We found a box or two of 101 Things Birmingham Gave The World down the back of a very shiny sofa that we bought from Latif’s. Do you remember it? 101 was our first book, about all the best things Birmingham invented. Things like nuclear war, Batman, having a piss, tennis, and fizzy pop. And more. 96 more.

read a sample — here’s Bounder on how Brum invented Christmas

So here’s the plan. We’ll run over to Express Polyethene for a box of jiffy bags, and we’ll post one of these to you. You need to tell us your address and send us a few quid. Check out the options below.

Secret Santa Special – £7
One paperback book (inc P+P)

Santa’s Dirty Secret Two For One – £10
One paperback book for them (inc P+P) AND a DRM-free ebook for you to keep. Shhhhh.

Readers said it was disrespectfully respectful, irreverent, informative and laugh-out-loud hilarious and rather tenuous but a great read anyway.

Available for less than a tenner, it’s a good Secret Santa gift for:

• Your mom, your nan, and your milkman
• Interested parties
• Scousers
• Enjoyers of moderate amusement, albeit with annoying inaccuracies
• Brave boys who want to steal valour from Kidderminster
• Folks with an immature sense of humour

Made in Brum

We’re (obviously) very proud of Birmingham, and indeed the entire West Midlands Combined Authority area:

• Books bought directly from this link were printed by Kingate Press in Aston.
• The book cover features an exclusive collage by local artist Mark Murphy.
• Most chapters were written while people should have been doing real work at such local institutions as BBC Birmingham and Birmingham City University.
• Stewart Lee wrote a bit of it and your boyfriend likes him, even if you don’t really get it all (your boyfriend will find this joke funny by the way).
• Orders are shipped from just over the border, in the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield.

Other things to note

We’re only posting within the UK (including Manchester) unless you contact us to arrange international shipping. You can alternatively buy print on demand books and Kindle locked ebooks from Jeffrey Bezos.

If you prefer fewer than 101 Things, we wrote 50 slightly longer essays about why Birmingham’s not Shit — that’s also a print on demand title at Amazon.

Merry Christmas!

Birmingham, as the Jane Austen quote misused by broadsheet feature writers says, has “something direful in the sound”: we are painted as dull, as boring. And particularly by a media based in London who definitely can’t see the point of any train that comes here at all, let alone one that does it 20 minutes faster.

Even ELO genius Jeff Lynne is described on Wikipedia as “a native of Birmingham [with] a flat Brummie accent” (from a Daily Telegraph review).

How odd then, that his song, the song that most defines the city, was voted the ‘happiest song ever’ in one of those polls that companies commission for publicity. It ran away down the avenue with a fifth of the vote. How odd then, that everyone loves the record but shows disdain for the town that made it. How odd then, that Jeff is responsible for some of the brightest and euphoric music ever to come from anywhere. He also worked on some Ringo Star solo material; which at least can make you laugh.

Mr Blue Sky has been chosen on Desert Island Discs many times, including by cyclist Chris Boardman, TV writer Russell T Davies and M&S CEO Stuart Rose. It was in the UK’s 200 most-streamed songs on Spotify every single day in July 2020. It was also joint second in the official chart of 2021’s ‘best driving song’. (Oh OK, it was a PR survey for an insurance company.)

The record is the closing track of side three of the Electric Light Orchestra’s LP Out of the Blue, the one with the spaceship on the cover. The four tracks there are what they call Concerto for a Rainy Day, said to explore how the weather affects mood. Nothing it seems affects mood more than Mr Blue Sky, though.

A Dutch neuroscientist prostituted his knowledge for Argos’s own-brand stereo company Alba and created a formula that worked out what the ‘most feel-good song’ was. If you’re interested in his formula it is:

60 + (0.00165 * BPM – 120)2 + (4.376 * Major) + 0.78 * nChords – (Major * nChords)

and the winner (based at least on research of songs already described as ‘feel good’ by Dutch radio listeners) was of course Mr Blue Sky by ELO. If you’re interested in what Dr Jacob Jolij said about his formula it is, “I had to cook up a formula. My client had asked me to come up with a formula for PR-purposes. So, how to get from the ‘formula’ to the list of ultimate feel-good songs? I had little to do with that actually.”

Like a stopped clock, these PR maniacs have to be right sometimes, and they also need two fully charged AA batteries shoved in their traps and their knobs twisted until their hands point in the right direction, but there’s no denying that Mr Blue Sky is incredibly loved. The single sold over four million copies worldwide, which is amazing when you consider that if you just stand around in Brum you will hear it at least once a week for free. How odd, that you can hear a song so often and still find it joyous.

For half of the city it may be because it’s played just before the team comes out at St Andrews: so do we love it because we associate it with hope and anticipation? Yes, but watching Birmingham City play football is mostly like fighting a war. It’s more anticipation for 90-plus minutes of mostly boredom alleviated by terror, hope that the queue for pies at half time won’t be too long, or resignation that here comes Jermaine Pennant about to become the first professional footballer in an ankle tag. Yes, it made him relatable to the fans and was a change from most of the team playing like they had a ball and chain, but, still, it’s not the bright blue future the song talks about.

Non-blues fans don’t hold a grudge about it, even though Jasper Carrot named his dog after it. The ELO karaoke night — ELOke “the songs of ELO crucified by drunks” — that we organised at the Sunflower Lounge finished with no audience, everyone on stage singing Mr Blue Sky together. It is a song that unites people.

