Popular music of Birmingham
Birmingham's culture of popular music first developed in the mid-1950s.[1] By the early 1960s the city's music scene had emerged as one of the largest and most vibrant in the country; a "seething cauldron of musical activity",[2] with over 500 bands constantly exchanging members and performing regularly across a well-developed network of venues and promoters.[3] By 1963 the city's music was also already becoming recognised for what would become its defining characteristic: the refusal of its musicians to conform to any single style or genre.[4] Birmingham's tradition of combining a highly collaborative culture with an open acceptance of individualism and experimentation dates back as far back as the 18th century,[5] and musically this has expressed itself in the wide variety of music produced within the city, often by closely related groups of musicians, from the "rampant eclecticism" of the Brum beat era,[6] to the city's "infamously fragmented" post-punk scene,[7] to the "astonishing range" of distinctive and radical electronic music produced in the city from the 1980s to the early 21st century.[8]
This diversity and culture of experimentation has made Birmingham a fertile birthplace of new musical styles, many of which have gone on to have a global influence. During the 1960s the Spencer Davis Group combined influences from folk, jazz, blues and soul and to create a wholly new rhythm and blues sound[9] that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South",[10] while The Move laid the way for the distinctive sound of English psychedelia by "putting everything in pop up to that point in one ultra-eclectic sonic blender".[11] Heavy metal was born in the city in the early 1970s by combining the melodic pop influence of Liverpool, the high volume guitar-based blues sound of London and compositional techniques from Birmingham's own jazz tradition.[12] Bhangra emerged from the Balsall Heath area in the 1960s and 1970s with the addition of western musical influences to traditional Punjabi music.[13] The ska revival grew out of the West Midlands uniquely multi-racial musical culture.[14] Grindcore was born in Sparkbrook from fusing the separate influences of extreme metal and hardcore punk.[15] Techno's Birmingham sound combined the established sound of Detroit techno with the influence of Birmingham's own industrial music and post-punk culture.[16]
Early rock and roll[edit]
Interest in rock and roll developed in Birmingham in the mid-1950s, after American recordings such as Bill Haley & His Comets' 1954 singles "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Rock Around the Clock"; and Elvis Presley's 1956 singles "Hound Dog" and "Blue Suede Shoes" began to appear on British airwaves.[1]
Many performers who would be influential in the later growth of Birmingham music emerged during this era. Danny King had been receiving American blues and soul recordings by mail order from the United States since 1952, and soon afterwards began to perform covers of songs by artists such as Big Joe Turner in pubs such as The Gunmakers in the Jewellery Quarter.[17] In 1957 he formed Danny King and the Dukes with Clint Warwick, performing rhythm and blues covers in local clubs and cinemas.[18] Tex Detheridge and the Gators began performing Hank Williams covers on Saturday nights at The Mermaid in Sparkhill and on Sundays at the Bilberry Tea Rooms in Rednal in early 1956.[19] The emergence of skiffle as a popular phenomenon in 1956 saw the birth of a new wave of Birmingham bands. The Vikings started as a skiffle group in Nechells in the spring 1957,[20] with Pat Wayne and the Deltas also emerging as a skiffle group in Ladywood around the same time,[21] spending the summer of 1957 busking on pleasure boats on the River Severn in Worcester.[22]
Brum Beat[edit]
By the 1960s Birmingham had become the home of a popular music scene comparable to that of Liverpool: despite producing no one band as big as The Beatles the city was a "seething cauldron of musical activity", with several hundred groups whose memberships, names and musical activities were in a constant state of flux.[2] The New Musical Express calculated that in 1964 there were over 500 groups operating within the city.[3] Birmingham was a bigger and more diverse city than Liverpool, however, that was never subject to a single controlling influence such as that exercised by Liverpool's Brian Epstein; and as a result Birmingham's bands never conformed to a single homogenous sound comparable to Liverpool's Merseybeat.[23] Instead the city's music was characterised by a "rampant eclecticism",[6] its style ranging from traditional blues, rock and roll and rhythm and blues through to folk, folk rock, psychedelia and soul,[23] with its influence extending into the 1970s and beyond.[2]
