Author: Jon Bounds

Jon was voted the ‘14th Most Influential Person in the West Midlands’ in 2008. Subsequently he has not been placed. He’s been a football referee, venetian blind maker, cellar man, and a losing Labour council candidate: “No, no chance. A complete no-hoper” said a spoilt ballot. Jon wrote and directed the first ever piece of drama performed on Twitter when he persuaded a cast including MPs and journalists to give over their timelines to perform Twitpanto. But all that is behind him.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 45: Shit shoes

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If you’ve seen any coverage of the Oscar ceremony, or any Oscar ceremony, you’ll know it’s all about the clothes. The women’s clothes. The women’s bodies, the ladies’ bras. Male attendees get to dig out evening dress and pass without comment. It’s an everyday sexist world, but let’s turn the male gaze on its head. Or feet rather.

Posh men’s shoes are always shiny, and that’s hard to keep up. Unless you have a basic military training, polishing leather is boring hard and messy. Luckily for the servants of the rich and famous, there is an alternative. An for that alternative the maids in Manhattan have to thank: Birmingham.

Back in 1793 a chap called Hand, in Birmingham of course, obtained a patent for preparing flexible leather having a glaze and polish that renders it impervious to water and need only be wiped with a sponge to restore it to its original luster. This is patent leather, and it’s been responsible for awful shiny shoes all the way from Bacons to Freeman Hardy and Willis, to Hollywood (which we invented too).

Birmingham: it scrubs up well. Or wipes up with a sponge easily. Or something.

Photo CC by: Dave Gates

 

Concrete and Cocktails: a journey to Birmingham’s glitter-stained independent heart

An unchained psychogeographic adventure from the authors of Pier Review.

Can you drink in all of Birmingham city centre’s independent hostelries in one day in 2011? Yes of course, although it might not be sensible. This is the first appearance on the web of this adventure, although it has been available as an eBook for some time.

CC by: Danny Wolpert
CC by: Danny Wolpert

As a part-time journalist and aspiring avatar for the gods of debauchery you are asked to do some unsavoury things. Be it covering some average indie band’s third ‘my dad drives the van’ gig. Or having to find an interesting angle on Valentine’s Day, despite having all romance crushed out of your soul by a government intent on turning the country you live in into a feudal system where big business robber barons set up their own personal fiefdoms using jazzy branding and clown make-up. But sometimes you get given a task that you are so attuned to, so personally right for, that it feels like the hand of Baron La Croix himself has pushed you to this point. Granted, the email only asked for a small article about my favourite independent pubs in Birmingham, but I knew this was a coded communication from the Furies, a challenge. Could I drink in all of the independent pubs in Birmingham in just one day? Of course I knew it was possible, just not very sensible. In my head I counted ten probable targets and beer maths did the rest. One pint in each meant ten pints at least. I was going to need back-up.Jon Bounds is a man with a lot of pie-placed fingers, his intelligence is sharpened by an odd wit. He seems to be the only person whose capacity for the Devil’s Dishwater exceeds my own and can understand the startlingly lucid and intelligent observations I tend to make after four or five small beers. So recruiting him was important and understandably easy given his weakness for strong continental lager and odd tasks.Please note the following account is pieced together from handwritten notes that degenerate into a language, I suspect, is a drunken dyslexic cuneiform, and a memory that doesn’t work properly in the first place.

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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 44: Musical differences

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All bands eventually get back together, except for the only two that you might actually want to see again: Slade and The Smiths. They all get back together because they all split up and then find they need the money, and the reason they split up is called ‘musical differences’. The ‘differences’ being ‘the difference between the cash they each pocket in royalties’ and the ‘musical’ being Oliver! on VHS on the tour bus.

Oasis ran out of ideas, yes, but the creative bankruptcy just made it all the more galling for Liam that it his brother was earning in the region of seven times what he was: because Noel wrote the big hit songs.

Readers of Morrissey’s autobiography (and hi readers, these spaces in between groups of sentences are paragraphs) will know that El Moz and Johnny Marr got 40 per cent each while the other two Smiths got 10. And they’ll know all about the recriminations afterwards. And what the judge in the court case had for breakfast. When these bands split, like so much from Up North, it’s bitter rather than mild.

But they wouldn’t have split if it wasn’t for Birmingham.

Because back in 1914 as the World geared up for War, Birmingham invented musical differences—there just wasn’t enough real conflict around.

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Local shops

Shops used to be different back then, from now and from each other. Each one had its own smell and atmosphere. Visits to Witton Road were infrequent, as the concrete shopping centre at Perry Barr was the preferred destination, but when we did go it was usually for something exciting and interesting. Turning right rather than left at the bottom of our street was quite a treat.

