This is a first draft of the introduction page for the Going Deaf For A Fortnight zine.
A bit of background, then, to put the rest of this zine into some kind of context, just so you know where I’m coming from and that.
A few years ago, circa 1998 or thereabouts, my friend Susi was writing gig reviews for some university newspaper in Birmingham and was getting bored of seeing the same old bands again and again, so to bright a sparkle of light into the proceedings she began dragging me along. For some reason I wasn’t gigging a whole lot so the prospect of seeing four blokes on a stage making an unholy racket with their guitars was pretty novel. I started looking forward to these evenings bathing in waves of distortion as the stresses of the working day were blasted from my inner being and I saw some pretty decent bands along the way. Novak stuck in my mind, playing some solid tunes but adding the flute and toy xylophone to the mix, and Quickspace made a solid impression.
About the same time a guy at work mentioned he was in a band who were playing a gig at the Flapper. We all liked Perry so a bunch of us bimbled along expecting the usual guitar-based rock thing. What were saw were Avrocar and Magnetophone at one of the legendary We Brought Our Friends nights, filling the stage with complicated pieces of electrical equipment which produced beautiful ethereal music like nothing I’d heard before. Most of the audience sat on the floor, which I thought was marvelous, as did Magnetophone during their set. It struck me that the Birmingham music scene was flourishing in obscurity. No-one knew about this stuff and that was what made it work.
After this discovery I moved to London for a few years and attempted to keep the gigging thing going, but it never really came to anything. Finding the good stuff was too much effort (despite Susi also moving down to further her Theremin playing career) and every support band seemed to be wannabes desperate for a record deal. It wasn’t cosy and nice like Birmingham so I stopped gigging.
And then, in 2003, I found myself living in Brum again. Some things had changed (what is this Academy all of a sudden!) but enough was the same and I started putting out feelers amongst my old contacts. Some excellent gigs were attended, notably Misty’s Big Adventure and gigs put on by ColdRice, and all seemed to be well, but I had a nagging feeling I wasn’t seeing enough. I seemed to be just seeing the same bands over and over, only discovering new bands if they happened to be supporting. Then at one gig I had an idea. I turned to my chum Tom and said I was going to go to fourteen gigs in a fortnight and write about them in depth on my blog. He grinned the insane grin of approval and it was set in stone. I even came up with the name of the project that night – Going Deaf For A Fortnight.
And so it came to pass on November 4th 2005 that I went to the Jug of Ale in Moseley to begin the marathon of thirty six acts at fourteen gigs in eight venues. Each report was written that night and posted on my blog along with photos in time for breakfast. The result was a personal overview of the Birmingham small gigs scene from the perspective of a paying punter. All opinions are my own and are as wrong as they might be right, filtered as they are through an increasingly fractured mind. Enjoy.