Author: Jon Hickman

Jon moved to Birmingham from Guernsey in 1997. Many people are confused why. He is working hard to integrate himself. Bab. http://www.theplan.co.uk

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 59: The 45th President of the USA

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On Tuesday, November 8, 2016 voters in the USA will choose their 45th President. If it’s not Hillary then Hillary will at least be the story, and behind every great woman is a man and behind that man is a song and behind that song is a woman and that woman is from Bearwood, behind which is: Birmingham.

The song that catapulted Bill Clinton to the presidency was Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac: a hopeful song forged in adultery, a message between two parts of a powerful professional couple whose careers were intertwined.

Don’t Stop was written by Christine McVie who grew up in Bearwood, the daughter of a concert violinist and music teacher. She studied art in Birmingham and played in bands, getting connected within the music scene. Her own career was going pretty well but it wasn’t until she met and married John McVie, and then joined his band Fleetwood Mac that she really found success in the music industry. Both partners to the marriage found greater success during their period of professional and marital partnership then they had before, peaking with Rumours the album that gave us Don’t Stop – Bill’s election theme – and the tour that preceded the McVie’s divorce.

McVie has said that the song is about her feelings about the break-up of her marriage. As she’d also written another song on the album about how much she was enjoying her affair with Fleetwood Mac’s lighting director, this might seem bastardly behaviour but it was pretty standard in the Mac at the time. Christine, being an honest Brummie type, at least wasn’t as bad as Lyndsay Buckingham whose contemporary practise was to write songs about how he didn’t love Stevie Nicks: and then give them to her to sing. This author likes to cast her in the role of Bill and so we look again at the lyrics, hopeful but also personal, a love letter to Hillary perhaps:

“Don’t stop, thinking about tomorrow,

Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,

It’ll be, better than before,

Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.

 

Don’t you look back,

Don’t you look back.”


What’s next? Hillary in 2016, that’s what.

Image CC Ableman. Fleetwood Mac facts checked by Howard.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 57: Exchange Students

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When we were at school a mate of mine would occasionally turn up at things during the summer with a weird sidekick: a French kid called Xavier. Xavier was an exchange student, sent over for weeks at a time to learn English how it is really spoken. Unfortunately for M. et Mme. Frenchie, they’d sent Xavier to hang out with a load of teenage boys so all Xavier learnt was how to say “I ave gaz” and then belch very loudly.

But Xavier wouldn’t have got that far if it wasn’t for Birmingham for we had our very own exchange student, America’s Benjamin Franklin, who used to come over to brush up on science and invention as it really happens by spending weeks in the 18th century working alongside the gentlemen of the Lunar Society who, it turned out, actually did have gas.

Photo CC BY: Robert S Donovan

Start here.

We’re in the paper today as part of one of those broadsheet articles they have about Birmingham these days. We’re actually right at the top of the article, with a link and everything. So this little post is aimed at new people who have come here. It’s a primer in what we’re about.

Firstly, you need to know that we have a manifesto. It spells out what we’re about and how we work.

Secondly, the work. We’ve actually already been around the houses on the generic ‘Birmingham isn’t that bad’ broadsheet feature. That should tune you into our tone. We have a number of recurring features, the main one being 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World (think nuclear war, tennis, Star Wars, the Internet, kettles and the FIFA World Cup).

There’s a lot of other stuff here: short stories, poetic asides, and popular toys such as Birmingham in Real Time – go there to see, in real time, the cost of running the second city – and the Birmingham Transport Strategy Generator.  Our most popular post covered Benefit Street. Oh, and if you’re early interested in that Trojan horse thing, here’s what we have to say about that.

We tweet @paradisecircus.

Thanks for stopping by.

Satirical Cartoon: Gove’s New Booklist at the Library of Birmingham

A schoolgirl is stretching to reach the books in the Library of Birmingham. She is standing in front of a shelf marked “Great American Novels”. The shelves start too high up the walls, well above her head.

In the foreground some men in suits are talking. One holds a newspaper with the headline “Gove’s New Booklist”. He is saying “looks like we can cancel the step-ladders, then”.

Ghosts

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before: I’m not from Birmingham, though I’ve lived here for some time and I’ve learned to pass myself off.

Over the years I’ve developed a fair sense of Birmingham’s official and folk history and I’ve picked up a Brummie twang and an authentic sense of loss and frustration about my (affected and now apostate) fandom for Aston Villa. No matter what I do though I can never acquire a lived experience and innate sense of Birmingham. Cultural osmosis cannot equip me with a deep down connection to this place in bone and blood, a fact of which I’ve now decided that I’m glad.

You see I’ve been home for a few days, back to Guernsey. I’ve reconnected with my childhood haunts and found them… haunted. Everywhere I go there are ghosts. Continue reading “Ghosts”

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.

Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 44: Musical differences”