Made In Birmingham - the city's punk, reggae and bhangra heritage
Alison Jones talks to the team behind a new film chronicling the unique music of Birmingham.
Forty years ago there was a club that was the epicentre of all that was cool in music. John Peel was the DJ, Pink Floyd played there, as did The Who, Black Sabbath, Traffic, Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac.
The American music press voted it the number one rock venue in the world. But it wasn’t in America. It wasn’t even in London.
It was above a furniture shop in Erdington and it was called Mothers.
“There is no recognition, no plaque but people still come from America to look at the shop,” says Jez Collins, of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research.
“This city has a rich musical heritage but we don’t use that history as Liverpool and Manchester do in the UK, or New Orleans, Nashville and Memphis do in the US.
“There’s a shop on the Coventry Road which sells 90 per cent of the bhangra music in the world.
“We should be celebrating those individuals, we should be shouting about it saying ‘Look, this is from Birmingham’.”
Jez and director Deborah Aston have been tackling this oversight head-on in a new documentary Made In Birmingham: Reggae Punk Bhangra, which “charts the cultural, social and political background to three music genres that have strong associations with the city”.
Funded by Screen WM through its Digital Archive Fund and produced by Swish Films, the Birmingham-based company run by Roger Shannon, professor of film and television at Edgehill University, it is a blast from the past via archive footage of news stories and band rehearsals and performances intercut with reflections from the musicians themselves.
UB40’s Brian Travers, Dennis Seaton from Musical Youth, Amlak Tafari of Steel Pulse, Viv from Fuzzbox, Paul Foad and Peter Hammond from the Au Pairs, Paul Florence, aka Paul Panic, of the Accused, Pete Byrchemore of The Nightingales, Andy Sargent of the Denizens, Alan Apperley from The Prefects, photographer and DJ Boy Chana and S-Endz from Swami were all interviewed at patisserie and coffee shop Maison Mayci in Kings Heath. Even Janice Connolly, aka Mrs Barbara Nice, looks back at her time as a singer with The Surprises and The Ever Readies, who were regulars at the Fighting Cocks in Moseley.
“The film is about voices being heard,” says Deborah Aston. “We are often overlooked as a region because we are too close to London and too close to Manchester.
“This (documentary) doesn’t only give the big names but also some of the unsung heroes an opportunity to be heard and to recognise their work as influential and important.”
The three genres were chosen because of how much they were tied up with a sense of community and of identity and because of how they would bleed over into other musical styles. Reggae and bhangra had direct links to the city’s large immigrant population while punk was another form of cultural self expression, a rebellion against authority and the system.
“We could see the overlap between all three,” says Jez. “Reggae was very strong in the city in the early 70s because it was the way black people expressed themselves, through music, through blues parties.
“There was an overlap through Handsworth and Moseley with punks, who had the same idea about how they wanted to express themselves, how they wanted to change society. This in turn fed into bhangra, where you would have second and third generation Asians taking traditional folk music then hearing reggae through their neighbours walls and employing those sensibilities in their music.”
They deliberately avoided metal, the other sound the region is most famous for.
Jez says: “There was never really a crossover between metal and reggae, bhangra or punk.
“There was Rock against Racism that Steel Pulse and the Au Pairs were involved in. UB40 grew up among black friends and that influenced their music.
“There were these really interesting stories to be teased out. We have found footage that hasn’t been seen for years. We have managed to tell this story about how Birmingham is, culturally, quite an accepting city.”
The film also acknowledges some of the more iconic hotspots in the city’s musical history like Barbarella’s, The Nightingale, Odeon, The Locarno, Rebecca’s, International, The Hummingbird, The Rum Runner, The Powerhouse, Pagoda Park and Romulus, as well as The Fighting Cocks, which still thrives as a pub.