Jeff wrote Mr Blue Sky “after locking [himself] away in a Swiss chalet” to write some songs. There was a period of poor weather, and then a nice day: “Everybody knows what I’m talking about,” he has said, “it’s the thought of ‘oh, isn’t it nice when the sun comes out’.” After listening to and reading many interviews with the Shard End songwriter, his flat Brummie accent sounding like home and his calm self-depreciation charming everyone he talks to, it’s clear that Jeff Lynne doesn’t really focus too much on what a song’s words are about. The chords, the melody, and even most of the recording are done before the lyrics, which he admits to finding hard to write. “It was dark and misty for two weeks, and I didn’t come up with a thing,” he wrote, “Suddenly the sun shone and it was, ‘Wow, look at those beautiful Alps.’” Had it been another shitty day we might have got a song cursing the complete lack of anything to do in Switzerland if it’s raining, the joy of a large Toberlone, or the inside of the house’s state-mandated nuclear bunker.

In almost every interview Jeff will be asked about how Mr Blue Sky came about, and in every one he will say that he had to write some songs for the new double LP. In every one he will be asked about the F to Dm chord progression that the verses ‘share’ with The Beatles’ Yesterday, and in every one he will say that “yeah, it’s just a simple melody” and tell us it was a song he wrote with ‘posh chords’. In every one he will detail how pretty much everything was in his head before he started to construct the sound, but still praise the work of late keyboardist Richard Tandy (it’s his voice on the vocoder, the voice of Mr Blue Sky) and drummer Bev Bevan (it’s him playing the studio’s fire extinguisher that makes the clanging sound). Every time we delve deep we find there are no real hidden depths, or if there are they are so hidden that even Jeff doesn’t really know where they are. “A lot of people ask me what my songs mean and I have no idea”.

I suspect that Jeff has no problem with people making up their own meanings. No-one, including Jeff, knows why, in the chorus of Don’t Bring Me Down, the backing vocalists sing ‘Groos’, it was just a placeholder noise. The song was recorded in Germany and ‘groos’ is close to the German word meaning ‘greetings’ so he left the word in the lyrics. But because it was meaningless people sang ‘Bruce’ instead when singing along at gigs. Jeff Lynne just went with it and joined in: he doesn’t care what it means. Can you imagine Jimi Hendrix giving up and singing “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”?

Because it means nothing, it can mean anything, and become anything. Mr Blue Sky has become a holiday camp 20 miles north of Hull, countless yachts, a pale ale, an eventing horse, a Belgian mattress company, and the high point of the soundtrack of such films as The Magic Roundabout (2005), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

It soundtracks every promotional video of Birmingham, all of which start with the hazy fog over the Bullring and then move on to a montage of canals and gleaming grade-one office space: and it’s still impossible to hate. It even made a choreographed kids dance in Victoria Square — the Commonwealth Games handover ceremony — not embarrassing. There is something Brummie in the hope after adversity.

Birmingham is always changing, going forward, being quietly awful in many ways, but the sun comes out and it can produce beauty like Jeff Lynne produced Mr Blue Sky: without being able to explain how it’s done. That’s why I always play the song at the end of the night, because the night will go away, and it’s a reason why Birmingham’s not shit and I’ll remember it this way.

Come and join us on Blue Sky btw.

The Electric Cinema is very flammable. 

There was a time when all cinemas were highly flammable. In olden times all buildings were tinderboxes, of course, but cinemas had the added flair of being full of nitrocellulose (that’s film stock to you and me), a substance capable of spontaneous combustion and which, once lit, actually feeds itself by handily producing oxygen while it burns.

The Electric Cinema opened in 1909 and still has not caught fire.

I first knew The Electric Cinema in its late 1990s incarnation. Painted in dappled burnt orange, with zany 80s signage, and featuring the terrifying art installation Thatcher’s Children by John Buckley (a series of macabre mannequins, hanging out of windows on the same level as the old New Street Station exits) it was quite an intimidating proposition from the outside — like the weird new kid at school with the too-big leather jacket, dyed hair and anachronistic musical tastes inherited from his older brother who lives away (is he in prison? The Army? Dead?). But much like that weird new kid, if you could get close to it, it was actually lovely. Weird but lovely. At The Electric in the 90s they had homemade cake alongside their terrifying statues.

It’s the oldest working cinema in the country. This is a fact. It’s a fact that is frequently disputed, but it’s a fact nonetheless: The Electric is older than the rest, and also has not burned down yet.

In the early 2000s The Electric closed down. It left a hole in Birmingham’s cinema scene as there were few other venues programming anything much outside of mainstream multiplex fare. It also left an empty and somewhat combustible building on a plot of land bang in the city centre. 

Empty buildings have had a habit of burning down in Birmingham, especially those that might be in the way of progress (progress in the form of city centre apartments and mixed-use developments). It’s a fate that has befallen many old pubs, factories, and cinemas too so you’d have been forgiven for expecting to read some sad news about The Electric back in 2003 but, like a phoenix without flames, The Electric came back from closure unharmed, renewed even. Restored and resplendent in an Art Deco makeover-cum-restoration, The Electric surged back into business in 2004 with a mix of mainstream movies, arty stuff, and they even still had cake!

