The best club night ever in Birmingham was Tuesday night’s Click Club at Burberries on Broad Street between 1988 and 1990. Thereafter Burberries shut down and it moved around small Birmingham venues so much that nobody ever seemed to know where it was and numbers dwindled. It eventually resurfaced as indie became more mainstream as the Friday night club night, Freak Scene at Snobs. Burberries was always the best though.
I made a Spotify playlist to celebrate Tuesday Night’s at Burberries. It’s collaborative so if you ever went feel free to add tracks. Be warned though, I do have my own specific memories of the place and if I don’t think a track got played there regularly I reserve the right to remove it from the list.
This was a favourite track and always resulted in much angst ridden posturing that I think pretty much answers the overiding question in this song. The answer is probably something along the lines of “because you’re an awkward, self conscious angst ridden freak in a cardigan.”
How I look at the emo kids and laugh and their self-indulgence.
Several reasons for posting this one, and for posting it today.
1) Prog Britannia starts on BBC Four tonight which I’m very much looking forward to. You should watch it. Much better than Celebrity(?) Big Brother. Go Now is from the early career of the Moody Blues, before prog. From their early origins where they were nearly called the M&B 5 due to an proposed sponsorship deal from Birmingham brewery Mitchells and Butler, through their pschedelia phase and concept albums they were one of the bands who defined prog. I suspect they may get overlooked though. Go check out In Search of The Lost Chord though. It’s a great English Psychedelic album.
2) I was listening to David Hepworth talking to Richard Thompson on the Word Magazine “Backstage” podcast this morning and they were discussing the way certain songs don’t sound right to you unless heard a certain way through a certain system. It’s all to do with evoking a particular romantic and nostalgic memory. Their examples were Eddie Cochran heard on the Dodgems or Phil Spector on the Waltzer. When I was little we inherited my Dad’s old Dansette and his 45s (that’s the speed that a 7″ piece of plastic rotated at 45 revolutions per minute(RPM) you MP3 kids.) . This track was one of my favourites and sadly the Dansette and 45s no longer exist, but in my memory this song always sounds a particular way with a certain sweet distortion that is always lost in any latter day CD or MP3 version.
3) These boys are Brummies and worthy of celebration for that alone. They were also exponents of the locally built Mellotron, an early tape based sampling keyboard. Over on the aforemention BBC Prog Britannia microsite is a great clip about the Mellotron but that’s an aside really as there isn’t one on this track so I’m not sure why I’m even mentioning it here! Pay attention.
4) Rather than linking to YouTube or last.fm all the time I’m also trying out blip.fm where you can hear the track. That also gives me the opportunity to tweet about the track with a link to this here post.
The photo is from one of my Flickr friends, Eightball. I was looking for a picture of a Dansette and his came up on the first page of searches.
I intended to go see these at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath this evening but by the time we’d got ourselves organized it was sold out. Seems I am unlucky with this band. I tried to see them at a pub in Balsall Heath about a month ago, only to get there and find the pub was shut.
I did see them earlier in the year at Moseley Folk Festival and was mightily impressed. They are a Birmingham based bluegrass band. It’s very much a family thing with dad on banjo and national steel guitar and his two daughters on guitar and mandolin. The girls’ vocals harmonize real purty.
This is one of their slower tracks picked mainly because it name-checks Bill Monroe.
Posting this one from my phone so no links at the moment. A google should point you to their myspace where you can take a listen.
