The Big Debate - More Power or More Powerless?

Yesterday I attended The Big Debate at the ICC.  As one of the bloggers for the NGA Festival, this came within my remit so I was there, laptop at the ready.  I’ve also been helping to flesh out the Birmingham Post’s coverage of this particular event (out of

The Big Debate - live transcript

Please bear in mind that the following was typed as the event was happening.  I’ve expanded any abbvs and even added the occasional bit of punctuation but otherwise it’s in a pretty raw state.  To take or leave but I need to put this somewhere. Introductions from Marc

International Dance Festival Birmingham

The past month or so has been amazing and nuts in equal measure so here’s an attempt to get it all down and make sense of it.  The first thing is that I’ve been out and about a heck of a lot.  Part of this is to do

Surface Unsigned Festival's PR Idiocy

Back in March of this year, Danny Smith wrote about Surface Unsigned, a battle of the bands kinda thing, on Created In Birmingham.  His fairly innocent post has provoked a bit of fuss over the past couple of days.  Here’s the story in a nutshell: 1. On 18 March,

DJing on Bambuser - 2/4/08

A few days back I had the idea of pointing my webcam towards my decks while playing some tunes and found myself doing an impromptu 30 min set via Bambuser.  A few kind people watched live and asked me to archive the next one I did, so that’s what

Glow release I, Yeah

It’s funny how you can have a stack of important posts to put up ‘soon’ but then something genuinely exciting comes along to cut through all of that, compelling you to put finger to keyboard. The release of Glow‘s debut album ‘I, Yeah’ today is genuinely exciting. And

NGA blog and Birmingham coworking

This is the story of two items on today’s to-do list. New Generation Arts Festival blog BCU have hired several bloggers to cover different aspects of this year’s New Generation Arts Festival.  As a fairly direct result of my work with My Fierce Festival I’ve been asked

Infadels @ Birmingham Barfly, 16/3/08

It speaks well of a band when, with the venue just over half full, the band’s appearance causes everyone in the crowd to huddle down the front with not a single straggler left propping up the walls. Before being assigned to cover this gig I knew two things about

Foals / Youthmovies @ Birmingham Academy 2, 12/3/08

As support bands go you can’t ask for much more than what Youthmovies provided.  Revealed later on to be Foals’ favourite band, they were a diverting hotch potch of styles and genres. Their set included some Money Mark-stle keyboards, the guitarist abandoning his guitar to be a second drummer

Duffy @ Birmingham Glee Club, 11/3/08

The (really quite good whoever it was) DJ was playing Aretha when I arrived at the Glee Club. I took that to be significant before remembering that no, Adele’s the new Aretha, Duffy’s the new Dusty. Of course. Whether or not she’s worthy of such praise, well,