Under the ownership of a chap called Tom Lawes, The Electric saw its way through to its centenary year in 2009. Our own Jon Bounds attended a special 100th birthday party at the cinema and reported back:

Tom showed a great deal of the refurb work that’s gone into turning the cinema back into an inviting place in recent years — the roof and the plumbing seem to have contributed to it pretty much falling down. I felt a bit uncomfortable with the way in which the previous owners/management were obviously seen. Business-wise they were crap no-doubt, but for a while at least they brought all manner of esoteric, odd, niche and arty films to Brum — I have fond memories of dozing during triple bills of Italian films in the mid to late 90s.

To further celebrate, Lawes put together a film about the history of British cinemas, and The Electric’s place in that story. The Last Projectionist, which came out in 2011, has been described variously as an award-winning documentary and a “nostalgic advertorial” for The Electric but further cemented Lawes’s stock as Birmingham’s charming man of cinema.

The Electric of this era brought a sense of occasion back to going to the cinema. As a visitor you wouldn’t need to know the deep lore of the place for it to feel special — the history is there in the bricks, it’s palpable. Beyond the mise en scene, The Electric worked harder than most for you to have a nice time, with little extras like bar service to your seat and the big squishy sofas at the back of the room. Chains such as Everyman — which opened a Birmingham cinema in 2015 — compete with this luxury experience, though, offering more and squishier sofas, drinks and food service, and that weird thing where a handsome man stands at the front of the room before the film to introduce it. Everyman’s interior designers have reached for opulence: it’s all dark wood paneling and chintzy lights, a sort of speakeasy 1930s vibe — like someone poured the aesthetic of a George Clooney Nespresso ad into a multiplex — but they’ll never have the history The Electric has and so Birmingham’s Everyman will forever be a concrete unit in the Mailbox doing dress-up.

Slightly more expensive seats and a slightly more curated programme made this era of The Electric a pretty safe bet for date nights for the well-heeled, and the restoration style of the refurb perhaps helped it catch an updraft of cool cachet, as the whole vibe chimed well with the growth of interest in all things vintage.

Whilst it relied on bankable fare from blockbusters that were lighting up the box office, it kept a toehold for itself and for the city in the more artistic and alternative end of cinema too. For example, my all-time favourite cinema trip was to see Oxide Ghosts by Michael Cumming at The Electric. 

Oxide Ghosts is a documentary about the Chris Morris TV show Brasseye, which was made with Morris’s blessing, on condition that it was only ever shown in cinemas and only if Cumming physically took it there himself and spoke about the film at length before and after it was screened. The whole setup for this is an incredible piece of self-curatorship by Chris Morris which, for me, beats even Morrissey’s insistence on having his autobiography published under Penguin Classics as an example of artistic shit-housing. Oxide Ghosts could only really show somewhere like The Electric because The Electric can make decisions locally, flex its programming to suit, and is big enough to make the showing worthwhile but also small enough to sell out such a weird event.

This is what is so delightful about this historic place: it allows Birmingham to stay connected to a world of film outside of what’s on offer at Great Park Rubery or Star City. And as a fixture of Birmingham for over 100 years, almost everyone has stories about going there, but if your dad has stories from the 70s they’re mucky ones…

If the post-2004 Electric was loved, its new owner, Lawes, was too. Saving The Electric (and serving fancy gin and lovely cupcakes) keeps you onside with the Evening Mail and would also go on to delight the slightly breathless #WowBrum faction of content posters who emerged in the 2010s to catalogue the nightlife and culture of our city. But Birmingham does love to build people up and knock them down, and some people like to bring their own hammer to help. When the Covid-19 pandemic forced cinemas to close, Lawes made his staff redundant when they could have been kept on under furlough and was roundly called out for his behaviour. Worse would be still to come, as the website for the cinema was replaced with a message that read:

The future of The Electric Cinema Birmingham faces an even bigger issue than that of Covid due to the impending end of its 88 year lease.

As the freeholder has yet to make a decision about its plans for Station Street, we are not currently in a position to reopen the cinema.

This uncertainty has also meant we have been unable to apply for the Cultural Recovery Fund or other financial support to assist us financially through the period of closure.  

The subtext in the note: they’re coming for this historic and flammable building, I’ve lost. 

Tom Lawes had been more than happy to criticise the business acumen of The Electric’s prior stewards, but it seems he may have succumbed to the same problems in the end. It will always be true, though, that he saved the UK’s oldest working cinema from dereliction (and probably a fire) at least for a while.

As with a disgraced pop star or movie maker, even if ultimately we feel let down by Tom Lawes we have to say: his work still speaks for itself, his work still stands — and The Electric still stands, un-burnt down, flickering its story onto the screen again and again, its projector a light that never goes out.

When I first wrote this for the publication of Birmingham it’s Not Shit: 50 things that delight about Brum, it seemed that The Electric would continue again. New heroes emerged to bake the cakes and load the projectors, in the form of the Markwick family who owned a not-quite-as-old cinema in East Sussex. The Marwicks took on the Electric and successfully reopened it in January 2022.

Unfortunately, their tenure seems to be coming to a close—and for reasons Tom Lawes foreshadowed, around the end of the lease, according to Flatpack

At the end of March the building’s current 88-year lease will come to an end. We understand that a property developer intends to apply for planning permission to demolish most of Station Street – except for the Grade II listed Old Rep Theatre – to make way for a fifty-storey apartment block.

Nonetheless, at the time of writing, The Electric Cinema has not yet caught fire.