It was in 1963 and 1964 that Birmingham's existing largely underground music scene began to attract national and international attention. The first single to be released commercially by a Birmingham band was "Sugar Baby" by Jimmy Powell and The Dimensions, released by Decca on 23 March 1962.[3] The first Birmingham-based band to have a Top 10 hit were The Applejacks, who signed to Decca in late 1963 and whose debut single "Tell Me When" reached number 7 in the UK Singles Chart in February 1964.[24] The Rockin' Berries made the Top 50 in September 1964 with "I Didn't Mean to Hurt You" and reached number 3 in October with "He's in Town", both songs featuring the distinctive falsetto vocals of Geoff Turton.[25] The Fortunes had their 1964 recording "Caroline" adopted as its theme song by the pirate radio station Radio Caroline,[26] and followed this with three major international hits in 1965 – "You've Got Your Troubles", a top 10 hit in both the UK and the US, "Here It Comes Again" and "This Golden Ring".[27] The Uglys achieved a sizeable Australian hit, "Wake Up My Mind," in 1965.[3] The Ivy League, founded by the Small Heath-born songwriting partnership of John Carter and Ken Lewis,[25] had three UK hits in 1965: "Funny How Love Can Be", "That's Why I'm Crying" and "Tossing And Turning".[28]
In early 1964 Dial Records and Decca both released compilation albums showcasing the breadth of the Birmingham music scene.[3] The sleeve notes to the Decca compilation emphasised that Birmingham's characteristic musical diversity was already becoming clear: "But is there a Brum sound? This album surely proves beyond doubt that the answer is no. The reason: all the city's groups, including those heard on this LP, are striving to achieve some degree of individuality."[29]
The most consistently successful Birmingham group of this era was The Spencer Davis Group, which fused its members' varied backgrounds in folk, blues, jazz and soul into a wholly new rhythm and blues sound[9] that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South".[10] Driven by the "astoundingly soulful"[10] vocals of the young Steve Winwood, accompanied by his own searing keyboard style,[30] the pounding bass riffs of his brother Muff Winwood, the jazz-influenced drumming of Pete York and the then-unique electric fuzz guitar effect of Spencer Davis,[31] the band started off playing R&B covers but achieved their greatest success with their own compositions.[30] Chris Blackwell of Island Records signed the band on the spot after hearing them at the Golden Eagle pub on Hill Street in April 1964,[32] and after four minor hits in late 1964 and early 1965 they broke through with their late 1965 single "Keep on Running", which knocked The Beatles off the number 1 position in the UK in January 1966.[33] Two more UK hit singles followed during 1966 alongside two highly successful albums, before the November 1966 release of their own composition "Gimme Some Loving" – the group's masterpiece and one of the great recordings of the 1960s.[9] This and its 1967 Winwood-written follow up "I'm a Man" were top 10 hits on both sides of the Atlantic[9] selling over a million copies and adding a huge fanbase in America to their existing European popularity.[33]
The Moody Blues were also originally primarily an R&B band, formed in May 1964 with musicians from other Birmingham bands including El Riot & the Rebels, Denny and the Diplomats, Danny King and the Dukes and Gerry Levene and the Avengers.[34] By November they had secured a major international hit with their multi-million selling single "Go Now", which reached number 1 in the UK and number 10 in the US, and whose "soulful, agonized" vocal performance established lead singer Denny Laine as one of the most recognisable voices in British music.[35] Although at this stage still within the R&B tradition, the music of the early Moody Blues already showed signs of the more experimental approach that would characterise their later career, with highly original musical compositions by Laine and Mike Pinder; live four-part harmonies that were far more expansive than anything used by bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Hollies or The Dave Clark Five at the time; and the zen-like repetition and rhythmic complexity of their piano parts prefiguring their future psychedelic style.[36]
