Bands

THE BAND SCENE.

The first ever concert I ever went to was Blink182 at the Birmingham NIA. I was a sixteen year-old boy who was beginning to enjoy his parents loosening their grip on what I can and can't do. It was the first time I'd been to Birmingham without an adult and it was night! Travelled all the way to the train station (there's one next to the NIA) and then followed the crowd. Blink182 were amazing. The NIA is a great venue, good facilities and the sound is good. You can hear who ever is playing even if you're stood at the back of the Arena.
The Scratch Club

Now my taste in music is quite specific. I like rock music, love it in fact, and I turn my nose up at most other types of music. My general rule is that unless there is at least one kind of guitar in it then I'm not interested. So when I found myself on my way to The Jailbird's rap night, 'The Scratch Club', I was as shocked as anybody. My flatmate Berlina had been trying to convince me to go all week but I had been adamant that I would avoid The Scratch Club at any cost. So how did she finally talk me into it? Well, she did it like this:
Berlina: Come on Brett, please come!
Brett: No, I am not going. I've got to sort my sock drawer.
Berlina: But it will be something different. You said you like to try new things.
Brett: That didn't mean I'd want to be tortured by that awful noise. Besides I've put some water on the stove and I need to watch it.
Berlina: I'll buy you a drink; I'll get you two drinks and a kebab on the way home.
Brett: I'll need more than two drinks to stop that noise destroying my brain and I'll be too nauseous after hearing that stuff to eat a kebab.
Berlina: ....They'll be lots of girls there.
Brett: I'll get my coat.
So we made our way to The Jailbird, which is quite a small venue near the ICC. I'd never been to The Jailbird before, still being new to the city. I nearly walked past it as it's so small I could have hidden it behind a postage stamp. I am exaggerating obviously but it is quite a small bar. Small but nice is how I'd describe it.  I have to be honest it was not what I was expecting. I had seen '8 Mile' a few weeks before so I was expecting some warehouse-style bar with a slightly menacing atmosphere. That is not what I found. As we walked in we were confronted with the sight of a small stage in the corner. Dotted around the room were a number of small tables and around the edge of the room there were black leather sofas. On each of the tables there was even a candle! Biggy Smalls would have turned in his grave.
We weren't one hundred percent sure we were in the right place. The music they were playing wasn't the kind of music we'd come to hear and the place was done up like a 70's jazz bar. It wasn't until I saw 'scratch club' written behind the bar in faded pink chalk that I was sure we hadn't made a mistake. "Phew," I said. "I would have hated to miss it."

Even though it was quite busy we managed to get a table at the back of the room. There were five of us and only four chairs. So after about fifteen awkward minutes of me having to go round asking to borrow a chair, "Is anyone sitting here, oh they are, ok sorry to bother you. Is anyone sitting here..." – nightmare. We waited for the first performer to come on. After about a half hour of my tutting at being kept waiting, they came on.
Now unlike the actual venue the first performer did look like a rapper. Baggy clothes, cap backwards and lots of 'bling'. As he got on the stage I asked my companions, "What does he think he looks like?" By now I had had a little to drink and my mouth was a little loose so my friends were on the look out to stop me embarrassing myself. Good mates.

As the rapping started I resigned myself to having to sit there bored all night but it didn't turn out that way. I don't want to go through all that I saw that night, neither of us have time for that kind of thing. I will tell you how impressed I was by the talent of the people I saw that night though. It was mostly rapping but they also had beat boxers up. At one point a number of rappers wanted to prove that they could rap off the top of their heads. So they got the audience to call out words or subjects that they could rap about. It was amazing to see them just integrate and change their rhymes so quickly. They did it without the tiniest pause.

Towards the end of the night the audience were asked if anybody wanted get up and show what they could do. I have to admit that I may have drunk a little too much. "I can do that!" I said. "I'm gonna get up there!" It was at this point my friends decided they thought we should leave. So we did, and for that I will be eternally grateful to them.
I'm not going to tell you that from then on I loved rap music. I didn't rush out to get Snoop Dogg's back catalogue and I didn't start walking round saying 'Word'. I did however come away with a new respect for that type of music and I will never be as quick to sneer at it as I once was. If you like rap music or want to try something new then I suggest you go along to The Jailbird or any of the other pubs and bars that have a night like The Scratch Club. If I, a rock music-loving puritan, enjoyed it, then anyone will.

Up until I came to uni I thought places like the NIA were all you really needed when it came to concerts. I thought to myself that if the performer isn't big enough to fill an Arena or Stadium then why bother. That rule had held me in good stead for a number of years. I'd seen a few great large venue concerts. That was until Berlina (it's always Berlina) changed that.

Now Berlina, my flatmate, got to be friends with a girl called Gemma. Gemma was well into the band scene of Birmingham. She knew all the bands that were worth seeing and the good venues – that's what I was told. Gemma had asked Berlina to come to a 'gig' because a guy named Ricardo was playing and according to Gemma was worth seeing. So I caught Berlina as she was heading out the door. I asked where she was going and she told me. It was a rough area just outside Birmingham; I won't name it here because if one of the residents of that area read it they might take offence. If the area they live is anything to go by that would mean my house getting firebombed (joke!).

Anyhow I couldn't let Berlina go out there by herself; I am a gentleman after all. So I went with her.
What followed was one of the strangest journeys of my life. It was late October and very cold. The cold was not the worst of it though. What was worse was the fog. I have never, not up to that point or after, seen fog so thick. It was like a curtain. We got off the bus where the driver said we should. We didn't know if he was telling the truth or not.

The fog was so thick and so bad that Berlina was just a dark shape and she was stood next to me! What came next was a shambling, stumbling attempt to find the pub where Ricardo was supposed to be playing. We did this in a very ingenious way. If we saw a light then we walked towards it to see if it was the pub. All the while we did this I cursed Berlina under my breath for dragging me out of my comfort zone – my lovely, safe comfort zone. We used this moth technique for about twenty minutes. In that time we came to two houses, a doctor's surgery and a church. We got there finally, as I went though the door I looked at Berlina and saw that she had been worried about the same thing as me, that we'd have been stumbling around all night only to be found by the milkman at five in the morning after we'd been forced to eat our own shoes to stay alive. But we had made it; phew, our shoes were safe.

The bands that played that night were unsigned. I think that's a shame because they were so good. They could play their instruments well and write catchy tunes. It turned out to be a great time. What was cool was that the bands came into the audience when they were finished playing. I ended up having quite a chinwag with the bassist of one of the bands. I do need to take a sentence or two to say how good Ricardo was. It was worth the harrowing trip just to see him.

That night opened my eyes to the band scene and also to the possibility of smaller venues. There is a good atmosphere in the smaller venues. They could never challenge the sheer spectacle of a stadium or arena concert but there has got to be something said for a venue where you can actually see the guitarist's eye colour.
Birmingham has hundreds of small venues that put on band nights. You just need to keep your eyes open. And with the large number of them that there are you don't even need to open them very wide. There is also the NIA and O2 Academy if you want to see established bands. Some of the many football clubs are known to have the odd concert so there are even stadium venues in Birmingham as well. It's got it all. There's a lot more in Birmingham than you would think and most of the bands and performers in the city are worth a look. So if you end up visiting Birmingham please, please try and make the most of it.