Those of you who missed the special screening of the Philip Donnellan piece on BBC1’s Inside Out on 8th March, which featured interviews with Filum fans at the Spotted Dog who’d just watched his documentary film The Irishmen, you can watch it again in the YouTube film above – sorry the sound is a little out.
Fans of Irish film might like to go along to the Spotted Dog tomorrow evening for an Irish Film Night from 6pm onwards as part of St Patrick’s Festival Birmingham. Landlord John Tighe is screening Everlasting Piece, The Informer and Dancing at Lughnasa. I can’t make this one because I’ll be chatting about Patrick McCabe at the St Patrick’s Literary Festival at The Old Crown Inn from 7pm. Go along to hear all about the darkly comic McCabe, poetical W B Yeats, avant-guarde Samuel Beckett, and modernist James Joyce.
Fans of Irish culture might also like to see the Irish storyteller Katrice Horsley weave her magic at The Irish Centre, 7pm this Weds 17th March (St Patrick’s Day), again as part of St Patrick’s Festival Birmingham. Irish film fans in particular would do well to check out the Flatpack Festival in Birmingham later this month. Highlights include:
Synth Eastwood’s Fast Forward Show on Fri 26th March, when Dublin collective Synth Eastwood will host a night of live music, animation and interactivity at The Rainbow.
The Secret of Kells at The Electric Cinema on Sun 28th March, ‘a stunning animation about how the Book of Kells was completed and survived to become one of Ireland’s national treasures.’
Atsuhiro Ito « More Canals than Venice – What looks to be an astounding concert at VIVID this Wednesday 10 March – Capsule present Japanese musician/artist Atsuhiro Ito:
He uses a device he has made called an Optron, fluorescent light tubes with integrated guitar pick-ups which are sent through guitar amp stacks. ‘When a voltage applied to the tubes is altered, the lights flicker and the pick-ups harvest the electromagnetic noise perfectly synchronized with the flickering light. The intense noise creating a visual hallucination and the sounds veering from some kind of extreme techno to outright noise. ‘ Wow.
BBC News – Does peace and quiet always take priority over loud music? – Problems encountered by the Ministry of Sound nightclub make the BBC look at the bigger British picture, which of course leads them to Digbeth’s The Rainbow and The Spotted Dog. John Tighe has dire warnings about where this might lead:
“They are going to close down Digbeth, the only area of Birmingham where live music is played.”
With forums and facebook groups bemoaing the Factory Club’s move from the main Custard Factory to the nearby Space2, Factory Club felt the need to make an official announcement. It is not The End, but ‘a new beginning’.
The Factory Events team, have decided to focus their energy on financing the redevelopment and complete refurbishment of some exciting new spaces within the Custard Factory, to include the 1500 capacity Space 2 warehouse, two large adjoining railway arches and a new, never used before ‘secret room’. These new spaces will herald a wave of bigger and bolder club events organised by some of the most successful promoters in the business.
The Rainbow is expanding it’s venues. We are recruiting…We feel that Digbeth is in need of a little bit more. We have been scouring the city for more hidden gems and have found some jaw dropping spaces some intimate some not. There is a certain criteria for the spaces to fit in with our plans but what we have added to the triangle exceeds our expectations. They will wet your appetite some for many years to come.
The back courtyard at The Rainbow provides an apt setting. Its pastiche of a graffiti-emblazoned derelict factory complete with metal crowd-control railings and skip-retrieved pub benches is cool as hell or post-industrial pretension depending on your viewpoint.
And Led Bib achieve a kind of industrial shriek when they are at full tilt. Their opening few numbers acted as a kind of metallic barrage, the twin alto saxophones, the distorted Fender Rhodes and electric bass played high and strummed all inhabited a narrow sonic band where the ear could buzz and thrill to the nuances of the clashing tones and timbres.
