‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ Documenting Birmingham’s Alternative Music Scene 1986-1990

Acknowledgements and Thanks

Thanks to Dave Travis for opening up his incredible archive and recalling the histories associated with The Click Club. Likewise, thanks to Steve (Geoffrey S. Kent) Coxon for his generous insights and for taking a road trip to tell us almost everything.

Thanks on behalf of all Click Clubbers to Travis and Coxon for starting it and for program- ming so many memorable nights for creating an environment for people to make their own.

Thanks to Dave Chambers (and Andy Morris), Donna Gee, Bridget Duffy and Bryan Taylor

Thankswho provided to all of particular those who materials contributed for the written exhibition memories: (Bryan Steve for some Byrne; fine Craig writing!). Hamilton; Andrew Davies; Sarah Heyworth; Neil Hollins; Angela Hughes; Rhodri Marsden; Dave Newton; Daniel Rachel; Lara Ratnaraja; Spencer Roberts; John Taggart; Andy Tomlinson and Maria Williams.

Acknowledgements to the many contributors to Facebook Groups for The Click Club and Birmingham Music Archive.

John Hall and Ixchelt Corbett

Mighty Mighty: Russell Burton, Mick Geoghegan, Pete Geoghegan, D J Hennessy Hugh McGuinness.

Lyle Bignon, Boris Barker, Darren Elliot, Graham Bradbury, Richard March Yasmin Baig-Clifford (Vivid Projects), John Reed at Cherry Red Records, Ernie Cartwright, Birmingham Music Archive, Justin Sanders, Naomi Midgley.

Neil Hollins for production of the podcast interview with Steve Coxon and Dave Travis.

Digital Print Services who produced the images.

Special thanks to: Neil Taylor, Ellie Gibbons, Anna Pirvola, Aidan Mooney and Beth Kane. What was The Click Club?

Established in 1986 by Dave Travis and Steve Coxon, ‘The Click Club’ was the name of a concert venue and disco associated with Birmingham’s alternative music culture. Located at the nightclub ‘Burberries-on-the-Street’, on a pre-regeneration era Broad Street, capacity was limited to a few hundred attendees on any one night. varied culture of the independent and alternative sector such as those associated with the C86During collection the period issued 1986-1990, by NME: thePrimal club Scream, showcased We’ve a wideGot a variety Fuzzbox of and acts We’re reflecting Gonna the Use It, and The Mighty Lemon Drops. The club supported the emergence of other local bands such as The Wonder Stuff, Ocean Colour Scene and a group of ‘grebo’ acts from the Black Country including Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. It scheduled Gothic Rock bands like Balaam and the Angel, Fields of The Nephilim and Rose of Avalanche, as well as nurturing the so-called baggy scene with appearances from The Charlatans, James and Blur (before they were labelled ‘Britpop’). The heterogeneous nature of the independent scene and a liberal approach to booking was further underlined by performances from hard-core punk bands like The Stupids, ‘acid jazz’ act James Taylor Quartet and DJ Fatboy Slim, as well as Zimbabwean music from The Bhundu Boys, who hold the record for the venue’s best attended gig.

The Click Club was thus important locally, nationally and internationally for the economic role it played as part of a touring circuit, and for distributors and retailers of independent music. As a central feature in a music scene operating on a DIY-basis, independent of the major labels, at the intersection of subcultures, it also had enormous cultural value for its participants.

Like so many sites of popular music culture, Burberries is long gone and, as with so many poses a number of challenges. This year marks the 30th anniversary of The Click Club’s opening,scenes that an haveapposite had anmoment important to explore in people’s and celebrate lives, assessing such a spaceits significance and the scene after andthe fact network of activity it represented.

This exhibition draws upon the personal archive of promoter Dave Travis, whose archive of images taken by Travis at The Click Club, which are a small proportion of those produced asfilm, a professional posters, magazines music promoter and ephemera and photographer. detail a dynamic Travis space estimates and time. that Central his personal are a set of archive of photographs is in excess of 100 000 images. The exhibition enlists participant accounts and loaned artefacts too in order to contextualize The Click Club as a historical moment that remains important to its community and to the music and cultural heritage of Birmingham Who is this exhibition for?

The title of the exhibition comes from 1986 single ‘Is there anyone out there’ from local band Mighty Mighty:

Is there anyone out there for me? Is anyone else lonely? I can’t stand another summer,

surely she’s out there somewhere someonebut if toonly, care I couldand share find thatin my girl world

The lovelorn lyric evokes someonethe romantic to drag angst me of round youth Chelsea but also Girl! poses1 a question for the curators of this exhibition: who is out there who might know about The Click Club and is anyone else interested in this subject?

The questions we have set out to explore therefore ask: what is the value of this material?

Does such material have wider importance and contributions to make for our understand- ingWhat of doesthe past? it tell us beyond confirming the memories of the few individuals it concerned?

While the exhibition will no doubt appeal to those who attended The Click Club as well as fans of popular music more generally, it is aimed too at a broader audience interested in history, urban life, creativity and the cultural economy.

These notes set out contextual details for the exhibition as well as details of those behind it. They aim to supplement and echo the materials found in the exhibition and to underline the nature of a general project to recognize, explore and preserve popular music’s past – in

Birmingham and further afield.

To underline the appropriateness of the song and title, Chelsea Girl was a clothing store and iconic meeting place in Birmingham High Street. As the Evening Mail’s Zoe Chamberlain wrote in February 20151 in a feature on the city’s lost shops and shopping culture:

Every young woman of a certain age loved Chelsea Girl when they were growing up because it offered trend-led pieces at affordable prices. They disappeared when the company morphed into River Island in 1988 Curating the exhibition

The core of the exhibition is the photography of Dave Travis. Travis began his career as a photographer for music magazines such as Sounds, New Musical Express and the local BrumBeat. His photographs were originally used in Click Club promotional items and materials such as the in-house Click! magazine. records and historical documents but also as artworks in their own right. The images reflect his trained eye and we have sought to present these not just as Over 500 original negatives were digitally scanned and these are presented in a slideshow in the exhibition. A selection of images – representative of the general culture of the Click Club and Travis’ artistry – has been selected for the walls and displayed in a variety of shapes and sizes. These images were scanned at high resolution and prepared for print with the help of Ellie Gibbons of the Birmingham School of Media, BCU.

The exhibition was originated and overseen by Dave Travis, Jez Collins, Sarah Raine and Paul Long of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). Collins is the founder of Birmingham Music Archive and has published widely on popular music heritage. Raine is a PhD student researching the younger generation of the current Northern Soul scene. Long is the Director of BCMCR and Professor of Media and Cultural History. Anna Pirvola, a postgraduate student in the Birmingham School of Media, aided the team and the organization of the exhibition.

Parkside Gallery

Parkside Gallery is a leading art, design and media exhibition space within the Birmingham City University Parkside Building, with an emphasis on, but not that is being undertaken within the wider context of the University. confined to, media and design-led practice. Exhibitions add value to the research The gallery is an integral part of the Faculty of Art, Design and Media’s teaching and learning environment. A small committee of University staff shapes an annual programme of relevant and innovative work that seeks to engaging audiences within and beyond the institution. Visitors can expect to see a diverse range of shows throughout the academic year, culminating in the University’s own graduate shows in the summer.

‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ is the second of three shows within the programme that explore music genres and culture constructed from archives of photographic images, ephemera and memories. We have already exhibited on the design of punk rock and are planning an exhibiton on the Northern Soul scene in Spring 2017.

