The other week I was lucky enough to interview artist Trevor Pitt and Gay John about Cum Clubbing – ‘an art party inspired by the colourful club nights of Birmingham’s underground scenes in the 1980′s’ that’s on at VIVID on Heath Mill Lane this Friday 10th September.  Tickets are still on sale for what should be one brilliant party. Cum Clubbing is presented as part of Trevor Pitts’ Sleeve Notes project and gets its name from Gay John’s infamous Cum Club night at the old Fantasy Club on Bradford Street during the 1980’s.

A little warning: The Cum Club was as dirty as its name suggests. Don’t read on if you’re easily offended and/or dislike talk of sexing and that.

Trevor Pitt’s Sleeve Notes project was born out of his introduction to the art world and his own major cultural influences, which didn’t come from art school or one particular source, but on the sleeve notes on the records of his varied music collection:

The thing I was interested in and always have been was this idea of sleeve notes. I didn’t go to art school, so my education was through picking bits up here and there. And on the back of albums they kind of give you some sleeve notes… Say for instance the David Bowie song, Andy Warhol – I’d never heard of Andy Warhol, I wanted to go and find out who Andy Warhol is. I think that’s how we learned….My education was through what I would call sleeve notes.

Trevor found himself increasingly interested in the unusual way he and the likes of Gay John grew as visual artists through their sleeve notes journeys, and looked at ways of mapping the largely unseen learning curve he and his peers went through:

Where did our art education come from? How did we fraternize with the art world? What did the art world have to do with the clubbing/underground world?…What was happening at that time…I knew it was a very creative period. We were very influenced by very visual culture of Glam – of Bolan and Bowie and Roxy – so we were a very visually saturated generation…

I was curious about this period in time, so I invited people to do a session with me where I made a cartography. A kind of map of their life…I just mapped out key incidents in their life so I looked at people, places and incidents…And thats when all this Cum Clubbing thing came out. Through that interview that’s when this idea of the project came out.

Trevor interviewed Gay John, Brian Duffy (Modified Toy Orchestra), Jim Simpson (Black Sabbath manager) and Roy Davies (Madhouse) about their journeys and it was his interview with Gay John that led him to creating the Cum Clubbing event at VIVID, ‘inviting younger DJ’s to respond to John and his archive’, referencing the influences of the likes of ‘New York Dolls…Iggy..Suzy…’ rather than doing the usual ‘Reflex factor’ of purely 80′s pop music.

Learning about Gay John’s record collection, it could be surprising that it led him to create the ‘visually stunning’ clubnights he did – it was made up of ‘anything that wasn’t in the charts’ and, in John’s own words, ‘My record collection’s crap…Disco Fuck and things like that….It’s just bad…I used to take punks back to my place and play them Shirley Bassey.’

Yet looking at the rich archive of posters, flyers and photographs from the Cum Club days, you can see they really were a fetishistic treat for all the senses.

John started Cum Club in the early eighties on Fridays at the Fantasy Strip Club, Bradford St, which had seen better days:

This was the really seedy side of the eighties. The Fantasy – you’d go in there and there’d be 45 year-old housewives and back in the day, they wouldn’t have Brazillians and things so they’d come on and there’d be a lot of forest appearing from all different places, they’d had the costumes for years and years and it was very, very sad but it was sort of captivating in a weird way.

Just like the strippers, The Fantasy Club was one of the many Birmingham clubs that was well passed its prime.

It had died on its bum really…there were lots of things wrong with it…It was just such a brilliant space, like time capsule things…last done up in the late 50s/early 60s, all done out like an old pirate ship….But If you think about all the clubs around that time, The Powerhouse, The Dome all those….they were all a night out. They all had really fabulous acts on, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, all these kind of people played at those clubs. But they slowly died.

As the market for ‘these fabulous, tacky clubs’ petered out, they left spaces ripe for Gay John’s outrageous creations where he and his friends, who suffered at the hands of strict door policies at local gay clubs, could get in dressed to the nines in their early Goth gear.