The television programme Thank Your Lucky Stars, broadcast by ABC Weekend TV from its studios in Aston between 1961 and 1966, was a major showcase for British pop music of the period,[37] hosting the network television debut of The Beatles on 13 January 1963.[38] The show was best known for its catchphrase "Oi'll give it foive!", which entered nationwide consciousness as sixteen-year-old West Bromwich-born Janice Nicholls gave her verdict on the week's singles in Spin-a-Disc in her broad Black Country accent.[39]
Punk rock[edit]
Birmingham's earliest punk rock bands preceded the late 1976 emergence of the Sex Pistols and mainstream British punk, instead being influenced directly by the proto-punk of British glam-rock, American garage rock and German krautrock.[154] The earliest were the Swell Maps, formed in 1972 by brothers Epic Soundtracks and Nikki Sudden, inspired by T. Rex, The Stooges and Can.[155] The group produced hours of home recordings on reel-to-reel tapes over the course of the early and mid 1970s[156] with Sudden later recalling that when he first saw the Sex Pistols in April 1976 "my reaction was that they sounded the same as what we were doing".[157] Swell Maps "took punk's no-rules, do-it-yourself, destruction-of-rock promises literally" and "proceeded to create some of the most challenging, foreign, distinctive, and truly rebellious music of recent decades".[158] Although never more than a cult success, they were to be highly influential in the emergence of the next generation of alternative rock, with Dinosaur Jr., REM and Pavement all citing the group as an influence, and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore writing that "The Swell Maps had a lot to do with my upbringing".[154]
Misspent Youth (band) formed in 1975, influenced of the New York Dolls and The Stooges but remaining heavily indebted to glam-rock.[159] Although only loosely connected with punk they were considered to be Birmingham's finest live band of the era[160] and built a strong local following, becoming the subject of a legendary epidemic of graffiti throughout the city and surrounding area[161] and regularly selling out Friday nights at the city's leading punk venue Barbarella's by the end of 1978.[162] Despite releasing a single in 1979 and appearing on BBC Television in 1980 they attracted little attention beyond the city and broke up a year later,[162] but in carrying the influence of glam through the punk era they would influence Martin Degville, Boy George, Duran Duran and the birth of Birmingham's New Romantic scene.[163]
The Midlands' most important early punks were The Prefects, considered by DJ John Peel to be better than either The Clash or the Sex Pistols.[164] The group's earliest origins lay in Hednesford to the north of the city, where a group of musicians including Robert Lloyd, P. J. Royston, Graham Blunt and Joe Crow formed in 1975 influenced by the New York Dolls and Neu!, originally calling themselves the Church of England, later The Gestapo and finally – on the suggestion of Royston – The Prefects.[165] Lloyd met Harborne's Apperley brothers at a Patti Smith concert in Birmingham in October 1976, later joining their band and bringing the name and several members from his previous band with him.[166] The new band's first public gig in 1976 ended in a riot when they performed their first song "Birmingham's a Shithole",[167] but by May 1977 they were opening The Clash's "White riot" tour at London's Rainbow Theatre,[164] perfecting a "shambling, improvisational" repertoire that included the 10-second "I've got VD", a highly original interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody", and their most well-regarded track, the 10-minute "The Bristol Road leads to Dachau",[164] an early example of the art-punk that would later emerge in the 1980s.[168] The Prefects had no interest in making records, their sole recorded output being a single released after they had split up, and two Peel Sessions eventually released in 2004 as the compilation album The Prefects are Amateur Wankers.[169] Distancing themselves form the wider punk movement – claiming "Bands like The Fall and Subway Sect are all dead serious... and we're a laugh"[170] – their "incredibly prescient and self-effacing sense of humor" saw them "satirize the commodification of punk with clarity, precision, and humor long before anyone else had even realized the limitations of the so-called movement."[171] Describing the "legendary Birmingham group" the journalist Jon Savage later wrote "The Prefects were always one of the most hermetic and confrontational groups. They spared no one, least of all the public."[172]