Exhibitions at Parkside Gallery are managed by John Hall and Ixchelt Corbett C86 & All That – The Cool Universe mixtape. In his last book, Document & Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade (Orion,Neil Taylor 2010) is a Neil former chronicled NME journalist the rise ofcredited the Rough with Trade compiling label theand influential shops. His C86latest chronicles the independent music scene of the mid 80s. In this short piece, he outlines thebook, musical C86 & development All That: The ofBirth a national Of Indie scene. In Difficult (See: www.facebook.com/c86andallthat) Times, due out later this year,

In May 1986, the NME asked me to co-compile C86, a cassette drawing together 22 new bands that helped codify a nascent independent music scene that had steadily been taking shape for the previous two or so years. The grinding effects of a hard line Conservative Government, the on-going recession, the brutally discombobulating social effects of the recent miners’ strike, and the sense that the period of post punk was well culture. A sudden thirst for change led to an outpouring of new bands, record labels, clubsand truly and over,fanzines. all combined It was, some to create later aclaimed, rupture the in the birth previously of Indie. steady flow of youth

The phenomenon was nationwide, with a whole welter of new bands forming and new clubs and record labels appearing to service their needs. Labels such as Creation, Pink, Ron Johnson, Vinyl Drip, Subway Organisation, Sarah and 53rd & 3rd sprang up not just in the capital but elsewhere – in Bristol, in Glasgow, in Manchester, in Nottingham and

Bereznik,in all parts Are of theYou country. Scared To At Get first Happy? the bands and wereTrout written Fishing about In Leytonstone in the mushrooming whose editorsfanzine wereworld, increasingly in publications one stepsuch ahead Rox, Simply of the Thrilled,mainstream the musicLegend!, press. Adventure Through In word of mouth, bands could pick up gigs all over the country. A band might play Ziggys in Plymouth and follow that with a show at the Mission Club in Bristol, before moving on to the Click Club in Birmingham, to the Wilde Club in Manchester, the Twang Club in Rochdale before arriving in Glasgow at Splash One. A similar route might then be plotted down the other side of the country before arriving London where the notable clubs included (or had included) Alan McGee’s Living Room, Dan Treacy’s Room At The Top, Bay 63 and the Cellar Bar at Thames Polytechnic.

The new indie was put together piece-meal, uninformed by anything as all-encompassing as the social media and internet networks that exist today. People made it up as they went along – their own take on what they considered to be cool. For instance, when the

McGee was shocked by their ‘punk accident’ look, which was ‘cool’, but smacked of ‘…a smallJesus &town Mary version Chain ofplayed a movement (and visited) that was London dead’. for the first time in summer 1984 Alan

Even in its borrowings, then, there was always a vestige of originality. Indie culture borrowed heavily, but at its best was never slavishly imitative. It took from the kinetic energy of Rockabilly and the pre-Beatles British Rock and Roll scene, and from all that followed – Merseybeat (first and second wave), Mod, Psychedelia, Punk, Krautrock, Glam and other genres. Punk had put ’60s pop culture to the sword – ‘no Beatles, no Stones’, as the Clash famously proclaimed – but indie rediscovered the period, took inspiration from it and fused it with the energy of punk to create a kind of ‘psychedelic punk rock’.

C86 was the NME’s twenty-third cassette release – and was, daringly, made up exclusively of new bands: it went on to become the most commercially successful up the best track that they could – Primal Scream, for instance, whose ‘Velocity Girl’ tape the paper ever issued, selling in excess of 40,000 copies. Some bands offered established a blueprint ‘indie’ sound that has come to define the moment and echoes werethroughout being shrewdthe later and work declined of the Stoneto offer Roses, up their one best of the work, first fearing bands tothat take it wouldindie be lostbeyond on an the itinerant confines release of the hipthat elite would and quickly into the become mainstream. forgotten. Some One bands band thought declined they to appear on the tape at all for fear of being typecast. In the end, everyone got typecast as C86 became short-hand for a sort of guitar-driven, indie sound. and cultural circumstances of the times. I decided to write a book about the period, C86 In 2014, I began thinking about the tape once more and, in particular, about the social was all but derided by 1987, yet thirty years after its release it is rightly recognised, & All That: The Creation Of Indie In Difficult Times. The tape had lived a strange life – it tape saw indie take on the mainstream, with a number of groups having ‘proper’ hits inby themany, ‘proper’ as iconic, charts. a defining They included moment. the The Wedding years Present,shortly following the Mighty the Lemon release Drops, of the the Darling Buds, the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, We’ve Got A Fuzzbox & We’re Gonna Use It, the Shop Assistants, Pop Will Eat Itself, the Primitives and others. This was the moment when indie came of age, for some, or completely lost it, for others, as the capital). In truth, the rising power of marketing attempted to turn every kind of music intofledgling its own genre mutually got turned exclusive into justgenre. another What brand had once and beenindie tributaries became Indie connected (note the to trash and garage – suddenly became isolated, specialist interest areas. the main flow in 1983 as the new music got going – such as anarcho punk, psychobilly, and it will be published later in the year. The book deals with the creation of the new indieI finished from writing its roots C86 in 1983& All That:(and earlier)The Birth through Of Indie to Inlaunching Difficult ofTimes the tape in spring and beyond. 2016 A planned second volume will deal with the period up to 1990. Like this exhibition, the book highlights a time and a culture that seems almost impossibly distant now, one less manicured and self-aware and all the more refreshing for that. In time, the indie culture of the mid-1980s was emasculated by the hedonistic rise of Acid House and Lads Mag culture that followed immediately on from it, and by the swagger of Brit Pop of the early 1990s. But it never disappeared. Like the cool universe – the dark matter and volatile part of the night sky – it has always been out there, if not always visible to the nakedastronomers eye. tell us floats between the stars and is the most interesting, dynamic

BCMCR has invited Neil to speak at BCU on the occasion of the launch of C86 & All That:

The Birth Of Indie In Difficult Times later in the year. Exhibiting Pop Music History and Heritage

Even if we are interested in the newest sounds, the central organizing activity of popular music is ‘the record’. This term originally referred to the capturing of a particular performance that took place live and in the studio. Of course, this is now a rather redundant way of thinking about making music: there is no ‘original’ performance when the multi-track, studio desk or laptop merge performances or indeed originate sounds and songs. Nonetheless, we continue to refer to ‘the record’ as a particular artefact that conveys an ideal impression of a whole performance, whether on vinyl, tape, CD or digital compression files such as the MP3, not to mention the Acapturing further aspectof the soundof the historicaland image sensibility of musical in events popular in film,music TV is and the radioway in programmes. which records lend themselves to preservation in the form of the collection. Many people might be ‘curators’ of the array of music they own and for the ways in which they arrange it and preserve it. In addition, then, music consumers preserve and record their own engagement in music, their attendance at concerts and their allegiance to artists, in terms of the collection of related merchandise or ephemera.

Of course, so much of the music that we love is about the past: ‘Let’s Twist Again’ (… Like We Did Last Summer)’; ‘Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?’; ‘Summer of ‘69’;‘December 1963 (Oh What a Night)’ or ‘In My Life’. Lyrics might be about the past and the music might quote older sounds or indeed be made from recordings from the past. And so much of this music is bound up in our memories and how we recall events. important moments: parties, family, friends, first loves, as well as major historical One way in which the current exhibition might be viewed is as part of a wider industry devoted to pop music’s past, and the history of popular music is big business. Amidst the search for the next big thing, the music industries repackage and re-promote the music of the past in the form of new pressings, extended versions and box sets. Witness Bob Dylan’s The Cutting Edge from 2015 (volume twelve in the ‘Bootleg’ series), which offers insights into the development of the triumvirate of Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde. As Rolling Stone magazine summarises, it is ‘available in a six-disc and a two-disc version, as well as a monster limited-edition 18-disc set that includes every single take of every song from the three albums’.

Artists of various vintages tour their most popular or critically acclaimed albums:

Signing Off. This kind of enterprise is supported by dedicated publications such as RecordPrimal ScreamCollector, with Classic Screamadelica, Rock, Uncut Van or Mojo.Morrison Radio with and Astral television Weeks commission or UB40 with a wealth of individual retrospectives concerned with popular music past focused on spectacularindividual artists, style, echoinggenres and Hollywood moments. biopics Other such TV shows as Jimi like (Hendrix): HBO’s Vinyl All Is and By Netflix’sMy Side forthcoming The Getdown dramatize pop’s past, interleaving fact and fiction in

(2013), Get On Up (James Brown)(2014) or Miles (Davies) Ahead (2016). There are of course whole TV channels dedicated to the past such as VH1 and Vintage TV: ‘a vital, unique offering for those who grew up with the many vintage artists still touring and recording as well as for a younger demographic beginning to appreciate Vintage TV’s “soundtrack to the 20th century”’ .

The invitation to (re)consume pop’s2 past – on record, on screen, on stage – is echoed by opportunities to engage and experience its sacred places. Popular music’s sites of

Whether Memphis’ Beale Street, Liverpool’s Strawberry Field, Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, thespecial Chasing historical Rainbows interest museum are at atthe Dolly heart Parton’s of an expanding theme park field Dollywood of the tourist or the industry. Salford surveyed in The Smiths-related tours, each offers a means of experiencing or connecting with the roots of particular music genres and origins of artists.