It was undoubtedly the right thing to do — good people do it, J.B. Priestley, Alan Bennett, Harold Pinter, David Bowie, Glenda Jackson as well as some absolute rotters like Evelyn Waugh the vile body who declined a CBE in the late ‘50s because he wanted a knighthood instead — but it would have been fantastic to hear the reasons this great Brummie did from him directly. My attention was not only compromised by taking the call in an open-plan office but by the fact I was hiding something from Ben, or being politic about it at least.

Ben was under the impression that his turning down of the gong had led him to being voted Brummie of the Year — an award that he said “means more to me than any medal” — and I didn’t want to disappoint him, because he’d come second. Second to a man whose achievements weren’t as literary, a man who danced on the corner of the road in Small Heath with a Walkman we were told had no batteries in.

I’m not proud that the inaugural Brummie of the Year was given to someone who was not being laughed with but at, and I shouldn’t have allowed that nomination to reach the public vote, so perhaps we can say that Benjamin Zephaniah was ‘the real’ 2003 Brummie of the Year and I can say ‘sorry Malik’. (In later years we abandoned the public vote altogether — after a year where we gave up the whole thing over what was described on Radio 4 by Mark Steel as being ‘due to foul and abusive language’ but was really about how something small could be overtaken — and now award the title on a whim, it’s easier that way.)

But back to Ben, he was lovely, and had tracked my number down somehow and I knew who it was from the moment he spoke: the familiar warmth to his voice. Proud Brummies don’t get a lot of coverage in the media, in the early ‘90s they got almost none. Ben stood out and you knew some things: he was a Brummie, he was engaged and righteously angry about injustice, and he couldn’t help mentioning the Villa. Most Brummies end up using part of their allocated message time to either ask us to ‘shit on the VIlla’ or support them, it’s something of a tic.

“Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought.“ Ben had written in The Guardian in a column he ended by telling Tony Blair to “stick it” — and you just know that if it had been ten years later he would have told David Cameron to stick to supporting West Ham too. But the most important thing he said, the one that makes me proud of the city that helped build him was this:

“I get angry when I hear the word ’empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.”

Stick it, elsewhere. Birmingham is not shit.

Danny Smith — you know the guy, he writes eloquently grimy stuff about our city right here— was finding life hard, so he went across the world on a mission to find Death – and have a word. 

In his new book Staring Death In The Face: Searching For The Reaper Across Mexico  (which we’re publishing) he describes how he travelled to ancient temples, vibrant bustling markets, white sands, with weird tourists, and found a neon blur of excess searching for the Grim Reaper in Mexico during the famous Day Of The Dead Festival.

He tells of nights at Mexico’s famous luchador wrestling, lost passports and drug busts, and a near-death experience almost drowning when swimming alone. 

Danny was lost, nearly forty, without his partner, and surrounded by bin bags full of his clothes in his parents’ spare room in Northfield:  his thoughts turned to death.

If he’s got to start his life over, he thought, he may as well start at the end and work back. Find Death and become, if not friends, then at least on nodding terms. It’s not a good plan, but it’s the only one he’s got.

Danny decides to stalk Death to Mexico. Home of The Day Of The Dead Festival, Santa Muerte the patron saint of drug dealers and the dispossessed, and a bloody cartel drug war that’s been going since the 80s.

Read an exclusive extract here, and then buy the book in ebook or paperback:

Market 23 seems to be waking up as I arrive – most of the stalls seem to be selling the same sugar skull T-shirts, Cancún fridge magnets and authentic Mexican blankets. Authentic, I suspect, insofar they are actually blankets and they are being sold in Mexico. At the heart of the market is food stalls, vegetables are stacked as high as me and a butcher is busily snipping the claws off chicken feet. The smell takes me back to Birmingham’s Bull Ring market and a little sprout of homesickness pushes through the heat. That smell is overpowered by the herb shop nearby – the odour of dirty liquorice and burnt vanilla. The market is empty apart from me and another white couple walking around, still a little intimidated by the area they came through to get here. They look for me and smile a smile of recognition. I obligingly give a little ‘what’s up’ nod back.

I need a drink. My bones are aching in a definitely non-jet lag way and my head feels full and slow. On my way back along the highway I see bright primary colours. In a background of white and sand they stick out. It’s a life-sized Homer Simpson, next to him his friend Barney, and next to that their good pal Spider-man. They’re all surrounding a bar. Of course, I go in. The midday sun is punching through onto the terrace between giant windboards all painted brightly with graffiti. I didn’t realise how hot the sun actually was until now in the cool shade. Being working-class English means I’m still incredibly uncomfortable with table service, so to shortcut the whole thing I walk into the back of the bar. I walk past a large man in a white vest and pencil moustache who is daring me to notice he’s a stereotype. The bright colours stop at the terrace, along with the furniture and hygiene. The waitress speaks no English, so the first part of the exchange is taken up with her explaining how I should have sat down and had table service – a process made a little tougher than it should by her insistence in looking over to the other waitress and laughing. I sit back on the terrace where the music is just loud enough to drown out the traffic and the breeze feels as good as the cold breakfast beer. A man arrives with a keyboard under his arm so big Rick Wakeman would have turned it down as “a bit much”. Being the only audience member of a giant keyboard serenade isn’t going to make this day better, so I get up to leave. As I stand up and finish my beer the napkin sticks to the bottle then somehow sticks to my shirt when I put the bottle down. As I look up, I see the two waitresses laughing again with Mexican Rick at the English guy who apparently tucks a napkin into his shirt like a bib to enjoy a beer. I stuff the napkin in my pocket and leave.