The release of the Sex Pistols' first single "Anarchy in the UK" in October 1976 led to a wave of punk bands in Birmingham as in the rest of the country. The Accused released a single EP in 1979,[173] their self-deprecating style illustrated by their two most popular songs: the self-explanatory "We're Crap", and "W.M.P.T.E." – a tribute to the West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive.[174] A review of The Sussed in 1978 called them "a shambles", concluding "every town should have one band like The Sussed. Any town with two is in dead trouble"[175] Dansette Damage were best known for their classic debut single, the "double b side" "N.M.E."/"The Only Sound", that became a favourite of John Peel and his producer John Walters and was later learned to have been produced by Robert Plant.[176] The all-male Dangerous Girls started in 1978 with a post-punk sound influenced by Public Image Ltd, perversely moving in an increasingly punk direction for their series of singles,[177] that were re-released on three compilation albums in 2001 and 2002.[178] Of wider long term significance were The Killjoys, who were led by future Dexys Midnight Runners singer Kevin Rowland and grew out of an earlier band called Lucy and the Lovers in 1976.[179] The success of their wild and snarling first single "Johnny won't go to Heaven" in 1977 saw the NME declare Rowland to be Johnny Rotton's successor as the voice of punk protest, but Rowland was already expressing dissatisfaction with punk's uniformity, complaining that "The original idea of punk was to be different and say what you wanted ... not just to copy everybody else".[180] By 1978, in an early sign of the uncompromising eccentricity of Rowland's later career, the Killjoys were inspiring the hatred of punk audiences by performing Bobby Darin covers and country and western music at punk venues like London's 100 Club.[181]
Birmingham's Charged GBH were, alongside Stoke-on-Trent's Discharge and Edinburgh's The Exploited, one of the three dominant bands of the second wave of British punk,[182] which emerged at the start of the 1980s and "took it from the art schools and into the council estates", reacting against the perceived commercialisation of earlier punk to produce music that was "brutal, fast and very aggressive".[183] G. B. H.'s influence helped codify the raw sound that would become known as street punk,[184] becoming a prime influence on the mid-1980s emergence of the thrash metal bands Metallica and Slayer.[185]
New Romantics[edit]
The genesis of Birmingham's New Romantic scene – "the only one outside of London that ever really mattered"[199] – lay in the 1975 opening of the Hurst Street boutique of fashion designers Kahn and Bell, whose influence was to ensure that Birmingham didn't wholly conform to the uniform punk aesthetic that dominated the rest of the country.[200] By 1977 Martin Degville was designing and selling clothes from his own stall on Birmingham's Oasis fashion market and had become a legendary figure on Birmingham's club scene.[201] Boy George later recalled that it was Degville's influence that led to his own relocation to the West Midlands in 1978: "he wasn't like the other punks, he was wearing stiletto heels and had a massive bleached quiff and huge padded shoulders. He looked brilliant."[199]
As the 1980s arrived, the Rum Runner nightclub played a significant role in rock music in the city, particularly in the case of New Romantic supergroup Duran Duran. Dexys Midnight Runners, Stephen Duffy, The Au Pairs and The Bureau also emanated from the city's music scene at this time.
The Charlatans, Dodgy, Felt, The Lilac Time, and Ocean Colour Scene were other notable rock bands founded in the city and its surrounding area in this period. Pop Will Eat Itself formed in nearby Stourbridge and consisted of Birmingham band members, as did Neds Atomic Dustbin.
