Category: 101 Things Brum Gave The World

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.

Technically, you could argue that, as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, Birmingham and the Midlands will eventually gift to all humankind a catastrophic environmental collapse that will ultimately destroy the human race. Some might say it’ll be our just desserts for pillaging the planet’s resources. But knowing what form our destruction will take? Well, that can be laid at our door too.

The time was 11:15pm; the place, latitude 35, some 24 degrees west of Greenwich; the ship, the ‘Guinevere’. Our narrator and his new bride watch as mysterious red glowing lights fall from the sky into the ocean. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that an alien life-force has colonized the ocean depths. In theory, we could have lived peacefully together, co-existing in our separate corners of the Earth. But no, the humans have to go and fuck it up it, sending down submarines to investigate and, when these are destroyed, dropping nukes into the sea to upset the new arrivals. What follows is an escalation of attack and counter-attack until the aliens unleash their most devastating blow: they melt the polar ice caps. This causes sea levels to rise, flooding many major cities and resulting in social and political meltdown across the globe. Serves us bloody right.
Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 55: Environmental catastrophe”

Oh, America. Hamburgers, Hot Rods, hanging out at the mall, Rock & Roll, Fox News, an out-of-control culture of gun violence. You’ve come a long way since you were a just another undiscovered continent of perfectly happy indigenous tribes.

Your star may now be on the wane, but you won’t find many people who will disagree with the notion that the 1900s were very much the American century. It was then you grew so strong, so big, and so quickly, that your power was undeniable. Culturally, economically, militarily – there was no-one to touch you. You even reached for the stars and lassoed the moon. Well done, America.

There are some who may argue that your rampant success was built on the foundations of your early life as a colony of Britain. After all, it was the British who gave you your language, your ingenuity, and your pioneer spirit. But to claim this stellar rise to success was the result of British intervention would be tenuous, to say the least. No, in truth, it wasn’t until you struck out on your own and decided to make a fist of it that you truly realised your potential.

So, how did you do it?

How did you take those first steps? And, once on that road to freedom, what informed the creation of your culture? What enabled you to become the dominant nation of the world?

Well, America, your history books may not tell you this but it was, as it happens, the city of Birmingham.

Two of your founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, got their revolutionary ideas and zeal from their involvement with Birmingham’s Lunar Society, the ad hoc collection of political, economic, mechanical and cultural minds that formed in the city in 1765 and which managed, through a process of free-thinking, a spirit of open-mindedness, and a middle finger firmly raised in the direction of the status quo, to pretty much invent the modern world that you eventually dominated.

From their visits to Birmingham in the 1700s, Jefferson and Franklin took this free-wheeling spirit and a belief in the right to free assembly back home with them. To defend this right, they wrote into your constitution the right to bear arms. There would be no arms to bear if not for us, for it was here, in Birmingham, that the guns, and the hand grenades, and the nuclear missiles that are variously used (or not used) in the defence of freedom, initially came into being.
Your first great export to the world was cinema (impossible without Birmingham), through which you invented the teenage rebel who shocked square society. The rebels rode motorbikes (a Brummie innovation) in the 50s, and rode them still as they evolved into the counter-cultural hippies of the late ’60s (channelling that Lunar Society vibe once more). Far out, bab.

Those hippies then cut their hair and started working in the banks (another Brummie invention) that became economic powerhouses, whilst your manufacturing processes took the (Brummie) innovations of the Industrial Revolution to hitherto unseen levels of growth and efficiency, which in turn created the disposable income that your brands, such as the carbonated (yes, that’s right) Coca Cola, successfully fought over on their way to conquering the world.

By the early 1980s, it was all over – there was truly no-one to touch you. And it is surely no coincidence, either, this at around this time you took (Birmingham’s) Duran Duran to your hearts in a way that we never could, and thus the baton was passed and the process of your Brum-inspired rise to global prominence was complete.

If you’ve ever wondered why you instinctively treat Ozzy Osbourne like royalty, now you know: It’s in the genes.

So, America, on 4th July next year, raise a glass to your hometown, and don’t forget the high foive.

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Stars and stripes photo CC Crystal Hess