Alongside such promotional productions, popular music history has attained a place as a part of national heritage culture. There is, for instance, the British Music Experience now at the Cunard Building, Liverpool after several years at the O2. ‘David Bowie Is’ tours the world after a successful season at the V&A while at the time of writing, ‘Exhibitionism’ at the Saatchi Gallery displays the archive and history of The Rolling Stones and a year-long range of events, supported by the Heritage Lottery

Fund and the Mayor of London’s Office, are taking place across London in celebration Forof the some, 40th this anniversary range of activity of Punk. is dubious, the critic Simon Reynolds for instance complains that it represents a form of ‘Retromania’, lamenting ‘Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past’ (2011). Certainly, there are plenty of new bands and dedicated cultural entrepreneurs who are sceptical for the same reasons as Reynolds, that such backward looking impedes the breath of creativity and innovation. Reynolds is sceptical too of whether pop belongs in museums –simply because you rarely get to hear the music – while others are openly hostile to the presumption that it has any cultural worth, or reject the conventional means through which subversive music and stylistic movements are remembered. Nonetheless, this kind of heritage activity is evidence of a general democratization of the past and a form of public history. Thus, while this range of activity might offer economic returns, it is important to register how it is simultaneously something that has public value, recognition of the cultural worth of popular music in the life stories of individuals and communities. At the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, pop music was one of the central representations of British culture and heritage.

showcasingThe BBC’s role music in this documentaries area has been and significant compilations in recognizing from the archive, the centrality and its of ‘My Generation’popular culture development in the national is the story, culmination with BBC4’s of this Friday attention. night is dedicated to

Most interesting is the way in which this particular project by the national public

2www.vintage.tv/who-we-are/about-us down’ from either commercial music industry or public cultural institutions – and moreservice organic broadcaster activities. reflects Cassian a coming Harrison, together Channel of official Editor projects of BBC Four, – produced suggests ‘top- that: ‘My Generation is a fabulous example of what the BBC can do: a year-long celebration of the power of popular music to shape the story of everyone’s lives - from the stars to ordinary people’. The programme makers have clearly been inspired by the practices of community ventures devoted to music such as ‘Pompey

Bands of the 1980s’ about Humberside. Closer to home we might also note the Pop’ in Portsmouth, ‘Uncommon People’ in Sheffield or ‘Pink Noise and other Hull of Metal (Capsule), both funded by HLF, and our own Birmingham Music Archive (BMA).influence of projects such as ‘Soho Road to the Punjab’ (Punch Records) and Home

BMA is certainly evidence of a wider set of activities organized across the online world that focus on individual artists, geographical areas, subcultures, venues, shops and communities. These can be found on bespoke sites, pages on Blogger or Wordpress and, most fertile of all, social media platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, MySpace and the ‘micro’ blogging site Twitter.

On Facebook for instance there are groups as varied as: the Record Shop Archive; Birmingham Record Shops 1970-1990; The Old Punkrock-Badges Fanatics; 80s Fanzines and Ephemera; Punk Memorabilia; Virgin Records In The 1970s And

In1980’s; each case,Stiff Records administrators the worlds and most group flexible members record post label! links to YouTube

Users upload digital scans of signed record sleeves, concert tickets, personal videos, Soundcloud files and Spotify, as well as official and ‘unofficial ‘releases. publicity or from the music press and other sources. Participants ask either explicitlyphotographs, or implicitly, along with ‘Do varieties you remember?’ of ‘official’ or images ‘Where from you recordthere?’, company posting invitations and comments, links and scans. In this way, communities are built on place of such things in relation to individual lives and experiences. the sharing of memories of specific pieces of music, performances, videos and the This exhibition began when scholars at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) discovered that amongst the many Facebook pages about music was ‘The Click Club at Burberries’. This page is described as: administered by the original Click Club promoter. Created on the 25th anniversary ofAlternative the opening disco night and (10/6/11). bands; June 1986 - July 1990. Official Facebook page

Here, Dave Travis has scanned a range of his extensive records of gigs in terms of period which document bands, audiences and the staff and environment of The Clickprogrammes, Club itself. flyers, As with posters many and other of course pages thelike photographs this, over 500 he people took during have come this to join this site, commenting on photographs and the posts of other, answering each others questions about particular gigs, records, nights or acquaintances, generating memory, creating a response to Steve Coxon and Dave Travis’s work in creating The Click Club and Travis’ archive of images.

This exhibition is an attempt to take this activity to a different space in order to explore its meanings and value. As is demonstrated by online memories, it had value for so many people who were there. But what has it to say to those who were not? What can it tell us about the wider context of social and cultural history? We proceed with the belief that this exhibition and activities like it are important ways of thinking about the past and in particular, the value of popular culture in the course of people’s lives. In this way, it is one way of responding to a recent call from a group of historians:

Modern British historians have rarely shown much interest in questions of youth, youth culture or popular music. […] The time has surely come, therefore, for historians to take youth seriously; to seek to contextualise and understand the ways in which young people have navigated their way to adulthood through the dramatically changing socio-economic and political contours of the twentieth century. Indeed, we would go so far as to argue that the study of youth and youth culture provides an opportunity to uncover important aspects of social and political change, be they mediated through consumption, the construction of identity, the production of popular music, or in terms of providing a ‘space’ beyond the family, school and workplace in which formative cultural and political interests and perspectives are developed (Garland et al 2012, p. 265).

‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ Documenting Birmingham’s Alternative Music Scene 1986-1990 might be an opportunity to reminisce and have fun for some or more activity that offers a stepping stone to a wider set of questions and understanding. generally, as a means of finding out about a small but not insignificant space and The Origins of The Click Club and its Cultural Context

Oh has the world changed, or have I changed? Oh has the world changed, or have I changed? The Smiths, ‘The Queen is Dead’

A Site of Memory

Founded by Steve Coxon and Dave Travis, The Click Club ran on Tuesday evenings at Burberries nightclub on Broad Street, Birmingham, from 1986 until 1990. It provided a performance venue for bands on independent labels and a disco offering music and an ethos as an ‘alternative’ to the rest of the week at Burberries and the conventions of the majority of the clubs in Birmingham. By 1990, The Click Club had relocated to the Institute in Digbeth when the building was sold, reopening as Tramps for a while. This process in which this site of alternative culture played a part and which merits some considerationmove signalled both that in the the city, context and the of thefield current of popular exhibition music, and had the undergone wider social changes, history a of Birmingham.

Like a number of sites of historical cultural interest in the city, the building that housed Burberries and thus The Click Club is gone: razed to the ground. In the local economy of popular music, even while other physical spaces may be more enduring, their use has changed. A good example is ‘Mothers’, a rock club hosted in a suburban dance hall above what was formerly a furniture shop (now closed). It was here that Pink Floyd recorded part of the album Ummagumma. Likewise with ‘Henry’s Blues House’, the name for a regular slot in the room above a city-centre pub where Black Sabbath and others gained an audience in the early 1970s. Previously, the pub was the home of a folk club, famous for the recording of the Ian Campbell Band’s ‘Ceilidh at the Crown’ album (1962). Later it was an important venue for the city’s punk scene. Now the site is closed and earmarked for transformation into apartments.

Despite such transmutations, such sites are not forgotten: visit them and there are often individuals or groups hanging around to commune with the spirit of the music and community that convened there. Some come quite a distance to do so. At the time of writing, the Broad Street space that was inhabited by Burberries is still empty: the makeshift car park. Whether you have memories from actually having attending The Clickfloor spaceClub or has have been considered covered over the images with a cursorydisplayed layer in the of gravelcurrent in exhibition order to provide it is worth a visiting this space in order to imagine the structure that barely contained the sound, energy and bodies that galvanized Tuesday nights.