Bhangra[edit]
In the 1960s Birmingham was the birthplace of modern bhangra,[13] a form of music which combines the influence of traditional Punjabi dance music with western popular music and urban black music such as reggae and hip-hop.[202] By the 1980s Birmingham was well-established as the global centre of bhangra music production and bhangra culture,[203] which despite remaining on the margins of the British mainstream[204] has grown into a global cultural phenomenon embraced by members of the Indian diaspora worldwide from Los Angeles to Singapore.[13]
The origins of British bhangra lie with Oriental Star Agencies, established by Muhammad Ayub as a small shop selling transistor radios on the Moseley Road in Balsall Heath in 1966, but soon including a business importing and selling recordings of traditional music from India and Pakistan.[205] In 1969 OSA established a record label to record the work of local Birmingham bands Anari Sangeet Party and Bhujhangy Group,[206] and it was Bhujhangy Group's early 1970 single "Bhabiye Akh Larr Gayee" that first took the momentous step of combining traditional Asian sounds with modern western musical instruments and influences.[207] Over the following years a network of local musicians and distributors emerged, recording in studios such as Zella in Edgbaston and distributing their work on cassette through local pubs and electrical goods shops.[205] With a young and culturally self-confident audience of second generation immigrants receptive to musical innovation and experiencing a wide range of music in multi-cultural districts such as Handsworth, bands such as Bhujhangy Group continued to experiment with integrating western music such as guitars into their sound.[208] Newer groups began to take this further: DCS successfully fused bhangra music with rock, using only keyboards, electric guitar and a western drum kit in place of the traditional dhol;[209] while Chirag Pehchan, another Birmingham bhangra band formed the late 1970s, combined bhangra with reggae, ragga, early hip-hop, soul, rock, and dance influences.[210] By the late 1970s bhangra had become well established as a significant and distinctive cultural industry among South Asian communities both in Birmingham and in Southall in London.[211]
The late 1980s and early 1990s marked the heyday of the grassroots bhangra scene.[212] Although the music remained largely underground, with sales of bhangra albums excluded from the British charts due to the scene's separate and often informal distribution networks,[213] successful bhangra bands could sell up to 30,000 cassettes a week, often outselling mainstream top 40 acts.[214] Groups usually featured between 5 and 8 musicians, often freely exchanging members, making one-off recordings and performing at Asian nights and weddings, with only the most successful being able to build longer-term recording and performing careers.[212] A network of late night and weekend events at local nightclubs was supplemented by "All-dayers" that could appeal to younger fans.[215] Bhangra musicians began experimenting with recording technology and with tracks such as Apna Sangeet's 1988 "Soho Road Utey" and DCS's 1991 "Rule Britannia" started to locate their songs within a distinctive British South Asian experience. [216] Handsworth's Soho Road in particular developed a global cultural resonance, symbolising the specific cultural social and political space occupied by British South Asians.[216]
The city's cultural diversity also contributed to the blend of bhangra and ragga pioneered by Apache Indian in Handsworth. Bally Sagoo's 1994 single "Chura Liya" was the first Asian language record to enter the British mainstream top 20.[6]
The late 1990s and early 21st century saw DJs, sampling and remixing gradually increase in importance in Birmingham bhangra [217] and drum and bass grow as a musical influence.[218] British bhangra became increasingly important within India itself, influencing both traditional folk music of the Punjab and wider cultural phenomena such as the music of the Bollywood film industry.[219]
Birmingham's importance in worldwide Bhangra is partly a result of its widespread connections to other areas of South Asian culture, both on the Indian subcontinent and throughout the Indian Diaspora, and partly the result of its concentration of musical infrastructure, with an extensive web of record companies, distributors, recording artists, DJs and marketing activity.[203] Suky Sohal from the band Achanak has also highlighted the importance of Birmingham's tradition of interaction between eclectic musical cultures: "It's such a thriving place for music, it's very sort of inspirational in that sense to produce music with the mixture of different cultures in the city. I mean I was brought up in a white school, I work in a black area, and I play for a bhangra band so I've seen a lot of different cultures, and that does help the music a lot. I think that is why Birmingham is thriving musically ... because you got a lot of different cultures musically, and in everyday life."[220]
Hip hop and Dance music[edit]
The hip hop scene dates back to at least 1980, and has produced popular performers like Moorish Delta 7 and Brothers and Sisters.
When hip hop performer Afrika Bambaata visited Britain he inspired new rappers and hip hop DJs including Moorish Delta 7 Elements, Juice Aleem, Roc1, Mad Flow, Creative Habits, Lord Laing, Fraudulent Movements, and DJ Sparra (twice winner of the DMC mixing championships).
House had been played in the City from the mid-1980s, DJ's such as Constructive Trio, Rhythm Doctor at the Powerhouse. Rhythm Doctor worked in one of the shops selling a lot of the early house 12"'s, Tempest. Frenchy (Constructive Trio) also worked in a record shop selling house – Summit Records & Tapes as well as being involved in radio. Pretty B Boy (constructive Trio) had his own record shop opposite St Martin's Church. Mixmaster (constructive Trio) was, as his name suggests, a master of the mix, and also worked in radio.