Early on, John’s nights split the audience into two groups – the delighted and the disgusted. Cum Club was soon infamous for its shocking stage acts, which became things of legend in Birmingham – from their Christmas Show take-off of Feed The World ‘with plastic tummies on and big cups’ to going ‘through the fetishes quite quickly. We’d do electrocution…setting you on fire…bondage…scat [involving some chocolate Angel Delight]…’

The flyers and posters John produced for Cum Club were as striking as the live performances. (My favourite is the Pope poster, which is pretty relevant now with his impending visit to Birmingham.)

I learned early on if you got a good image people would focus into that image and go down. These all used to go in shops, in the record shops and over the subways…we did get told off, people did say ‘we’re not putting them up anymore, but bring them in becase we want to collect them anyway’, so we probably toned them down…But I did go down the whole Byron thing. We all got into Byron and all the black arts…

Cum Club soon moved beyond being a simple fetish night to being ‘somewhere to dress’ that explored all elements of the hedonistic and bizarre.

We just wanted to do bizarre things…We’d have a section in the show where we’d humiliate someone in the audience…We’d have a section where we’d attack popular music at that time…I chainsawed a pig’s head up on stage….I got hold of this record [a parody of 'Fever' about a tumour], so we used to go out as patients and we’d have all meat inside body stockings and throughout this song we’d rip this meat off and pull it apart and throw it into the audience.

I commented that this sounded similar to the video for Robbie Williams’ Rock DJ:

It is weird, this is a long time ago…there is quite a lot of things I’ve seen, I’ve thought ‘God, that’s so close to what we were.’

The Fantasy club closed later in the eighties, partly because two people died falling through a glass factory roof trying to get in through the back fire escape. However Gay John’s adventures in clubland continued – progressing from Cum Club to create nights like Kipper, Slipper and Hypnosis and becoming Birmingham’s first Door Whore.

However, John increasingly found he didn’t have the ego for enjoying the the power over people he’d gained, and this eventually led him to leaving the club scene.

I turned myself off. I was hosting a night….and I got two people on stage having it away for 4 cans of lager. I just thought ‘What am I doing?…Why am I doing this? Why am I manipulating people? This is not what I got into it for, it’s not what I’m about.’ Just because I can get people to do things it doesn’t mean I should. So from then I stopped doing it and went and done other things. I didn’t miss it at all, in the end.

John doesn’t know what he’ll do with remaining archive of posters and paraphernalia from those days.

I was just going to bin it all…What use is it to anyone?

Luckily, Trevor Pitt intervened.

You can listen to my chat with Trevor and John here.

Photo by Richard Battye

Just been reminded about this by Anna Blackaby on Twitter. There is a deer currently residing in the River Rea at the back of the Custard Factory, as you can see from the above photo by Richard Battye. John Mostyn is keeping a watchful eye over it and according to him:

It’s not stuck. It could go downstream to Spag Junction if it wanted. Worried might go up to Middleway tho

An interesting find by Jackie Booth, which she came across whilst updating her Brimmin website – 94 Moseley Rd, one of the four sadly boarded-up buildings opposite Highgate Park, used to be home to 8 nurses who paid 40,000 visits a year. The above 1930 image of one such nurse outside her home was taken by Jackie from the Birmingham Women images of England book (can’t seem to source this online).

Now 94 Moseley Rd is now home to no-one, boarded up with plywood by its mysterious owners Award Developments Ltd of Sparkhill, who have no contact details for me to call up and ask, “Woss Goin On?” The three empty properties to its right (106/Flynn House, 102 and 98 Moseley Rd) have been sold by BDO Stoy Hayward – still no idea who to or what their plans are for it.

Two years ago yesterday Devon-based artist Melinda Scwakhofer paid a visit to Birmingham, enticed by the delights detailed here on Digbeth is Good. Keen to give her the full Digbeth experience, I took her for a drink in my local The Spotted Dog on the evening she arrived, where Melinda paid for the drinks with Art Money.

John Mostyn was also making his way to The Spotted Dog that evening, inviting drinking buddy Steve Coxon to join him and refusing to take no for an answer. Melinda and Steve met in The Spotted Dog’s back garden and the rest, as they say, is history.

The wedding labyrinth

Melinda are Steve are now married and living in Moretonhampstead but last night they returned to Birmingham to celebrate their anniversary in the place where they first met, with pasties, pies and Prosecco in what was a lovely, heart-warming celebration.