This section makes use of a memories and commentary provided by a range of people who responded to a call online during early 2016. All of the commentaries are from those who regularly3 attended The Click Club and are used across the exhibition. We also draw upon the superlative Rocks Backpages for contemporary music journalism (www.rocksbackpages. com). Thanks to Dave Travis, Bryan Taylor and Dave Chambers for original editions of Click . Building The Click Club the mid-1980s a vibrant music economy and culture had developed in the UK. Prompted byThe the Click DIY Club spirit emerged of punk, from hundreds an earlier of labels wasteland were established,to fulfil a gap sometimes in Birmingham simply life. to putIn out one record by one band, and unevenly available across a national retail sector of independent music stores (and even sometimes available in larger chains such as HMV or Virgin). Some labels were established or supported directly by independent stores such as Rough Trade in London, Probe in Liverpool, Red Rhino in York and Revolver Records in Bristol. Together, these businesses formed a co-operative together with others such as Backs (Norwich), Fast Forward (Edinburgh) and Nine Mile (Leamington Spa), to create a distribution ‘Cartel’ in order to support the independent sector, underwritten by an ethos to make available cultural work that would be completely ignored by the dominant ‘major’ labels and distributors such as (then), EMI, WEA or Polydor.

In a spirit of public service broadcasting applied to popular culture, the BBC DJ John Peel supported much of this music because, as is suggested in his biography: ‘The 1980s saw commercialism and marketing become the major driving forces behind getting bands onto the radio, but John remained determined to back the underdogs of the musical underground’. On his Radio 1 show, Peel would play records sent in by a prodigious array of labels, reading out contact details so that listeners could mail direct for copies. Richard Marsh of Pop Will Eat Itself, a key local band that was a regular attraction at The Click andClub, phone has recalled number how (actually this benefited Marsh’s parentalthe release home), of their with self-released newfound fansdebut mailing single cashof or calling1986 ‘Poppies to speak Say with Grrr!’ the Peelband. played the single regularly, reading out both contact address such as Sounds, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and New Musical Express (NME: where Of course, Peel was not the only means of finding out about music. Dedicated publications

‘Poppies Say Grrr!’ achieved ‘Single of the Week’ when reviewed) responded to this emergent field as much as they serviced the dominant record companies. were willing challenge the boundaries of amateur and professional music business. Bryan Taylor,In the field later of one live of music the regular promotion, DJs at and The in Click the sameClub, isentrepreneurial one of a range spiritof individuals of DIY, some who sought to make their own entertainment – whether by forming bands and writing songs, starting record labels or promoting gigs. Much of this cost money of course and required

Primal Scream ever played in Birmingham: a mixture of naivety, risk aversion and sheer brass neck. As Taylor recalls, the first time Myself and Hugh McGuinness (Later of Mighty Mighty) put this night on. We were

cautioned for flyposting, the gig didn’t get into the weekly listings for some reason, the weband split turned everything up at 10.45 I owed and him the about power £65 was so pulled maybe at took 11.10. £70 Disastrous! on the door. I recall that we had to pay the bands £200 as Hugh had signed a contract without my knowledge (!). As (Courtesy of David Chambers) In spite of such efforts, regular gig-goers like Coxon and Travis lamented the apparent decline of clubs and pub venues in the city by the mid 80s. As Derek Hammond (AKA: DJ Taylor) wrote in the NME on the occasion of The Click Club’s launch: ‘Every club venue managing to attract a regular crowd over the last 10 years has fallen victim to the city’s

Zoo, Barbarella’s and the Cedar Club – all are now untended mausoleums in a Youth Cultureultra-conservative graveyard’. licensing,The two were polizei also and reviewers fire regulations. for the music The Tin press Can (Coxon: Club, the words; Holy City Travis: images), which made this situation a practical issue too. As Coxon relates, ‘Dave and I were fed up of going to Derby, Leicester, Nottingham etc. to review/photograph bands for Sounds that weren’t playing Birmingham because there wasn’t the right-sized venue’. The city did not then have a venue that could cater for bands that were beginning to gain success: enough to draw crowds that meant they were too big for a pub venue but not appealing enough to merit booking at larger sites like the Odeon.

In late 1985, Coxon had learned that Mark Jones and Keith Williams, owners of the Peppermint Place nightclub were in the process a new build along the same lines. Coxon and Travis saw an opening. As Coxon recalls:

When I bumped into one of the blokes who was about to build Burberries (600 capacity, exactly the right size) I said, ‘What’s your worst night?’ He said, ‘Tuesday’. I said ‘We’ll have it.’ Then, Dave and I struck a spectacularly good deal where we paid no rent for the everyone … Like a lot of what we did then, the end result was more luck than judgment, butvenue luck (just was a onshare our of side… the profit) and they paid a share of the losses. It worked out for

Managing The Click Club which continued to be available in house for the duration of the Burberries residency. It launchedThe Click onClub 10th was June named 1986 after with Click!, a packed a magazine gig by local that bandCoxon Terry and Travis and Gerry. founded As Steve and Coxon recalls, at least one person approached him and Travis to praise the venture but to warn that it would not last. But it did last, sustained by the DIY spirit of the post-punk scene in which shared cultural values were as important as a return on investment or search for profit. the promotional posters for The Click Club; hi slogan was ‘Two thirds the quality, half the Jeremy Paige of Cowboy Printing (also leader of Birmingham band Rumblefish) designed to an affable arrangement with Headquarters, the organization that controlled much of price!’ As promotional material such posters would be pasted on available walls (subject everythingthe flyposting was sites done in by the hand, city). including Posters were hand printed painted on ideas lightweight for posters’. paper Each that poster made thusfor hadefficient an individualized and economic quality flyposting. that Travisgave them relates double ‘In the value days for before music computer fans as souvenirs graphics, but also underlines the rarity of such materials. WeRegular made Click our Clubway downgoer John Broad Taggart Street recalls only to his be discoveryconfronted of by it anda line his of first haircuts, visit: the line feeling sure we would be turned away for having the wrong hair or not being coolmisfits, enough. anoraks To ourand surpriseNational we Health were glasses welcomed outside in by Burberries a smiling mannightclub. who I We later joined found to be called Dave Travis and for three pounds our lives he changed forever.

The construction of the Burberries space made for a distinctive experience. A low ceiling made the venue seem smaller than its capacity suggested. Bands played on the thatdance the floor, plans on had a 12-inch changed stage: and ‘Thisthe owners was not had deliberate. neglected In to the include original a stage plans, until the 2stage was going to be at the back of the club and about 4-5 feet high. Dave and I didn’t know was the only place it could go. Actually, it worked out brilliantly.’ weeks before launch. They paid for a dismountable stage to be built. The dance floor The organization of stage space in Burberries meant that the audience was always close to the band – before during and after performances. Audience members could stand in front, at the side and behind the stage. Fanzine writers interviewed acts in the interviewing Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream backstage in the toilet before a gig forchanging a fanzine. room, actually an adapted fire exit dressed in tinfoil. Angela Hughes recalls drinking orange juice and talked about how he would never drink before a gig as it wasn’tIt was thefair quietest to the paying place audience.we could findI was to chuffed record thatit on I’d my managed Sony Walkman. to get some Bobby time was with him – and it had been so easy. I’d just called earlier on in the day, asked to speak to the Tour Manager and asked if we could come along and speak to the band. You could do that a lot back then, we did it often.

If bands were able to stick around after they played for the alternative disco, they

As regular DJ Steve Byrne has commented, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Pop Will Eat Itselfwould and be joinedThe Wonder at the Stuffbar by were audience ‘all brilliant members bands and who share played the dance the venue floor on with occasion them. members who were in successful bands by the late 80`s on major labels. You would not haveand drank known there it as regularly!! they were Thereall very were down no to airs earth.’ and graces with any of the band

As is apparent in the exhibition, one of the unalloyed joys of Dave Travis’ photographic record of The Click Club is the variety of images of the audience simply having a good time. Travis often turned his lens on the crowd, sometimes without reference to the such shots have none of the kinetic power of those losing themselves in the midst of a liveband performance. of the night. TheSometimes images heattest captured to the theobvious dance importance floor at the of alternative audiences disco to music but culture but also the particularity of The Click Club. The proximity of band and audience allowed for unusually intimate exchanges, with individuals arrayed before, beside and and around them. Such images convey the heterogeneity of The Click Club, as well as thebehind camaraderie musicians and – with good all spirit action of reflectedaudience in members the mirrors crammed and polished into a small metal space, above vying for a prime viewpoint and moving with the swell of numbers.

