the excellent Birmingham: It's Not Shit website (they of the recent Spotted Dog Pub Landlord John Tighe-winning Brummie of the Year Awards) has come up with a novel way to help promote this fine city's thriving community of bloggers. It's called Brum Blog Tig and Jon's rules are as follows:

• Each player starts with an odd, but fun, fact about Brum and one odd, but fun, fact about their blog.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose two people to get tagged and list their names.
• Tag your post “birminghamUK” and “brumblogtig” (the second one is a memetag).
• People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (with their version of the post) and post these rules (or link to them here). They can tie it in with their particular subject if they so wish.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  

So - without any further ado - here's My fact about Brum:

The Digbeth area has long been known as the spiritual home to the city's Irish community, but did you know that one of Ireland's most famous literary sons - a certain James Augustine Aloysius Joyce - once resided there?

James Joyce and his lover Nora Barnacle arrived in Birmingham in 1920. They were about to embark on a new life in Paris after their lengthy self-imposed exile in Trieste, and in those days Digbeth's Coach & Horse Station was a common stopover point for journeys between the the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. This involved a time-consuming 1,300 mile detour, which was - at the time - a common feature of short-haul European travel, despite the fact that SatNavs had not been invented yet.

Joyce - an Irish emigre with a fondness for booze, lock-ins and a thriving live music scene - immediately felt at home in Digbeth. Nora, by contrast, instantly despised the area. After years of living in impoverished exile she longed for the style, sophistication and readily available boeuf bourguignon of the fashionable Parisian scene. According to contemporary eyewitness reports, she tried to drag her suitcases onto a Paris-bound coach and insisted that Joyce should get her "the Hell away from this fecking shithole". Joyce stubbornly refused, and tried to drag her suitcases out of the Coach Station and into a nearby pub. This luggage-based tug-of-war soon escalated into characteristically violent confrontation between the hot-tempered lovers which lasted just over a fortnight. According to Richard Ellmann, the row only ended after Joyce - who by this stage was suffering from a cut lip and broken spectacles - hastily composed a conciliatory lyrical poem to Nora entitled "In the Coach Station at Digbeth":

O cracked lookingglass
The flesh of lip now parted
By repeated blows to my skull
From your suitcase

Following the fight, Joyce and Nora left the coach station and found lodgings at a nearby public house called The Dislocated Arms, and it was there that Joyce set about forming his first and last band. According to Joyce scholar Hugh Jenner's definitive study of this period (C'mon Feel The Joyze, 1988), the resulting band - 'Molly and Her Bloomers' - were pioneers of the interwar industrial music scene. Unfortunately, their bulky musical instruments - which included heavyweight manufacturing equipment like conveyor belts, steel rolling mills and even a viaduct - prevented them from getting booked into adequately sized venues and made touring prohibitively expensive.

Frustrated by these setbacks to his fledgling musical career, Joyce submitted to Nora's persistent demands and decided to leave Birmingham and resume their journey to Paris. Before they left, though, Joyce indulged himself in a mammoth pub-crawl of the area. This event was recorded in his personal journals and - according to Ellmann and others - formed the basis of his masterpiece Finnegans Wake:

Riverrun, past the Adam and Eve, from Pershore Street to bend of Rea, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Ceol Castle and environs.

That's my Brum Fact. Here's my Blog Fact:

Not everything I write here is absolutely true.


I'm tagging Pete Ashton and Dave Metcalfe.

The National, Birmingham Irish Centre, 6th November 2007

"I wish that I believed in fate

I wish I didn't sleep so late

I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders."

- The National: Mr November

"Everything I can remember

I remember wrong."

The National: Daughters of the SoHo Riots

It’s been a long time since I last visited Birmingham’s Irish Centre. I remember going there as a child, my Dad supping a pint of Guinness in the lounge while my little brother Rob and I scoffed vinegar-soaked chips and slurped watered-down Coke and tried to play pool on a table we could barely reach. Back then, Rob was significantly shorter than me and “little brother” was more than just a figure of speech. Ah, simple times.

And, look… there I am again: slightly older, none-the-wiser and now I’m standing outside the Irish Centre. I’m waiting for the coach that’ll take my family and me to Aunt Maria’s cottage in rural County Monagahan - via Hollyhead and the Irish Sea - and aren’t I the sulky wee gobshite! Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan was about to be released on the big screen and I was going to an Irish village with one shop, three pubs and no cinema. There was no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t get to see Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan in the way that God intended, and this caused me great anguish. But I’d more than make up for it in later years, and – for that matter - in recent weeks.

As I got older, the Irish Centre became a regular fixture in my teenage calendar. I went to numerous gigs there – from late-80s seminal indie darlings like The Sundays to raucous Irish folk bands like the Wolfe Tones. It was also the regular venue for my sixth form college’s end-of-term disco. Yes, we called them “discos” and we weren’t being ironic or post-modern. That’s how O-L-D I am.

I can still remember one end-of-termer during my late teens, as the proper old-school, non-superstar DJ – a middle-aged man known as The Mighty Quinn – put on the obligatory Pogues track and the dancefloor erupted, as Anglo-Irish dancefloors have a tendency to do during obligatory Pogues tracks. It was Fiesta, one of the barnstormers from the classic If I Should Fall From Grace With God album, and it wasn’t long before I found myself entwined in a spinning huddle of drunken bodies. Fast, faster then even faster we spun, like some booze-fuelled, high-octane centrifuge of booze. Faces, lights and sounds melted into a dizzying, synaesthetic blur until, inevitably, I lost my grip, flew through the air and crashed into some vacant tables and chairs parked nearby. Within seconds I was back on my feet - dusting off the booze, ash, glass and bits of table – and launched myself back into the fray with tremendous gusto.

These days, my recovery time is a bit more sluggish. If I was catapulted though the air and crashed into furniture now I’d probably be in a body cast typing this with broken fingers. Or dead. Or possibly a broken-fingered corpse.

Like I said, it had been a long time since I’d last visited Birmingham’s Irish Centre. More than seventeen years had gone by since I’d last made an eejit of myself in the main hall, but when I went to see The National last month very little had changed. The same tricolour flag was hanging in the corner, the same Irish lakeside mural was on the wall and – unless I’m mistaken – the same fittings and fixtures were behind the bar. It was as though the place had been preserved in amber, a weird time-capsule of faded 70’s working class elegance. Nothing had changed, only me.

For me the Irish Centre is still loaded with meaning, and few places resonate with my memories – with my personal history and mythology - in quite the same way. As I glanced around the main hall – at the chipped paint on the Céad Míle Fáilte sign, at the school assembly hall stage with its gold foil drapes - it set off a wild cascade of half-remembered moments. Dreamlike glimpses of lost innocence and lurid triumphs, a nonlinear slideshow of images that all run together and never make sense. The shy 16 year-old gracefully disappears in a room while his boisterous older incarnation raises his heavenly glasses to the heavens. Snapshots from a simpler time, when all the wine was all for me and we were heirs to the glimmering world.

It was the perfect place to see a band like The National.

Technorati Tags:the national, birmingham irish centre, digbeth, star trek 2: the wrath of khan, the sundays, wolfe tones, pogues,
Generated By Technorati Tag Generator