Second City Subversive Part 1

Second City Subversive

At the age of 13 I started attending live music events in my home town of Birmingham England. I have only thought about this recently and realised that all these concerts I attended I was on my own, just me in an auditorium full of strangers, but I didn't care about that, I was there for the music and also something else less tangible. I was still at school of course at that time, I funded my interests by a variety of jobs, I delivered newspapers 7 days a week but in between my morning and evening rounds on Sauturdays I worked on a travelling grocery shop, an old converted 1940s bus upon which I served, I carried shopping bags, I weighed carrots and spuds, I sliced ham....I did everything but drive the thing around the north Birmingham suburbs where we plied our greengrocer's trade.

The result of this unceasing industry was that I was able to save up for and obtain records most of my working class peers only got at Christmas or birthdays if they were lucky. About this time I also discovered  The Diskerywhich was then still in its original location in Hurst Street in Birmingham city centre and which was a treasure trove of  imported records and hard to find artists. It was here that I first met the fruits of Alan Lomax's labours and the various strands of my boyhood enquiries began to come together.

I read DH Lawrence books, the world seemed a very tempting cornucopia of pleasures as I handed the lady from number 36 a large cucumber and two Spanish onions, my mind would drift to a better life in Greenwich Village or perhaps Tangier?

Birmingham Town Hall was one of the primary locations for fulfilling my passion for music and culture back in the mid 1960s.

Between 1964 and 1967 the year I precociously left school, I had seen such classic live acts as the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Marianne Faithful, Amen Corner and a lot of others too.

I knew what I wanted to be, it was a bohemian bum and no other profession interested me at the time so I designed my own apprenticeship within the art of the possible.

I left school and home at the age of 15 to throw myself into this world I'd been covertously window shopping whilst desperately trying to grow up. At 15 I decided I'd made it to adulthood and went to work on a farm in rural Stafforshire, very different to my life up until to that point in an urban area of Britain's so-called 'Second City'....Birmingham (a.k.a  the city of a thousand trades and the hub of the Empire).

I chose this farming life as a way of funding my independence because it was remote from everything I knew and alienation was an important ingredient of the plan, although actually the farm was no more than 15 miles from my parents house.

I gave it my best shot working 13 hour shifts milking cows and mucking out, riding about on a tractor which I was too young to drive on the roads.

I learned a lot of things there, but it was just too far away from the scene to continue.

On Saturday, my one day off a week, I used hitch a lift back to Birmingham looking for a piece of the action, my farming career was doomed to an early demise there was too much happening in the big city to stay in what felt like the middle of nowhere most of the week.

I did about 6 or 7 months of farming before moving in to a basement flat with friends in Erdington which only source of light was a stained glass window at pavement level, through which the dim outline of passing feet could sometimes be discerned.

Here things took a more promising turn including a kaleidoscopic mix of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll...well what else? I got a job in a nursery....the sort that grows plants rather than babies... which funded all manner of excesses that would evntually lead to my homelessness, destitution and all sorts of come-uppances as are fitting to a morality tale such as this. Before saying anything more about Aardvark the wilderness years I want end this part on a note that says through all the pathos and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune it was also a lot of fun

At this point I want to post an early favourite song of mine by a singer I still greatly admire, folk singer and influential folk revivalist Shirley Collins.

I would have put her version of the Banks of the Bann on here if I could, but I couldn't find it on YouTube so I will put another favourite The Cruel Mother instead. This song has an atmosphere of the time I am writing about when I was in a more reflective mood during my early teens, living with an odd bunch of people and part of the nightlife scene that was Birmingham in those days.....but more of that anon. To me this song captures the smoke filled folk clubs where my underage drinking began without any challenge, at last...I was in!

At other more adrenalin fuelled times I was getting off on this sort of thing too...incredibly to me now but this film was made around the same time I saw Chuck Berry in his pink suit at Birmingham Town Hall....I was entranced, knocked out and inspired here at the roots of the swinging 60s watching a performer who the Beatles and the Stones were fans of themselves! 

At the very source of Beatlemania and all the rest of it, that's where I wanted to be. Over the next few years I'd see other great bluesmen like Muddy Waters at Digbeth Civic Hall and Taj Mahal at Mothers.

End of Part One