And whilst we were looking through the wedding photos, I learned that the Digbeth-Devon exchange didn’t stop with Melinda and Steve’s meeting. The stones that laid out the little circular labyrinth for their wedding ceremony were actually from the Birmingham Bead Shop, who were moving shop units and looking for a new home for their stones. I think they went to the best possible place.

The Museum of Windows, a forthcoming exhibition from Andy Broadey at the Bordesley Centre of Contemporary Art, looks interesting – seemingly proposing a whole new regeneration plan for Digbeth which takes its development as a ‘creative quarter’ as far as it possibly can:

The Museum of Windows proposes the hypothetical redevelopment of vacant or dilapidated factories and warehouses in Digbeth as art galleries. The proposed designs combine aspects of white cube galleries with the existing structures of local buildings, whilst also replacing one or more of the outer walls with glass facades. Were they to be built, these structures would transform previously abandoned spaces into sites of artistic appreciation and their transparent facades would allow visitors to view the surrounding industrial landscapes. The exhibition takes the form of an installation, presenting architectural plans for the proposed galleries, documentation charting the history of the proposed sites, and architectural and art historical reference points for the project.

The exhibition opens this Friday 10^th September 6.30 – 8.30pm and is open Saturday 11^th - Sunday 12^th September 10.00am – 5.00pm at the Bordesley Centre of Contemporary Art, which is a tricky place to find – location details here.

Collecting street stories at Highgate Funday | Talk About Local – Apologies for cross-posting from my work blog to here, but I used it to explain what I’m hoping to do at Highgate Funday tomorrow, so seemed fair to pop this on here too. Please come and see me if you’re around! The Funday fun starts at 12pm tomorrow in Highgate Park.

In March I was pretty inspired by My Street – Cuban Stories, a beautiful book from artists Diana Ivanova and Babak Salari, who worked in Cuba to help people tell the stories of their street to someone who’s never been there with words and photography. At the launch event Babak commented how much more mobile we are than most Cubans, moving quite often rather than spending our lives in the same areas, using me as an example:

“When I was talking to Nicky, I couldn’t really work out where she was from. [He'd gotten the Irish father/English mother/Welsh childhood/Midlands adulthood backstory.] But when I asked her what street she’s from, then I knew.”

ZeFrank's A Childhood Walk

And he was right – I’m from Vanfield Close in Caerphilly, where I spent a large part of my childhood.  It’s not where I first lived and I’ve moved quite a lot since living there, but it’s the place that holds the most memories for me.  Of course, this may change in the future.

Since then I’ve been enjoying seeing people use Google Street View to revisit ‘their street’ and talk about the memories they hold.   So tomorrow I’ll be at Highgate Funday, talking to people about what they feel is ‘their street’, possibly revisiting those places on Google Street View and recording the stories they have to tell about them.  I’m hoping to create a simple map from these recorded conversations.  Whether it will work well or not remains to be seen – wish me luck!

‘timelapse’ from Mathew Beckett on Vimeo.

Arty-tecture: New Kid On The Block at Digbeth (Coach Station) and Old Face Re-Acquainted at The Zellig, Digbeth – Two in-depth, architecture-type articles about the construction of the new Birmingham Coach Station and redevelopment of Devonshire House as ‘Zellig’ at The Custard Factory. Quite liked this time-lapse film of the coach station’s construction by Mat Beckett that was included.

Always popular this will be an intimate affair and as per usual the lineup/times (see Punks Picnic link above for details) will be subject to change. Prices Fri £6:00, Sat £8:00 and Sun £2:00, with food/distro stalls and DJ’s.There’s also silly games in Cannon Hill Park beforehand.

All proceeds go to the Justice for Gary Critchley campaign.

I’m hoping to make Saturday at least so see y’ there

Midge x

Brum Punx Picnic

Spotted and papped by Will Perrin

Planning application for River Street/Fazeley Street – Now this is interesting – a planning application for:

Erection of a 14.8m MK3 dual user column with ground based cabinets and ancillary developments.

Photo by Will Perrin

In layman’s terms – a 50 foot mobile telephone mast for two mobile phone providers with a couple of big grey cabinets at the bottom of it. Might we finally get a mobile phone signal in Digital Digbeth?