Cold War Steve has produced a cultural collage representing the West Midlands. He has previously created work specific to Birmingham (I have a framed and signed copy of that one). This covers a broader area. Slade in pride of place at the top there.
A list of the artists featured is on the web page if you want to test how many you can identify.
On his website he says:
‘I’m a Brummie and I’ve created Birmingham works before (although not solely concentrating on music) and I was always a bit frustrated by the strict parameters I’d set myself. They had to be from Birmingham – even if they were just down the road in Walsall or Coventry they didn’t make the cut – which I was able to do, because Birmingham has been blessed with such a rich history of creative artists. However, I wondered how even more magnificent it would be if I just widened the net a little. The joy with my Manchester piece was the prefix of ‘Greater’ – with ‘Greater’ Manchester I wasn’t restricted to a self-imposed rigid geographical area. I could encompass not just the actual city of Manchester, but also Salford, Oldham, Stockport, Bury etc. So now I present to you my WEST MIDLANDS MAGNUS OPUS!"
From 808 State to Herman’s Hermits, via Georgie Fame, Marcus Intalex, Happy Mondays, DJ Paulette, Mark E Smith, Mr Scruff, Lonelady, Space Afrika, the Bee Gees, Demdike Stare and so many more.
The name of the piece comes from the late Steve Mackey of Pulp, who once described how people in Sheffield downplay things compared to those in other cities. To describe something, you really love can simply be reflected as "alright".
Some cities are known for their street art. This can sometimes be based on local musical icons, including those who have passed away - acting as a memorial perhaps, or a reminder of their influence.
Image: Alan Parkinson - just off Brick Lane, shared on Flickr under CC license
There are several sites which post these, including on Instagram.
Birmingham has its fair share of murals linked with Black Sabbath.
Sheffield has Jarvis Cocker on the side of the Fat Cat in Kelham Island.
Please share any musical murals from your own home area.
Thanks very much to Briley Habib for sending me the following image.
Image: Briley Habib
She says that the image can be found at Barranco, Lima, Peru. It is located at a bridge in an area popular with buskers, and the mural explores Afro-Peruano music.
There was an exhibition of her connections to Siouxsie and the Banshees.
One of the parts of the exhibition which worked particularly well was a group of leather jackets which had been painted with details of concerts that she had attended and other bands that were contemporaries.
Their drummer was called Budgie, and they released some decent albums of their own. Budgie also worked with other musicians, including the late Hector Zazou.
Budgie married Siouxsie in May 1991.
In 2007, the pair publicly announced their divorce.
Here's a few of my images showing the leather jackets hanging from the roof of the gallery.
To finish, here's one of Siouxsie's famous songs: 'Spellbound'.
A close friend used to have all four-album covers of Brian Eno’s ambient music series framed reverentially in smooth beech and hung as art in his living room.
Music for Airports (1979), The Plateaux of Mirror (with Harold Budd 1980), Day of Radiance (with Laraaji 1980), and On Land (1982) all share a cover art theme of partial map representations with a topographically knowing nod to pop art.
Hung in sequence on a wall the album covers were as striking and as artistic as the music they represent.
It is probably not possible for a single recording to be acknowledged as the starting point for a whole musical genre but ‘Ambient 1 Music For Airports’ comes some way to achieving that feat. Although it certainly was not the first ‘ambient music’, it was the first record to specifically adopt the label ‘ambient music’. Brian Eno had started exploring abstract electronica in his 1975 album ‘Discreet Music’ before moving onto work with Talking Heads and producing their ground breaking albums ‘More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978), ‘Fear of Music (1979) and ‘Remain in Light’ (1980)’’, a trilogy that sound-tracked my late teenage years.
As a teenager, ambient music was as unfathomable as penguins trying to grasp jazz, it simply was not on my radar until I got an ‘in’ with the Brian Eno/David Byrne genre busting, or is that genre defining, I’m not quite sure which even now, ‘My Life in The Bush of Ghosts’ (1981).
Here's the track 'Regiment':
Producer, Associated Performer, Composer: Brian Eno
Producer, Associated Performer, Composer: David Byrne
Drums, Associated Performer: Chris Frantz
Bass Guitar, Associated Performer: Busta Cherry Jones
Associated Performer, Drums: David van Tieghem
Associated Performer, Voice: Dunya Yusin
This was an album that employed samples of radio shows, sermons, an exorcism, chanting of the Qu’ran, cawing rooks and the voice of Lebanese singer Samira Tewfik. Few albums have had to fend off so many lawsuits, offending as it did both some Christians and some Muslims. Its initial critical reception was mixed but not from me - now I had to explore everything that Eno had made, and that included his ambient work.
It was whilst in Berlin producing David Bowie’s Low album in 1977 that Eno started work on ‘Music for Airports’ and he added parts that were looped from Robert Wyatt on piano and the avant-garde jazz guitarist Fred Frith, who I once saw in the 1980s in an upstairs room of a pub in Sheffield with three men and a dog.
Wyatt and Frith were both involved with Mike Oldfield early in his career too... more on Oldfield throughout the blog.
Although musicians contributed, Eno stated that machines predominantly made the album. In this it was a precursor for a whole direction for the creation of music to go in and this found further expression in the manic chop and paste rhythmic assemblage that ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ became.
Music for Airports is a wandering, rather aimless piece of music whose tone is set by piano motifs that are arrhythmic and with melody barely hinted at.
Eno describes his ambient music as something that “is intended to induce calm and a space to think”, he has also referred to it as “music to resign you to the possibility of death” which doesn’t appear to be the ideal music to listen to in an airport waiting room.
What ‘Music for Airports’ does not do is demand active attention and in that it has a lineage back to ‘Musique d’ameublement’ (Furniture Music), the phrase given by French composer and pianist Erik Satie (1866-1925) to his sparse piano motif led minimalist compositions.
Satie’s work, instantly recognizable, a century after his death, were an influence on the young Brian Eno and that is both acknowledged by Eno himself and is straight-forward to recognize when listened to side by side. Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 is perhaps the most widely known of his short works.
Which brings us back to the cover-art of Eno’s quartet of ambient albums.
A representation of the abstract landscapes that the music inside conjures with.
A melancholic air of beauty is all round, a grey day of scudding clouds and intermittent drizzle is evoked, a beauty that is sometimes so under-stated that it is hard to see, something that the cartographic suggestions give possibility to.
Or maybe that’s just the geographer in me.
And quite striking on a living room wall.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
A posting from a while back on Facebook explored the connection with sport and music, with a share of some outputs from a Twitter account called @_Bands_FC