Of course, some of the character of the club came from the fact that it was a licensed venue as well as an interesting promotional arrangement. As Bryan Taylor writes:

wouldAt first, often the ‘Alternative get a bus from Disco’ Harborne nights took at 10.30 a while with to my take mate off. andAs an get incentive, there just pints in time towere order 60p 8 before pints of 11 Tennents o’clock and Extra £1 to afterwards. last me ‘til At 2 o’clock.the time, Quite £1 was often, ‘nightclub it didn’t price’! ... Also, I I wasn’t the only one to do this, so situations would arise where there’d be a group

(shudders).of five or so of us around a table choc-a-bloc with pints, trying to remember whose was who’s with comments like, “These are my six”, “My five are on the left” etc. etc. As Lara Ratnaraja, another regular, recalls, the very fact of gig-going and partying on a Tuesday evening could be quite demanding, enough to involve some serious lifestyle planning: ‘I managed to get a job in a call centre that let me work afternoon shifts so I would be met at the bus stop at 9 in the evening, by friends with a change of clothes, go to Burberries and sleep off the hangover caused by cheap beer and go to work at 2 the following day.’

Gentle Tuesday: As Click Club as You Could Get

Before The Click Club launched, Travis had already gained some experience, managing a band called ‘The Man Upstairs’ (two of its members – Rupert and Caroline – took on regular DJ duties at The Click Club) and organising gigs at a city centre pub. Coxon acknowledges that ‘Dave was the genius behind the band-booking, though. He had great taste and insight. (Maybe still has.)…’ Importantly, as was and is often the case in the independent sector, the two were genuinely interested in music. As Travis has said: ‘We were fans rather than hard-nosed business men’ and, while this did not militate against the success of their venture, it did contribute how the two approached the management of their nights and events and the cultivation of a particular community spirit.

Certainly, the promoters’ own fandom comes across in their recollections on Facebook:

Dave Travis: I remember when Camper Van Beethoven played live at Burberries, we locked the doors and everyone, including security went in to watch when they played ‘Take the Skinheads Bowling’

Steve Coxon: Actually, we didn’t lock the doors. For a few minutes, there, the Click Club till and the door was entirely open while we and the doormen went and watched the band, which was, basically, as Click Club as you could get! Of course, the central fact of The Click Club was the music – whether live or on record – interleaving with life. As John Taggart has told us:

The Click Club became the highlight of our week (life) we saw brilliant bands, we got drunk, we snogged girls and boys made friends for life, we made shapes on the dance

The Weather Prophets, Big Decision That Petrol Emotion, Pristine Christine The Sea Urchins,floor … all Built to a Like soundtrack a Car Mighty of brilliant Mighty, songs: She Looks Velocity right Girl through Primal meScream, The Waltones, Almost Prayed Give me back my man The B52’s.

Muses and The Pixies. Sarah Heyworth (who describes herself as blonde, sixties dresses, alwaysOne of thedanced best-attended to Velocity nights Girl and was Prince) a double writes headline ‘The clubgig by decor 4AD was label naff mates even Throwing by peak Eighties standard. But the great thing about seeing the bands was that you were eyeball to eyeball with them on the three inch high “stage”. When Pixies played, the sweat, throbbing veins and raw force of the band were literally in your face.’ Photographer Phil Nicolls was present to shoot the images of the bands for Melody Maker. He writes that ‘The small and low stage was also surrounded by mirrors with gaps where the fans peered through. It was bizarre, the band being watched from all sides … The place was rammed and the crowd went mental, the sound amazing. I think that was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to’. As the Black Country Rock blog suggests: ’I know a few people who were there who equally blown away and it feels like a Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks at the Lesser Free Trade4 Hall moment. It really was one of those nights.’ Many other nights were as important for many other people for a range of reasons. 5 journalism pseudonym Geoffrey S. Kent), pondered The Click Club’s reception and On the occasion of the first anniversary of the night’s launch, Coxon (under his music magazine he commented that: ‘The hard work you don’t need to know about. The faith youevaluated already its know success about in terms – it’s demonstratedof a pact between every promoters, week. Because bands the and only audience. bands weIn Click! see too.’ This approach was distinct from those who would ‘put on any band who will pay theminvite enoughto The CLiCK! for the Club night’. are the bands we want to see and believe other people want to

To further understand the integrity and value of The Click Club it is worth considering the nature of the alternative culture and space that it offered. Indeed, what was it and the music it programmed offering an alternative to?

-

4https://blackcountryrock.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/bloody-your-hands-on-a-cactus-tree-the-http://www.philnicholls.com/archiveshop/prod_2949094-Pixies-live-at-Burberries-Birming pixies-at-burberries/ham-first-UK-tour-1988.html 5 Writing on John Peel, and mindful of the dangers of generalization, Ken Garner has written that bands favoured by the DJ ‘were characterised by a witty melancholic disaffection with the emerging cultural orthodoxy of 1980s Britain’ (Garner 1993: 158). The context for this orthodoxy was the ascendancy of the New Right manifest in several terms of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher. The dominant social and economic programme of this period meant an end to the post-war ‘consensus’, the pursuit of deregulation, monetarist polices and an ideology captured by the announcement that there is ‘no such thing as society’.

John Peel noted that:6 ‘You’d get records sent in by these stroppy lads from tiny towns in Lincolnshire, places you had to look up on the map . . . And I’m a great sucker for cheerful amateurism. Another thing I liked was that a lot of these bands were almost entirely without ambition. Their goal was often just to put out a single, or do one session with us’ (Quoted in Reynolds 2005: 221). This is quite a contrast to the avarice and self- interest promoted by government. Certainly, the kind of commercialism and marketing that he was suspicious of was manifest in the appearance of artists like Madonna, Wham or Duran Duran, a band of whom American critic Robert Christgau wrote: ‘As public of the postpunk if not post-Presley era.’ Interesting to note here that this band was one benchmarkfigures and maybeagainst as which people, The these Click imperialist Club measured wimps its areethos. the As most Dave deplorable Travis noted pop instars Click Magazine’s advice to bands submitting tapes in search of a gig:

It’s worth pointing out that if your band sounds like Duran Duran and any one band member has one of those ludicrous feathered hair cuts that’s long at the back, short at the sides and stuck up on top, or wears jackets with their sleeves rolled up to the elbow, we’re not interested in hearing from you … The rest of the world doesn’t want to listen to the bilge which you so predictably churn out.

What is worth pointing out here is the ethos of independence, intimately tied to a sense of alternative cultural expression and an authentic commitment to music. Consider this exchange between Andrea Lewis of The Darling Buds and Miles Hunt of The Wonder Stuff from NME in which the nature of independence seemed to be under threat from the encroachment of certain types of act, particularly those associated with Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s PWL label as well as dance music:

Andrea: ‘… looking at the independent charts, it’s all Jason Donovan, Kylie Minogue, Yazz, Bomb The Bass. I’m not having a go at those bands it’s just that those labels have taken over from the indies, from actual real live bands that gig up and down.’

Margaret Thatcher, originally quoted in Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987, discussed in Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, Harper Collins, London, 1993, p. 626. 6 Miles: ‘With all those sorts of acts in the indie charts it’s hardly worth thinking about anymore, it doesn’t exist.’

To some degree, such exchanges,7 while seeking to distance independence from a mainstream ethos, also gesture to at a kind of cultural conservatism. For writers like Simon Reynolds, some aspects of indie-pop were rather retrograde although complex and resistant to any one summation:

Indiestyle weaves elements chosen from a host of repertoires — Fifties and Sixties children’s clothes, prepermissive adult clothing, Sixties beat and early psychedelic indigenous anti Americanism), Punk and Gothic wardrobes. styles, the American beatnik look (this fits because American bohemianism is a kind of Similarly, indiepop is seldom straightforwardly revivalist, but fuses idioms like folk, country, soft Velvets, hard Velvets, Dylan, Byrds, English psychedelia, Television, Spector, Buzzcocks, Postcard and the Mersey groups of the early Eighties. What all this adds up to is an elaborate and stylised authenticity, an innocence that isn’t natural but put on, worked at. Indiepop’s fantasies of innocence are actually a sophisticated response to current reality and to pop history.

Here, Reynolds was thinking of bands8 such as The Soup Dragons, Tallulah Gosh and the kind of ‘Cutie’ or ‘Shambling’ band and subculture associated with a tape compilation issued by the NME in 1986: C86. This compilation featured a host of bands that went onto play at The Click Club: Primal Scream; We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use it; McCarthy; Mighty Mighty; Stump; The Shop Assistants; The Mighty Lemon Drops and others. As such it, and the kind of cultural attitude summarized by Reynolds, encompassed a wealth of the indie sector but varied enough to incorporate also genres such as hard-core punk or even ‘World Music’, so-called, all of which were represented at The Click Club on stage and on the playlist.