There were places such as 49er's, Roccoco, Willies T Pot, Mojo, Dial B, Salvation..which played a mixture, from funk, jazz, soul through to house via hip hop and all sorts of everything. Bill, Dick used to do 49ers bar and Roccoco, and earlier Anthony's, along with Ean and Aidan, who did Mjo and Willie's T pot. Nathan dj'd at 49er's around this time, playing everything from Prince to House and Balearic.
The city embraced the national acid house scene with Lee Fisher and John Slowly's Hypnosis on a Thursday night at the Hummingbird Carling Academy Birmingham. Followed shortly after by Snapper club at the same venue, which was Jock Lee and John Maher's Friday night, along with Jock and John, DJ's such as Martin & Bear, Pretty Boy B, amongst others. This span off into bank holiday all-dayers with guests including Lee Fisher, Sacha, Carl Cox etc. Although illegal acid house parties had been popping up in Birmingham before, the first proper legal all night acid party/rave was at The Hummingbird also, and was called Biology, which was a London organisation. Acid house nights such as Spectrum took place in Tamworth and at The Hummingbird in Birmingham. Land of Oz at The Dome with Paul Oakenfold and Trevor Fung in 1989 which occurred on a Wednesday night, the same night The Happy Mondays played at The Hummingbird. Pirate stations such as Fresh FM and PCRL help publicise the music and parties, which help expand the scene in Birmingham. West End Bar was a major meeting place before parties, with Steve Wells and Steve Griffiths and was another important venue throughout this period of time. Electribe 101 hit the charts in 1988 with 'talking with myself'.
Brothers and Sisters took place in the 'Coast to Coast' club in the old ATV television studios on Broad Street in the early 1990s. Then came Fungle Junk, held for many years beneath House music club Fun., and bringing The Psychonaughts, Andy Weatherall and the Scratch Perverts to the city.
Electronic artists include Big beat musicians Bentley Rhythm Ace, Experimental music producer Enarjay 808 the Terminator and Electronica bands Electribe 101, Mistys Big Adventure and Avrocar.
Ambient dub[edit]
Ambient dub was born as a genre in Birmingham in 1992, when the term was used by the city's independent label Beyond Records[293] for their series of compilation albums documenting the music of the scene that had grown around the Birmingham club Oscillate.[294] While the rest of Britain was dominated by rave, Birmingham developed an underground scene combining the practices of electronic music with the influence of local black and Asian music,[295] particularly the production techniques of dub, to create a highly psychedelic downtempo sound that reinvented trance music by stretching the music out using echo, delay and reverb techniques.[296] Oscillate incorporated these new sounds with surrounding visual effects to create what it called "heliocentric atmospheres",[297] becoming "The club of the moment, making waves far beyond the Midlands".[298]
Oscillate was more about live electronic music performances than DJs playing records and it quickly became the centre of a network of producers and other musical collaborators.[299] The group most closely associated with the club was Higher Intelligence Agency, established at Oscillate by its founder Bobby Bird in May 1992 to improvise live tracks between records, releasing their first track on Beyond's first compilation Ambient Dub Volume 1.[300] In 1993 they released their debut album Colourform and began to take their experimental live act around the country.[300] Also associated with Beyond Records and performing regularly at Oscillate[297] were Leamington Spa-based Banco de Gaia, who built on an ambient dub foundation with samples and elements from Eastern and Arabic music.[301]
Rockers Hi-Fi was formed in 1991 by the former punk Richard "DJ Dick" Whittingham and former rock & roller Glyn Bush,[302] who'd both fallen under the influence of Jamaican dub pioneers King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry in the Birmingham club scene of the mid 1980s.[303] Their debut single "Push Push" and debut album Rockers to Rockers marked the first fusion of the influences of dub and house music and "redefined dub for the acid house generation",[304] going some way to establish the sound that would later become known as trip hop.[302] In 1993 Whittingham and Bush formed the Different Drummer record label, which quickly grew an international roster of artists to become "the premier outlet for forward-thinking dub productions", building links with wider scenes including German and Austrian nu-jazz.[304] They later also launched the Different Drummer sound system, which toured worldwide.[304]