Later, while emptying my pockets to get into the hammock on the hostel’s roof I find the napkin. On it is an advertisement for La Isla Shopping Centre. It’s a mall over on the archipelago of developed hotels and resort complexes – normally the sum total of what people see when they visit Cancún. I’ve never been on a hammock before but it turns out the combination of this stupid cold I’ve picked up and the constant movement means I’m asleep in minutes. I’m a natural.

“Have you been to Cancún before?” asks the taxi driver with only a little accent. The taxi is comfortable, too comfortable. The seats in the back feel like a mattress, they’re reclined and the windows are tinted a deep blue. It’s more like an isolation tank than a taxi. I have to sit up to talk.

“No, first time,” I say

“This is all fake.” He says this with pride as he gestures to the hotels over to one side,. “Built up by the government.” We get to a stretch of road with water on each side. “Do you know what that is?” he says, pointing to the water on the left.

“The sea?” I ask. His rear-view mirror has two tiny pink Adidas trainers hanging from them.

“Good!” he says, “And this?” He points to the other side.

“More sea?” I say. He gives a little chuckle

“It’s a lagoon,” he says “You know the difference?” I tell him I don’t. “Crocodiles,” he says with pride. “Don’t mix them up”. He drops me off outside of the ‘shopping village’ which, anyway you cut it, is a mall. A large sterile mall, empty and jarringly aspatial. It could be anywhere – cool marble walls and slick shopping outlets, the only thing reminding you you’re in Mexico is the tat in the gift shops and the giant replica of the Mayan calendar on the traffic island outside. It was a mistake to come here. Death would never be allowed here, even if there are crocodiles. My head is pounding and my bones are heavy.

Don’t you dare judge me, but I find myself in Hooters. For four reasons: firstly, my cold needs hot wings to clear my sinuses; secondly, Hooters was the only restaurant without people outside hassling you to come in, which I was actually grateful for. The other two reasons belong to Luisa who has kindly put up with me changing my given table until I could find a seat with my back against a wall. Okay, so Hooters is vulgar, crass, and morally questionable, but so am I. There’s a family at the next table, all wearing matching sun visors and generic basketball vests, except the daughter who has a straw hat and white vest top. The mom has a giant tattoo of a gun and a rose that takes up her entire upper arm. They’re all wearing an all-inclusive resort bracelet with tan lines behind them. They’re getting up to leave as my wings arrive.

“It’s good to get out, see outside for a change,” says the dad as they make their way out.

That night I go for a walk. The heat gets oppressive and, despite being ill, sitting felt like stewing in my own sweat. I don’t know where I’m heading. I just pick a direction and walk. For the most part it seems to be along a four-lane highway. The surroundings get more and more urban, less polished, cracks in the concrete, broken glass embedded on top of the walls. Every time I look ahead there seems to be some neon or a bright sign that something is just ahead, but every time I get there it’ll be a closed car showroom or mattress outlet store. Then sure enough, just ahead, another flickering promise, a fluorescent mirage I can’t help shuffle towards with the same road-worn hope, grateful for the distraction.

The new book Staring Death In The Face: Searching For The Reaper Across Mexico is out now.

I’m not going to argue that the German Market isn’t shit. Its shiteness is self-evident and widely talked about. It’s easy to slag it off, so first I will. There are crowds of people with no idea how to act or move in crowds. There’s the eye-damage from stray umbrella spokes. And there’s overpriced tat and foul tasting sweets sold from the same five or six stalls repeated over and over again. Over and over again like a twisted parody of the shops in your pisshole suburb’s high street. The high street that you’ve just come from on a bus that manages to be both clammy with condensation and uncomfortably full of coat. To drink, there’s headache beer and migraine wine liberally over-served to once-a-year drinkers. The weather is almost consistently a mixture of sleet and hail, so perfectly calibrated for its bleakness it’s enough to make you believe in an intelligent creator; and that he hates us.

For the longest time, people loved the German Market. To all Brummies it’s ‘The German Market’ no matter how hard the PR hacks push its real name, or how large they print the words on the banner. People would meet after work, parents would bring their kids, and hating it became akin to labeling yourself Scrooge McBastard and filming yourself buggering an elf on a shelf. But hate it I did. It’s unfair to label me a contrarian because that would imply some reactionary element, I’m not a contrarian, I’m just a weirdo.

But the German Market lost its shine. The prices, that were always a little high, carried on inflating while peoples’ wages were stretched a little further. Its popularity grew but the infrastructure to support it lagged. The local shops came to resent the two full months of having a carnival full of office drunks on their doorstep, and there’s only so many wooden croaking frogs you can buy your other half for Christmas before they start pissing in your morning coffee.

For a brief and glorious minute the public consensus and I were simpicato. I wasn’t expecting sky writing or a big party with ‘you were right all along’ banners, but a card might have been nice. Bastards. This, however, was to be short-lived. My editor (one of the other writers of this book, Jon Bounds) challenged me to write something in defence of the German Market. So I spent a very cold day from when it opened to near enough when it closed and wrote a nuanced and thoughtful piece called ‘Hate The German Market, Buy a Candle and Shut the Fuck Up’.

The thing I realised is that indeed, the Frankfurt Christmas Market is shit, but everything about Christmas is a little shit. The films, the songs, the parties, the food, all of it is fifty shades of shite. But that’s not the point: we not only endure them, we love them. Not despite the hokey saccharine artifice but because of it. The magic of Christmas is a suspension of our cynical adult brains, we drop the cool, the cynical, and jaded and wrap ourselves in the rituals and traditions we all share. We eat dry turkey, suffer the same cracker jokes and hide the same Lynx gift sets until we can re-gift them next year: because the things are rarely the thing. The love is the thing, the love is the point.