While commentators and consumers might have argued between themselves about the meaning of independence and alternativeness, it was easier to identify what they were against. In terms of having a good time, and the place in which to pursue one, it meant something distinct from the kind of available nightlife experience in the city. As a physical famousspace, Burberries Rum Runner, was as typical described with by its Duran emphasis Duran’s on glitz John and Taylor glamour, ‘If you its did superficiality make it expressed in the reflective surface of the mirrors and neon. In this, it echoed the relatively beyond security, you’d find that the club had been remodelled to simulate a sophisticated New York environment: mirror flex, pink neon flashes, moving lights and a sad selection

Len Brown, ‘The House of Love, The Darling Buds and The Wonder Stuff: Tomorrow Belongs To Us’, New Musical Express, 7 January 1989. 7 Simon Reynolds, ‘Ladybirds & StartRite Kids’, Melody Maker, 27 September 1986

8 of sickly, etiolated palms – quite posh for Birmingham, really.’

In this design the aim of Birmingham nightclubs was aspirational and escapist, their generic purpose summarised by one poster at the online Birmingham History Forum who writes ‘I remember Bonkers...... peppermint place...faces....millionaires.....loads of mirrors in there...I always fared well in millionaires....never left alone always pulled that was late 80s I used to go..’ Derek Hammond was pithier in the NME in describing The Click Club’s ‘Parasitic residency in an up-market meat market’.

This is not to suggest by any means that habitués of The Click Club were in anyway less interested in ‘pulling’ and many relationships were made (and broken) there. As Maria Williams recalls:

We met in the Click Club back in 1986 aged 18 & 19 and that was it - for me anyway, he took a and babbling to her about this bloke I’d just met, and she just said “bloody hell are you going tobit get more married?” persuading! because I remember I was being going so effusive... off to find And the friendI really I’d shocked abandoned, myself beautiful by blurting Sarah, out

Ultimately,“yes!”. Anyway those reader, who subscribed I married him. to the And alternative we’re still claims together of The 30 Clickyears Club later. responded to a freedom to be themselves – there was a strict ‘No Smart Dress’ policy, so overcoming the general insistence across the city that jeans, trainers and a lack of shirt and tie in men were whatever the differences about what constituted independence or alternativeness, was the primacydetrimental of the to atmospheremusic. As Bryan and aTaylor good describestime. Above his all, role: what ‘DJ united wise it and was defined all pre-cd, the mp3culture, etc. and we survived very well indeed with the old two turntables and a microphone. The microphone, however, was out of bounds and I understood why Dave Travis wanted it that way when I called into Burberries one Thursday night with him to witness what a ‘normal’ night was like. Quite frankly it was awful and the dj announced every record and also talked over each one.’ Click Club regular Andy Tomlinson has also written:

I went on to be a DJ on the indie-circuit in Birmingham and the Black County during the late 80’s/early 90’s, but it wasn’t until I went to Burberries on a Tuesday night and heard Rupert & Caroline playing indie & alternative tracks, that I ever imagined I would hear the kind of heard in nightclubs in Birmingham was the slick soul of Alexander & Luther, or Brum club/ partymusic classics I was listening such as to‘Welcome in my bedroom, To The Monkey in a nightclub!!! House’ by Up Animal until then, Magnet the &only ‘Kiss music Me’ byI’d Tinever Tin.

Valuing The Click Club

Some of the music labelled as ‘alternative’ from the 1980s exhibits some of the inevitable consequences of DIY culture in its character. To many ears it is poorly recorded and even often poorly executed in terms of musicianship. However, this is not always the point of why people make music, nor what they value about it: the total sound and imaginative landscape of a record is what matters. Ian MacDonald, after Alexander Pope, suggests that a little learning is a bad thing, particularly in pop: ‘where technical expertise tends to produce either songs of lifeless textbook correctness or kitsch exhibitions of decorative pseudo-classicism’ what they gesture to for listeners – as much as their creators – to imagine aims and ideas that(MacDonald never quite 1994, materialise 2005: 10n). as intended.There are Theenough value gaps and and meaning suggestions of music in recordingsis not there and to be read off like a set of terms and conditions. We might love the label, a cover image, a particular sound, the associations of where we bought a record and so on. Thought of in this way, music is important personally and collectively (from a couple of people to a crowd) not for how much money it made the UK economy, how many mansions it paid for or awards it won. In the apparent dead end of so much music, as well as the scenes that music inspires and is inspiredthe song by.Ballad In his of mournfulthe Band, toneLawrence he sings: from ‘Ain’t the greatgot no Birmingham money, ain’t outfit got no Felt fame/And encapsulates that’s why, I feel like giving in’ and yet such a recording, which has barely registered amongst the wider culture, is described by the super fan and author JC Brouchard as ‘a perfect pop- rock song, from the intro on with the rhythm guitar riff and the solo guitar, both played by Lawrence.’ (Brouchard, 2011: 28). To others, such music is equally valuable because it might have been playing at a particular moment, in a particular club, on a particular night, either on record or played live by the band.

In the traces and memories of a place like The Click Club we discover how the romance and imagination engendered by music carries over into the wider community of interest that convened there. And bands are often especially adroit in capturing in song the imaginative and romantic potential of any location and the aims and ambitions of particular communities of interest. For instance, another evocative recording by Felt, ‘Final Resting of the Ark’, might be interpreted in this way. In this song, Lawrence uses the biblical fable of the lost Ark of the Covenant as a metaphor for identifying locations that have been inspirational sites of cultural production:

Palisade of pleasure A circus sound Paris of the twenties, a New York sixties art underground Buried treasure A Gaudi park 57th street gallery

The final resting of the ark. gig on 19th December 1989. For those who were there, and who might mythologize it, it was aPerhaps treasured one moment could add on to a parthat with list The these Click other, Club, more the renownedplace where and Felt well-documented played their final sacred ever spaces of culture.

The current exhibition displays but a fragment of Dave Travis’ personal record of The archive of a scene in a city that has largely been overlooked and even actively disdained in popularClick Club, music yet ithistories. is unusual Amongst to find thesuch images a systematically of dancing documented and performances, and well-preserved the record of an appearance by a band like Suicide at The Click Club underlines the value of this photographic archive and the exhibition’s exploration of the context and meanings of Birmingham’s alternative culture in the 1980s. Across popular literature and media, music genres and networks associated with New York clubs like CBGB or Max’s Kansas City have been extensively documented and celebrated, favouring great bands like Suicide, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patty Smith, Television or The Ramones, alongside other types of creative worker and entrepreneurs that came out of that milieu. This archive attests to this time and place and suggests that there is something to be valued and celebrated (if not uncritically) about Birmingham’s cultural life, its development, connectedness and those who made it that might contribute to how those in the city see themselves and how they are seen in turn by outsiders.

Ultimately the experience of The Click Club proved to be transformative for so many individuals, impacting on their orientation and direction in life and enduring in fond memories, friendships and dispositions. As so many have recorded in relation to the exhibition call for memories and comment:

Steve Byrne: ‘All in all The Click Club holds a very special place in my memories of the time. It was a brilliant experience full of hugely talented and dedicated people from the bands to the promoters, record shop workers and owners to indie and rock kids out for a good time. There was never any trouble, the beer was cheap and friends were easy to make.’

Sarah Heyworth: ‘I still love music, go to gigs when I can and still count as good friends many of the people I had fun with at Burberries. Most of us run our own small businesses or still make art. The indie spirit fostered there survives.’

Neil Hollins: ‘Burberries was a beautifully messy, atmospheric and intimate venue. I was a regular there and saw many bands; these experiences lit up my life and fed my obsession with music and fuelled an ambition that, one day, I would one day be in a band good enough to grace the stage there myself’.

Dave Newton:

Lara Ratnaraja:‘God ‘what bless has The never Click left Club!’ me is the sense of friendship and like-mindedness that surrounded the club. I still make my initial judgments on people’s record collections.’