Former Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris's Scorn project severed its last sonic links to its grindcore roots with its 1994 release Evanescence, creating "a dark digital domain where fancy danceable beats pop under thick clouds of textured samples, deep bass and minimal muted vocals";[305] that redefined ambient dub[306] by moving away from generic Roland TR-808 synthesiser elements and creating a sound much darker than that associated with Oscilllate.[274] Harris' records as Lull went further into the ambient extremes of isolationism, dropping the drums and rhythm loops that characterised Scorn to focus entirely on looped tones and evolving textures, with songs drifting in and out as slow, steady progressions of tones, chimes and drones.[307] Harris also released ambient and dub influenced albums under his own name in collaboration with musicians such as New York City's James Plotkin,[308] and Bill Laswell[309] and Italy's Eraldo Bernocchi.[310]
Retro-futurism[edit]
While the music of the rest of Britain during the 1990s was dominated by the straightforward revivalism of Britpop, Birmingham developed a more irony-tinged retro-futurist subculture, producing music which was far more experimental in its sound, and whose relationship with the recent past was more ambiguous.[329] The bands associated with the movement were highly varied in their style, ranging from the catchy and ethereal pop of Broadcast, to the more sinister and angular work of Pram and the enigmatically precise instrumental music of Plone.[330] All were however united by their interest in old musical technology that had previously been thought of as modern,[331] and its use to create an ironic sense of "nostalgia for a time when people were optimistic about the future".[332] Tim Felton of Broadcast described how they would "take that from the past, move it forward and present it", though insisting that "it's not a true realisation of the past. It's all perception and reality, which are completely different"[331] The American National Public Radio described Trish Keenan as "an ambassador between the parallel worlds of what happened and what might have been", noting that she was "interested in memory less for nostalgic reasons and more for the world and lives it distorted and rewrote."[333]
Birmingham's divergence from the national mainstream was partly driven by the city's inherently eclectic musical culture. Rosie Cuckston of Pram, originally from Yorkshire, recalled how "coming to Birmingham, you suddenly realise that there's life outside of your pop or punk, and other influences start to feed in".[332] An early review of Broadcast from 1996 described them as "laughing in the face of genres".[334] The architectural critic Owen Hatherley has also linked the scene to Birmingham's unique recent history, as the booming economy and futuristic rebuilding of the postwar era gave way to the economic collapse and melancholic cityscape of the 1980s.[335]
The roots of Birmingham's retro-futurist scene lay in the mid 1980s. The club night Sensateria ran from 1984 to 1994 in various Birmingham venues playing psychedelic and experimental music by artists such as Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. It was an important early meeting place, introducing key figures to seminal influences such as the late 1960s Californian band the United States of America.[336] The term Retro-futurism was first applied to music by Brian Duffy, who used it to refer to the music of Stylophonic, which he established with Robert Shaw of Swan's Way in 1984 and whose performances involved 15 analogue synthesisers sequenced live on stage – "We were kind of doing this mix of Kraftwerk, The Walker Brothers and Marc Bolan ... it was synthesiser glam rock"[337]
Pram were the scene's first major group, forming in 1988,[338] with their early sound being limited to vocals and an accompanying theremin.[339] Their minimalist and abrasive 1992 debut Gash stood out from the grunge and shoegazing that dominated alternative music at the time, instead anticipating later developments like lo-fi and post-rock,[340] and their musical palette broadened rapidly over subsequent releases to encompass jazz and hip-hop elements and unusual instrumentation including glockenspiels, toy pianos and a Hawaiian bubble machine.[339] The best known exponents of the scene were Broadcast, who formed in 1995 and of all the Birmingham retrofuturist bands were the most directly influenced by 1960s psychedelia.[341] Fronted by the ethereal vocals of Trish Keenan, Broadcast combined influences as varied as the library music of Basil Kirchin, the children's music of Carl Orff and the soundtracks of Czechoslovakian surrealist cinema, while continuing to produce identifiable pop songs.[342] Although they largely eschewed mainstream commercial success, they acquired a large and international cult following and were cited as an influence by artists as diverse as Blur, Paul Weller and Danger Mouse.[343]