And if we decide that the way to show my friends I love them is standing in god’s own punishing sleet, drinking overpriced beer that will definitely give me a headache, I will gladly do it and keep the glass as a souvenir. Not because I need a heavy pint glass, as I said, the thing isn’t the thing. The pint glass is a night shared laughing with my friends.

Birmingham isn’t shit, but Christmas is, and that’s why we love it.

At the dawn of the 2010’s, I was in my early twenties and knocking out 80,000 word dissertations and contributing bits of writing towards various music publications on the internet. Even back then, over a decade ago I knew that the idea of pursuing journalism, or indeed writing longform in exchange for money, was about as far-fetched as becoming a pop star. Like the music industry, it was obvious that the trade (or at least the idea of it being an accessible career path) was dying, if not dead already.

Even after the Brexit referendum, when half of the population seemingly snorted cocaine off of a toilet in Wetherspoons and the other half smoked the kind of weed that makes you think writing “cockwomble!” on a protest banner is both hilarious and worthwhile activism, writing about anything seemed futile. Everything was too nuanced, people’s attention spans were too short and nothing seemed like it was worth fighting for. That was until I saw local artist Tat Vision’s statue, Four Lads in Jeans, unveiled at Grand Central. Or, more accurately, when I saw the online response to it.

Statues are, of course, a bizarrely sore subject for a nation that seems to be constantly in the grip of a hysterical mental breakdown and resembles the kind of family dynamic where an incensed parent disowns their only child for not kneeling at the altar of Boris Johnson, a man that neither of them will ever meet and couldn’t give a single shit about either of them.

To recap this exciting front of the endless culture war, after the statue of “beloved” slave-trader Edward Colston got chucked in the drink in Bristol back in the Summer of 2020 a small clutch of confused racists tried to “defend” George Eliot’s statue in Nuneaton. I should also add, as an aside, that I wouldn’t be too fussed about anarchists tearing down George Eliot’s statue because I had to suffer reading Middlemarch during my literature degree.

The idea that a bunch of lads fired up their WhatsApp group (probably called “EDL Elite” with a lion emoji, despite the hate group basically having disappeared years earlier), raised the alarm and got out there to defend a female Victorian writer’s statue is almost as hilarious as the shrunken papier mache heads of Tat Vision’s artistic homage to pumped up Love Island lads taking an awkward photo outside of an All Bar One. While the knuckle draggers in Nuneaton didn’t really understand what they were doing two years ago, other than hoping they’d get to beat up some lads with long hair who use words they don’t like or understand, I will happily lay down my life to defend Four Lads in Jeans fully aware of the sacrifice I am making by facing the inevitable and depressing fever-dream of really terrible discourse.

Like most people my age, commenting publicly on social media is reserved exclusively for tagging your significant other and saying “this is u” on a video of a little animal wearing a silly hat and eating some crisps. It seems, however, in the unique circle of hell that is Birmingham Live’s Facebook page, people have some opinions. As young people would say, there are some very “hot takes”.

A confused elderly woman called Brenda, with 7 layers of profile picture banners all awkwardly stacked on top of each other in a graphic design nightmare that means she can simultaneously support the troops whilst also celebrating Christmas 2018, blathers on about how it’s a “waste of council money when we should be feeding the homeless” when it literally says RIGHT FUCKING THERE IN THE FACEBOOK POST that the artwork has been funded by The Bullring and The Hippodrome. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to assume that Brenda’s exhaustive list of work to support the homeless community in her area is as non-existent as Andy Street’s or indeed a tram on Corporation Street.

How much do you reckon spray-painting four old mannequins and putting some papier mache heads on them cost anyway, Brenda?! You never see these lot thumping their displeasure into their smartphones about how much it cost Liz Truss to go and dick about in Australia via private jet in January (hint: half a million quid of your taxpayer money, you Kool-Aid guzzling bozos)

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take any opportunity to criticise Birmingham City Council as the civic embodiment of a 1950s dad who forgets it’s his kid’s birthday, gets absolutely rat-arsed, knocks up a dodgy Wendy House and then suddenly brings home a labrador that dies two days later. But are we genuinely so dense as a population that we can’t even do the most basic of research and reading? The simple information on who funded Tat Vision’s creation wasn’t buried on paragraph 12, under a raft of pop-up ads that render the article unreadable, kill your smartphone and set off your fight-or-flight response. It was literally in the short paragraph of copy that accompanies the Facebook post itself.

Old people on the internet, who will doubtlessly be crowing very soon about how much they loved having ice on their windows back in the 60s so you should put a jumper on while you freeze to death this winter, are an obvious and easy target. Do reserve some of your ire, as I have done, for the lads out there who have haircuts that look as though they were hastily drawn on by a four year-old with a Sharpie. “This statue is fucking shit! An embarrassment!” they cry. The endless comments about how it “doesn’t even look like them!!” hammers down like a deluge of idiot rain.

These lot are young enough to know how the internet works, presumably, as they already all do a good job of hiding their OnlyFans activity from their poor sad misusses, so why can’t they do a quick Google on what Tat Vision does? For a subset of the population who exclusively communicate by posting cry-laughing emojis on news stories about refugees drowning in the channel, do they not realise that this statue speaks in their native language. It’s an obvious piss take! A meme! Can something just be a bit of fun without having to quantify exactly how many pounds of tourism it directly pumped into the big Primark?