Spencer Roberts: ‘The people and millions of bands I saw that inhabited my world every Tuesday night at Burberries from the mid to late eighties, would go on to shape my life, and my world view on everything. Thanks for the drink, the friends, the great

Johnmusic Taggart: and the ‘…and memories because – Dave we wereTravis!’ you young we thought it would never end and like all good things it did. It was a special time and a special club…’ Our aim in this exhibition is to explore those transformations but also the meanings that such stories offer for a general cultural history and sense of the city, of the role of popular music, the night-time economy, subcultures and scenes. What, we ask, might be transformative for us and our knowledge of history, the city and culture in engaging with the stories revealed by the exhibition materials?

Postscript

surveysAlongside Broad film Street.of gigs Wefrom see inside abandoned The Click buildings, Club, the boarded current up exhibition plots and also an displaysovergrowth a short film of its wider location. Shot on super 8mm film by Dave Travis, this short piece turns his lens to capture the many cranes arrayed around what would in time become theof vegetation International slowly Convention reclaiming Centre. this partly We see derelict the noticeboards urban space. proudly In the sameannouncing film, Travis the coming development and a spread from the local paper on the vision of what Birmingham would look like in the 1990s.

Between furniture store Lee Longlands and the old Trade and General Workers Union building, a walk around the empty site of Burberries now reveals the results of this vision. There is a density of new apartments, a whole series of other clubs and scenes have come and gone. Just towards the Five Ways island is the site of the Gatecrasher super club that attests to the legacy of the rave culture of the late 80s and its hubris. At Fiveways, Auchinlick Square is the abandoned site of Faces International and Peppermint Place. Myscha’s on Tennant Street is closed, while the Sugar Suite, still going strong on Broad Street, makes a claim to be the oldest urban club.

One of those faux frontages is dressed to make the vacant lot look like a proper building – perhaps to aid the imagination of developers addressed by the agent’s note. Opposite is a Novotel and signs point to NIA, ICC, National Sealife Centre and Brindley Place’s mélange of architectural styles. Standing at the entrance to what was Burberries one can look down street too at the new Library of Birmingham and the tower of the Hyatt. At the back of the club, one looks across to The Cube and the site of the Mailbox development.

All of this change reminds one of a familiar theme in accounts of Birmingham life, of its

Brummagem’ making and remaking, first recorded by James Dodds in 1823 in his song ‘I Can’t Find Full twenty years and more are passed Since I left Brummagem. But I set out for home at last To good old Brummagem. But ev’ry place is altered so Now there’s hardly a place I know

Which fills my heart with grief and woe For I can’t find Brummagem. The changes in Birmingham represented by the new Broad Street established at the end of the 80s attest to the increased importance of the leisure economy in the twenty- as Patrick Loftman and Brendan Nevin put it, ‘From ‘Motor City’ to ‘The Convention City’’(1996).first century. TheBirmingham nighttime has economy undergone as well a transformation as the city’s wider of its cultural very economic offer has base, grown in importance and contributed to overturning some of the historically negative perspectives of the city. While these transformations appear to be engineered by a core of visionary agents on high, what of the contribution of a wider cast of actors who have forged the heterogeneous culture of the city in a myriad of ways? Those who created, appeared at and attended The Click Club might be amongst those actors, the people who, between them, have contributed to creating and recreating Birmingham in meaningful and exciting ways. What next? Exploring the archive and mapping the context of The Click Club

What is represented in this exhibition is a partial snapshot of a place in space and time. The very selection we’ve made from the archive of Dave Travis in particular is an interpretation, accentuated by the layout of the exhibition boards and the type of print made from the images, as well as the commentary we’ve provided and solicited from others.

In developing the exhibition we attempted to involve as many people as possible in order to extend the nature of this interpretation. During the exhibition period – and beyond – we welcome feedback as well as suggestions for additions, amendments to commentaries and so on.

We have also created a map that invites participants to extend our understanding of something about The Click Club might be willing to indicate the connections between that siteBirmingham’s and its attendees music culture. with other This venues, might workclubs, in record two ways: stores, firstly, events, those individuals who know and so on. For those who were not there – before this time, during or after, right up to today – they are welcome to add notes or signs about important venues, places, spaces and so on that extend our understand of what places, people and events have mattered to them.

It is important for visitors to feel able to comment and feed back to us.

Whether you were there or not, whether you have any interest in popular music or cultural heritage, insights into your reactions to this interpretation about what is here and what is missing are things we’d like to hear about.

You can win one of the exhibition prints by filling out one of the available feedback cards, sending us a letter or emailing us.

Simply name the print that you would like to win with a short explanation of why you want it and some feedback on the exhibition. You might want to think about the following questions:

What knowledge have you gained about Birmingham’s popular music history?

What have you learned about popular music heritage?

What changed as a result of visiting the exhibition?

What kind of similar activities have you been involved in that could be investigated by historians? You can leave comments in and around the exhibition and you are welcome to contact us directly:

Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research Parkside Building Birmingham City University Curzon Street Birmingham

B4 7BD Email:Telephone: [email protected] 0121-331-5468 Exhibition Partners Birmingham Music Archive

Practice in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research that is concerned with popular music history and heritage is in part inspired by the work of a range of activist archivists and historians. Jez Collins of the BCMCR is one such activist and the founder of Birmingham Music Archive and his activities were central to the development of this exhibition. Here, Jez outlines his ethos.

I’ve been fortunate enough to live more or less my whole life in Birmingham. And I’ve always been surrounded by music.

I have vivid memories of queuing with my mom and dad, in about 1975, outside Cyclops cousins Mark and Loz in Chelmsley Wood later on in the 70s and 80s and listening to the newRecords punk in and Piccadilly then post Arcade punk for records Bob Dylan they ticketsbrought (for home them, from not trips me!). to Of town. being Of with feeling my somehow different to the majority of my peers at school because I liked ‘weird’ music. like me, danced like me, and liked the same music as me: Brian, Dave Kal, Steve and Linda, Squee,And then Dave finding Wheels a home and allwith the a others.group of mates drawn from all over the city who dressed

The nights spent at venues such as Upstairs at the Mermaid seeing local bands like Napalm Death and The (Anti) Contras, at The Barrel Organ with Egyptian Fringe and Nigel The Spoon and of course at The Click Club where I’d see Mighty Mighty or The Poppies.

Memories of escapades, of love, of friendships won and lost and of course music.

When you are in the middle of it, young with your whole life ahead of you, you don’t think about how these times might be captured. How these people, these places and spaces and this music might be remembered in the future. How your history might be remembered. hindsight, this experience laid the seeds ofLooking the Birmingham back now, withMusic the Archive benefit (BMA). of I wanted to be able to share my music history and culture with others and provide a space where others could do likewise. And I was also driven by the frustration that, more broadly, Birmingham’s music heritage

Manchester. wasn’t recognized by its own citizens or further afield. Certainly not like Liverpool or So the Birmingham Music Archive was created expressly for anyone to document, celebrate and share whatever aspect of music culture is important to them. There is no

included. right or wrong, no singular version of history and nothing too small or insignificant to be Taking this approach to the creation and formation of local history has resulted in a deeply rich resource of material and memories being uploaded and shared across a number of online environments. The main BMA site hosts hundreds of entries on bands, venues and record shops written by a broad community of music lovers. The associated BMA Facebook group continues to attract 1000’s of uploads of photographs, ticket

amounts of memories and conversations between members. stubs, flyers and all manner of associated memorabilia as well as generating prodigious All this music and memory activity highlights the role that popular music plays in the lives of individuals and communities, who come together to create, populate and sustain the Birmingham Music Archive.

The truth is this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is so much more material to be collected and preserved, more projects and research to be undertaken such as the role that black music and migrant communities have played in the cultural life of Birmingham,

that the Birmingham Music Archive can play in documenting Birmingham’s incredible, richa project and sustained that is proving music hard culture. to find funding for, before we can fully realize the potential

Please do continue to help us build such a resource by getting involved at:

birminghammusicarchive.com | Facebook: Birmingham Music Archive Public Group.

Jez and friends The Very Things, The Tube, Jez on stage at the Barrel Organ with Nigel Newcastle (1987) The Spoon Vivid Projects

BCMCR and Vivid Projects have collaborated on a range of music, archive and heritage related activity.

Vivid Projects is a collaborative project space exploring all forms of media arts practice. The company was founded by Yasmeen Baig-Clifford in 2012, developed out of VIVID (1992-2012). Yasmeen is lead curator, and works with associate programmers to explore historical and emerging contemporary media practices. There is a focus on iterative research, and the company supports artistic innovation through seeding early stage creative practice alongside sourcing rare and underground arts practices for new audiences.

