music

Keep on burning

John Barrett’s excellent Northern Soul photographs are showing at Love Retro, 25 Frederick Street, Jewellery Quarter Birmingham on Friday June 15. From 6pm until 2am, with soul djs, dancing and drinks. ta Newsgland

The Inspiral Carpets are heading to Brum as part of the Rootsville Festival – always ones to jump at the chance to hob-nob with royalty from England’s second city, hem hem I spoke to lead singer Tom Hingley… The Inspiral Carpets’ Life LP was one of my first ‘grown up’ record purchases, I’m not counting the hormone-fueled obsession with Wendy James and Transvision Vamp or Ed Stewart’s Pop Party. Drawing me to them rather than the rest of the Madchester scene was, at first, the full Farsifa organ reminding me of The Stranglers (who I had a bizarre pre-teen obsession with), but it was more the ‘proper’ songs, the real-life lyrics that kept me actually listening. It was the songs again that meant I stayed huddled against an ice-cream van in the rain watching the re-formed Inspirals at Glastonbury three years ago, instead of slinking away to a tent, any tent. They stood out at Glastonbury that year as a band that actually had songs and could play them, despite the fashion to denigrate ‘band’ bands in favour of the more trendy ‘world’ stuff – a groove is all well and good, but it’s not going to keep you...

Tell us your best Brum gig story and win a pair of Rootsville Festival Tickets

At B:iNS we like two things above all else; music, and weirdness, and Birmingham. One of our favourite Brum stories we’ve been told since we started the site as about a bloke who hit the singer out of UFO outside the Odeon on New St, and we loved hearing about how Keith Emerson (of ELP) was thwarted in his attempt to fiddle with the Town Hall organ. We’re sure that Rootsville, with its none-more eclectic line-up will bring out a few more tales. So in order to win yourself a pair of tickets to the fab Rootsville Festival at the Custard Factory on Saturday 30th June, tell us, here in the comments, your Best Brum related gig story. The compo will close at midnight on the Sunday 3rd June and we’ll pick our favourite story and award the winner a pair of tickets – if you haven’t got a great story, don’t worry as we’ll also pick one random entrant who’ll also get a pair of tickets. Usual compo rules apply. Don’t forget we’ve got to contact you – check back on Monday 4th June for the results, or if you like email us with your entry too, so...

Rudimentary Records Launch Party/Gig

Birmingham’s newest record label Rudimentary Records is launching with a showcase gig at The Jug of Ale in Moseley on Tuesday the 15th of May. Created by three students studying music industries at The University of Central England, Rudimentary Records is working with Ben Calvert, a well established troubadour in the West Midlands who is due to play the acoustic tent at this years Glastonbury festival. The Motive, a hard working indie punk band voted in the top 10 unsigned bands in Birmingham by birminghammusic.com, and The Boom! Cans, a young band creating loud riffs and interesting breakdowns to create a prog rock punk sound. Both The Motive and Ben have played Birmingham lots of times before, but this event will be the first chance for Birmingham to see The Boom! Cans, who are also supporting Milburn in Derby next week. more info

Ali Campbell, you may already have won…

Top music blog No Rock And Roll Fun reports that SoundExchange (the body which has taken on for itself the task of collecting and distributing royalties from online radio in the US) is looking for artists that it has collected money for – and if they don’t ‘find them’ by the end of June SoundExchange will keep it. Just like the National Lottery. They don’t seem to be looking very hard for the artists, Suede are in the list – as is UB40′s own Ali Campbell. Ali if your reading this, get in touch with them. We’ll only take 5% ;)

sites of interest

The new website for the Town Hall & Symphony Hall launches this morning (developed by locals Made Media). It looks pretty stylish, but the real interest is under the hood where it is doing all sorts of funky stuff – tag clouds, personal home pages (no logging in required) and the best thing personalised RSS feeds. You should never miss a show again – and DEVO, Ray Davies and Andy Williams coming up at Symphony Hall all deserve a watching imho. Go have a play – it’s one of the best venue websites I’ve seen.Another job by Made Media is the Fierce Festival website which is cool and groovy – and should help you pick out the events you want to attend.

Soweto Kinch up for award

BBC Jazz Awards 2007 Jazz on 3 Innovation Award – vote for B19′s Soweto Kinch. via Podnosh

sax, but no THE – Town Hall reopens

I’ve just come back from a launch for the opening festival of The Town Hall, sorry Town Hall (what have modern corporate advertising agencies got against the definite article? That’s going to a- be ignored and b – sound so old in a year, no hang on it already does), and it sounds so good I can’t believe we’ve been without it for ten years. It does SOUND good as well, the acoustics were fantastic – we were treated to a song from Soweto Kinch‘s new album (great, but he looked like it was a bit early for him) and a barnstorming calypso (i think!) from the venerable Andy Hamilton and the Blue Notes. It’s now to be run together with Symphony Hall, which should mean that they can compliment rather than compete, and is certainly showing commitment to a wide variety of music – Guillemots with the CBSO, Handel’s Messiah as arranged by Quincy Jones, tea dances, and of course one man and his organ ;) There’s also a ‘Brum Rocks’ event which pulls together a host of Midlands Rock Royalty, Robert Plant, Tony Iommi, Bev Bevan et al in aid of the Childrens’ Hospital. The opening festival...

get down and get with it

The Times has a piece on the stuperb Slade. cheersD’log

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music

Keep on burning

Cool as folk, rock jazz, blues &c.

Tell us your best Brum gig story and win a pair of Rootsville Festival Tickets

Rudimentary Records Launch Party/Gig

Ali Campbell, you may already have won…

sites of interest

Soweto Kinch up for award

sax, but no THE – Town Hall reopens

get down and get with it

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Birmingham's emotional wellbeing* on Thursday 17th of May 2012 08:36: 53.8 % (average)