Each block on the Witton Road started with a larger shop, and the sides of the buildings were painted with signs. ‘Leslie Smith for Television’ read one. I never went in as we had a TV and no need for another, but it was a special shop as I’d been told Leslie Smith used to play for Aston Villa whose ground was on the next main road over. On the next corner was Dick Taylor’s sports shop. Everyone called him ‘Discount Dick’, despite the name over the door saying ‘R. Taylor’, and he too had once been a Villan. I got my first pair of football boots there, a reward for making the school team, and the place had a beautiful dark smell of rough cloth. My dad wouldn’t have taken me anywhere else as he would get a good deal there. He often bought whole kits for the football team he helped to run, and a good customer would be remembered.

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The shops nearer to our house were also interesting. The greengrocer was known as ‘Dick Turpin’, which gave him an air of untrustworthiness. As well as an apron, my image of him has a black fedora which I very much doubt a greengrocer wore in the late seventies in Aston, Birmingham. But my favourite shops were just along from the highway-robbing fruit and vegetable man, a chemist and a newsagent next to each other.
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101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 43: Class conflict in popular culture

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In 1908 26 men lost their lives just on the edge of Birmingham, but also on the edge of our understanding of the earth itself. Opened in 1876 Hamstead Colliery was at that point the deepest mine in the World—2000 feet down beneath the surface. Not too far from where the Aldi is now.

At this point Birmingham led the globe in the technology of digging holes in the ground, the heroic deeds of those that went down them created stories and songs and flooded popular cognition: along with fishermen, miners were the working class cultural heroes that built a nation. These miners would be the foundation of the celebration of the differences between the rich and the poor—which is the central tension in all great Great British culture.

The high point—celebrating but diametrically opposite to the deep seam miners—is 1962’s Hole in the Ground by Bernard Cribbins, which peaked at number 9 in the charts. The numerologists amongst you will have spotted that there’s a 9 in 1908, and also that 1+0+8=9 (much like how 1962’s 1+6+2=9)—that’s no co-incidence. 54 years later (54/9=6, turn that around much like the miners and Cribbins were opposite terraneally, and they were both opposed to the ruling class and you get—a 9) Cribbins punished the capitalists, puncturing them with the sharp end of his spade. He dug it round when they wanted it square, he dug it where he wanted it to be: but most of all he dug it towards those class martyrs of Hamstead in Birmingham.

Noël Coward chose the record as one of his Desert Island Discs, probably unaware of the implied class genocide in the last verse. Hole in the Ground is one piece of popular culture where the working man comes out on top—literally—and that’s a tribute the those that we lost. It’s a tribute to the courage—and digging skills—of the men of Birmingham. Together they produced a message to the capitalists—and that’s that.

 

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 42: Teletext

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Before Birmingham gave the World the Internet, information traveled at a much slower and more unreliable pace. Say you were on the terraces of the Spion kop on a Saturday afternoon, depressed, waiting and hoping for some light relief from Billy McNeill’s Aston Villa who were probably losing away at Watford: a mention on round-the-grounds round-up on the radio would filter through the one earpiece of the man with the anorak and transistor, be mumbled to a bloke trying not to stand too close to him, a rumour might become a ripple, would become a gale of laughter. If you missed the classified check, you wouldn’t really know what happened until the Sports Argus came out—and by that time you were usually well on the way to not caring.

Teletext changed all that. Pages around the magic number of 302 would be refreshed and rotated all around the country: from living room to pub. It was a revelation, provided you had a newish telly and a decent signal you could get information in a matter of minutes.

You won’t be in the least surprised that it’s Birmingham that is responsible for the BREAKING NEWS culture that drowns us, but it’s a more circulatory route than some. You can’t of course have teletext without television—and we couldn’t have had it if broadcasting television didn’t work quite the way it does.

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Lost Shops of Birmingham, No.1: The Andalusian Cafe

The Andalusian Cafe in Moseley was a couple of shop fronts up from the Prince of Wales. No one ever went in… we did.

The counter staff seemed uncertain when asked for food, there was no menu and they went in to a fizz when we opted for a plate of food with Harissa; they had none and had to go to their mum’s house for a tube of the stuff.

The food did arrive. But just then so did a white van unloading domestic hardware such as fridges and washing machines which were trooped through the dining room and put at the back as we gobbled down what had to be the only meal ever served there.

I asked why it was called The Andalusian. It was explained they always wanted to go to Morocco and we didn’t get out a map to show them Andalusia was in  Spain.

You always knew the cafe by its sign, the only words on it were ‘Andalusian Cafe, Tel’ maybe the owners ran out of paint before they could add the phone number.

It closed down soon after  our meal.

 

By Richard Lutz