You suspect that even if they did have the figures (written out nice and big on paper with curved edges so that they can’t hurt themselves on it) that they don’t like it because it isn’t being horrible about women or the LGBTQ+ community. To flip reverse their favourite line of attack back onto them I say: “What’s the matter? Can’t take a joke, mate?” But why not indulge the question even if they don’t want the answer: do we have any evidence that meme art can bring in that sacred tourism money that those monarchists love to bang on about? Yes! Monkey Jesus brings 16,000 visitors every year to the Spanish town of Borja. I rest my case. Now go back to shouting racist slurs on Call of Duty.

Adjacent to this lot is the swathe of general jobsworth pricks who say that the work is just “bad art”. You don’t have to hack their social media activity to know, instinctively, that what they imagine is good art is a 14 year old on TikTok doing god awful photorealistic pencil drawings of Drake or some other culture vacuum. You can also guarantee that if you asked them when the last time they went to BMAG was, they’d probably reply with: “oh, I thought BHS had closed down? Is it back in The Bullring?!” Never forget: these are the kind of people that would dob you in to your boss for taking two extra minutes on your lunch break.

Some of my favourite responses have gone so far as to suggest that it’s “a waste of brass”. I think when I first saw one of these comments my eyebrows genuinely left my head, such was the distance I raised them. The overwhelming urge to reply with: “IT’S MADE OF PAPIER MACHE AND OLD MANNEQUINS, YOU THICK TWAT.” is almost unbearable. But, as we’ve learnt over the past six years or so of this unbearable and never-ending hell of discourse, what’s the fucking point? I don’t really understand what could ever satisfy these people. Do they want us to live in some sort of failing Soviet-style state where everything serves a stolid utilitarian purpose only? “Yes, I’ll take one government issued art piece, please. Ta very much, glory be and may we crush our Manchester rivals!”

Maybe if Tat Vision had whacked up a giant glass building around Four Lads in Jeans for a few more billion pounds, and covered it in “Exciting Unit Partners Coming Soon!” signage, it might attract the attention of those utterly braindead Instagram accounts that post the same picture of Chamberlain Square with the caption: “Birmingham: you looking fine today!”

Is a character like Tat Vision, living with his mom and making weird art out of stuff he finds in charity shops, really so hard for the spittle-flecked online population to comprehend as nothing more than a bit? He even wears silly clothes and has a comedy handlebar mustache, for Christ’s sake.

Rather than just being mean about people, I’m going to be vulnerable for a minute and do what most people, like myself, who have had their brains melted by the internet are often too scared to do: express an opinion. What do I think about Four Lads in Jeans? I love it. I particularly like how intentionally crap it is in an area of town that is so glossy and strains very hard to give outsiders an inoffensive and retail-heavy first impression of our simultaneously amazing and flawed Birmingham. To put it right outside of our biggest train station, where most visitors first glimpse our city on a sunny Saturday afternoon, is genuinely commendable. Had it been put in Digbeth, I don’t think it would have had half the impact. It’s a hopeful hint of the enthusiastic changing of the tired narrative about Birmingham that the Commonwealth Games, for better or worse, has kicked off. A genuine attempt to “Be Bold”.

But back to the idiots and, finally, a special mention to the bloke on Twitter who said, I quote: “When you consider everything else in Birmingham looks like it’s stuck in 1970’s this is positively futuristic for them”. To borrow a commonly used retort from the same era where your tired, tired gag would have been actually original: 1998 called, mate, they want their joke back. It truly conjures a mental image of an irradiated and dead Britain where a small handful of Tories scrabble over the last bottles of Bollinger in an underground bunker and, meanwhile, a bloke in rags barbecues a dead rat over a toxic campfire and, with his dying breath, rattles out the phrase: “Birmingham is shit, isn’t it. Ha ha ha”.

Adrian Chiles does not miss when he (often) praises Birmingham for not being boastful. Stephen Knight and all the other creative collaborators around the Commonwealth Games resisted the call to bang drums and blow trumpets while shouting loudly and removing bushels. Instead they just sort of got on with it, and produced something very special.

Hearing Boom Shak-A-Lak from the PAs around Edgbaston during the T20 cricket was life-affirming, as was the attitude of almost everyone you met around town. Even the tram conductors were smiling despite having to work instead of putting their feet up while Andy Street wrings his hands and issues excuses as to why the public transport system is failing.

The closing ceremony pitched Brum as a home of unpretentious delight. I lost count of the number of times I laughed out loud at the audacity and joy of it. The staging of Punjabi MC, with the cars and stars, the Wolves shirts of Beverly Knight and Goldie, the trip inside the Rum Runner for TV while some set was being changed.

The Commonwealth Games, I feel, was able to have the confidence to celebrate cultural heritage with a light touch, embracing the silliness and humour, in a way that ‘officialdom’ couldn’t before. Is that because there is no longer any danger of real culture standing in the way of capital? Or has the Brummie attitude been recuperated by the Local Spectacle with a Global Heart?

Could you imagine a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony 15 years ago doing similar things and celebrating Madin’s Central Library: the outpouring of love then stopping them knocking it down? Commerce has pretty much all it wants of our public space and culture already, so it feels safe and able to allow us to talk a bit.