Vivid Projects places high value on cultural research, developing dynamic curatorial projects which create contemporary access to archival content. The programming of archives from repositories to active resources for artists, and facilitating broad audienceopens up engagement.spaces between film, cultural studies and visual arts - redefining the role

Highly successful archival projects, such as Slide/Tape Library of Birmingham and the University of Birmingham CCCS50 project, have connected archival content back to communities. Current work in development with HEI partners focuses on moving image and the ethics and digital potential of archival practices, and through this, we are brokering new opportunities for artists with academic and cultural partners across disciplines and sectors.

Selected projects from 2008 to the present are archived at www.vividprojects.org.uk

Vivid’s NOISE + NOSTALGIA is a season exploring the Post-Punk aesthetic in moving image and sound which runs through May. BCMCR is hosting the following:

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR?

19 May | 7-9pm | Venue Parkside, Birmingham City University

Screening of HOME TAPING (78mins) introduced by Yasmeen Baig-Clifford, Vivid Projects and panel discussion with Richard Heslop and Justin Smith. broadcasting in 1982 with a platform for marginalized and controversial content. In Launched with a remit to support ‘minority programming’ Channel 4 started unique at the time for replacing presenters with a computer-generated information display.1986 The Music Chart video Show production emerged, heavilymoved oninfluenced from a visual by the music video aesthetic formats ofto MTVa more and commercial footing. With music video forming an increasingly important part of historical studies of the 80s, what is the context for music video now? Justin Smith and Richard Heslop will discuss these issues and more in a post-screening discussion chaired by Professor Paul Long, Director, Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Justin Smith is Professor of Media Industries, University of Portsmouth and Principal Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video, 1965-2015’ in collaboration with Dr Emily Caston, London College of Communication (UAL). artists including The Cure, Happy Mondays, Sinead O’ Connor and New Order, as well Richard Heslop is an established director of music videos and films, directing videos for Projects 6-21 May as programmes on Channel 4 and the BBC. Selected early films are screening at Vivid Ellie Gibbons

Ellie Gibbons is a photographer and digital retoucher based in Birmingham, and a tutor in Media Photography practice and theory at Birmingham City University. It is at BCU she is also completing a Masters in Visual Communication, exploring considered approaches to documenting ‘family’ with an emphasis on analogue processes.

Bethany Kane www.bethanykane.co.uk

Concentrating on the lives people lead, Bethany Kane aims to reveal their narratives through photography by highlighting details within the personal and public environments central to their processes of identity construction. Her practice builds upon the knowledge and understanding she gains through her own personal experience, using retrospective photographic processes to produce a unique insight into these rarely documented subjects. Past exhibitions include her work on the Northern Soul scene, Punk, Skinhead and Oi subcultures.

Accompanying Kane’s photographs documenting the site of where The Click Club used to stand is her work on the contemporary ‘B-Town’ scene. This relatively new scene

‘Forgetreflects Madchester,the modern it’sindie all crowd about andthe Bthe Town current Scene’ Birmingham live music circle.

B-Town is the term given to a collection of indie bands9 based in and around Birmingham who caught the attention of music journalists throughout the country. Active scene participants have adopted a grunge like style, montaging second hand clothing and vintage trainers that imitate the sense of un-perfection and youth culture

Peace’s ‘I wish I had perfect skin’. For some, B-Town is a derogatory term suggesting that journalistsB-Town reflects aren’t though taking its the early Birmingham raw sound music and lyricalscene seriouslycontent as and evoked see this by wave of successful bands as just a fad.

In her on-going project Kane documents the bands that are at the forefront of the scene such as Peace, Swim Deep and Jaws in local venues such as The HMV Institute, Wolverhampton Civic Hall and the recently closed Ooblek.

King, A. (2012). Forget Madchester, it’s all about the B-Town scene. Available: http://www.inde- pendent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/forget-madchester-its-all-about-the-b-town- scene-8207631.html.)9 Aidan Mooney

Aidan Mooney is a graphic designer from London based in Birmingham. Working for and with various community interest companies such as Project Birmingham and City of Colours. With a strong passion for promoting the arts, he plans to continue

Birmingham City University. a creative path in Birmingham after finishing his Graphic Communication degree at behance.net/aidanmooney instagram.com/aidantmooney

Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR)

BCMCR was established in 2009 as one of Birmingham City University’s 13 research centres, in order to develop excellent research as a core activity within the Birmingham School of Media, a part of the Faculty of Art, Design and Media.

At the moment, BCMCR has over 30 research-active staff and 30 research degree students who are led by Paul Long as Director with Nick Webber as Associate Director.

Popular Music Studies; Cult, Gender and Sexuality; History, Heritage and Archives; Journalism,Activity in the Activism, BCMCR Community; is based around Cultural the collaborative Ecologies. BCMCR work aimsof five to research produce teams:

Thedistinctive, ethos of collaborative BCMCR is that work research within is the a collaborative field of media enterprise, and cultural that research. work should make individual and collective contributions to furthering the discipline and the academichave impact community within the which field andsustains society it. This as a whole,approach and is that characterised it is important both that by the staff way staff work within the centre and in research teams, where investigations and publications are often jointly developed, and in the way staff work with individuals and organisations outside the university. Selected Bibliography

Baker, S. ed., (2015) Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-yourself, Do-it-together. Rout- ledge.

Baker, S & Collins, J. (2015). Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community ar- chives and museums, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21:10, 983-996,

Baker, S., Istvandity, L. and Nowak, R. (2016). Curating popular music heritage: storytelling and narrative engagement in popular music museums and exhibitions. Museum Management and Curatorship, pp.1-17.

Bennett, A. and Janssen, S., (2016) Popular Music, Cultural Memory, and Heritage. Popular Music and Society, 39(1), pp.1-7.

Brouchard, J.C. (2011) Felt: Ballad of the Fan. Vivonzeureux (translated from the French Felt : La Ballade Du Fan by Pol Dodu). in Les Roberts, Marion Leonard, Sara Cohen & Robert Knifton (eds), Sites of Popular Music Heritage,Collins, J. &Routledge. Long, P. (2014) ‘Online Archival Practice and Virtual Sites of Musical Memory’

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Garland, J., Gildart, K., Gough-Yates, A., Hodkinson, P., Osgerby, B., Robinson, L., Street, J., Webb, P. and Worley, M., (2012) Youth Culture, Popular Music and the End of ‘Consensus’ in Post- War Britain in Contemporary British History, 26(3), pp.265-271.

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Leonard, M. (2007). Constructing histories through material culture: popular music, museums and collecting. Popular Music History, 2(2).

Leonard, M. and Strachan, R. (2010) The Beat Goes On: Liverpool, Popular Music And The Chang- ing City. Liverpool University Press.

Leonard, M. (2010) Exhibiting popular music: museum audiences, inclusion and social history. Journal of New Music Research, 39(2), pp.171-181.

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Long,Radio P.Journal: (2015). International ‘Really saying Studies something?’ in Broadcast What do and we Audio talk about Media, when 4 (1-3); we talk25-48. about popular music heritage, memory, archives and the digital?’ in Sarah Baker (ed) Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-yourself, Do-it-together, Routledge.

MacDonald, I., 2005. Revolution in the Head: the Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. Random House.

Ogg, A., (2009) Independence Days: The Story of UK Independent Record Labels. Cherry Red.

Regeneration’ in Visual Culture in Britain, 5(1): 37-58. Parker, D. & Long, P. (2004) ‘The Mistakes of the Past’? Visual Narratives of Urban Decline and Parker, D. & Long, P. (2003) ‘Reimagining Birmingham: Public History, Selective Memory and the Narration of Urban Change’ in European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(2): 157-78.

Reynolds, S.,S. (2005),2011. Retromania: Rip it Up and Pop Start culture’s Again: addiction Post Punk to 1978–1984, its own past. London: Macmillan. Faber and Faber.

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Roberts, L. and Cohen, S., (2014) Unauthorising popular music heritage: outline of a critical frame work. International journal of heritage studies, 20(3), pp.241-261. - tional journal of heritage studies, 20(3), pp.262-280. Roberts, L., 2014. Talkin bout my generation: popular music and the culture of heritage. Interna