This is not to say there are conspiracies everywhere, but if you consider Capital as an organism – much like James Lovelock asked us to consider the whole earth in his Gaia theory – it evolves. The evolutionary advantage to Capital (organism or meme) of indifference to the chipping away of working class history is obvious.

Can the Eagle and Tun pub, which featured in the concept sketches for the HS2 terminus, be saved from the reality of it being far easier to demolish? Can the nearby Woodman survive while the disruption around it makes it unviable? Can a legacy of the Commonwealth Games be an internal confidence to do more than shrug against the commodification of our heritage?

This isn’t about being on a map, or telling an indifferent World: this is about becoming an interesting, enjoyable, worthwhile place because we have the confidence to not just do stuff (we do, always have) but to do it without caring what other people think. And to keep going. Those bands on our stage on Monday very much epitomised that, ask Kevin Rowland.

There are still battles. This confidence can be misdirected. Shopping, eating, laughing about the existence of a nightclub, is not heritage. Choice in the marketplace isn’t democracy, and spending money is not a personality: even if it’s going to an independent outlet with a large beard. There’s a place for that all, but milking the chance in the sunlight for a city and then flipping back to writing up whatever is on The Chase or Emmerdale, is not the solution, neither is asking ‘What time and when’ does my light turn green?

New office buildings don’t always look wonderful in the sun. Much of the time uncritical celebration isn’t going to help, but you can take a pause and take it all in. It has been marvellous in many ways.

Legacy can’t just be about the redevelopment of the Alexander Stadium, a new swimming pool in Sandwell and another large animal statue to not quite do justice to. It should and it can be about sporting opportunities, it won’t – probably – be about tourism or respect in the media, but it can also be about really being proud.

Proud to not give shit if others care.

“It’s been years since there was any bull baiting here… colourful markets remain.” says Kojak in the 1981 short film Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham. 

At the time he was talking about the ‘old’ 60s Bull Ring. Not the old, old, one. He was talking about the concrete walkways and sidings, the bridge next to the island by the Rotunda, the one featuring the lost nine-tonne bull sculptures cast by Trewin Copplestone. The ones that many a kid thought looked like dinosaurs. 

I don’t think I ever got it straight in my head that if I focused the other way, it was a charging bull with its tail aloft – rather than a thin-necked diplodocus with something frightening up its arse. I never saw it the other way until long after the dinos were skipped, and until long after the space in ‘bull ring’ went the way of the ‘the’ in the Town Hall . When new brands are formed and our public spaces are privatised. they can’t help themselves colonising the language.

As the new Bull Ring rose, I focused more on the name: possibly because it now seemed more incongruous. No outside space to have a cattle market, no ring at all. It gained a statue, one that we liked as it was one of the few waypoints the confusing streets and identikit shopping centre walkways had. “Meet you at the Bull” became a replacement for meeting at the ramp as the centre of town was refocused. 

The Bull Ring bull statue itself is continually dressed in the clothes of commerce, which is apt for Laurence Broderick’s work does little but look like a softer, domesticated, version of The Charging Bull (1989) which sits by the New York Stock Exchange. This bull (this capitalism) won’t hurt you, honestly.

But the use of the bull as a symbol of the city seems to be retrofitted from the word being used in the name of the market, and the name of the shopping centre built on top of it. It seems to really date from our sublimation to commerce. There’s a bull on our flag, but the flag only came into being in 2015. 

George Orwell’s meditation on middle-aged nostalgia, apt to think about as our Games cultural experience has been one of nostalgia,  Coming Up for Air, set in between WWI and WWII, reflects on what a bull in town meant. “The big noise was always when they brought a bull to market. Even at that age it struck me that most of the bulls were harmless law-abiding brutes that only wanted to get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn’t have been regarded as a bull if half the town hadn’t had to turn out and chase it.”

There’s a need to be scared of bulls, especially for us city types. Withnail and Marwood don’t know what to do when confronted. Bulls in mythology are dangerous, the Cretan Bull, father of the Minotaur, was captured by Androgeus as part of the sporting games held by Aegeus, King of Athens. Androgeus won all the games, but the bull broke free from his pen and rampaged through the city: eventually killing him

It was obvious that the Commonwealth Games mascot would be a bull, but Perry is a bull in horn only. Enthusiastic and eager to please, he represents the friendly face of Brum. He exists, but like all mascots there needs to be something human inside. And the humanity needs a counterpoint: it needs a reaction. 

Our opening ceremony Raging Bull, stamping and snorting on the hour, better than any of the previous bulls represents the repressed power of the city. This has been done deliberately, taking in our industry and past, and like the majority of the art created alongside the Commonwealth Games has done brilliantly in capturing something about our city. We deserve anger, government policy, and media-led ridicule and indifference has actually hurt us.  

The reaction to the Bull is very Birmingham too, and is gratifying to see: for a town that can’t get anyone to go out and do anything it is constantly surrounded by people. The rows about the lack of foresight in the Bull’s future feel Brummier than even Duran Duran playing a gig in Perry Barr with a mocked up canal behind them.

We are worshipping our own Golden Calf, but there’s no reason to suspect it’s a false idol.  Long we continue to have a cow. 

You are named for a strange idea
And you are a strange mix of sport
And places too

We didn’t originally want you
But you came
And we didn’t build the houses we promised
But the stadium looked nice

You’ve made Smithfield be the name of a place
Which was unexpected

You gave us back a monkey
But he’s bigger now and
Thank you for the other statue

You were OK
No bull

EJ Thribb, 22 (sports)