Popular music of Birmingham

Birmingham's culture of popular music first developed in the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s the city's music scene had emerged as one of the largest and most vibrant in the country; a "seething cauldron of musical activity", with over 500 bands constantly exchanging members and performing regularly across a well-developed network of venues and promoters. By 1963 the city's music was also already becoming recognised for what would become its defining characteristic: the refusal of its musicians to conform to any single style or genre. Birmingham's tradition of combining a highly collaborative culture with an open acceptance of individualism and experimentation dates back as far back as the 18th century, and musically this has expressed itself in the wide variety of music produced within the city, often by closely related groups of musicians, from the "rampant eclecticism" of the Brum beat era, to the city's "infamously fragmented" post-punk scene, to the "astonishing range" of distinctive and radical electronic music produced in the city from the 1980s to the early 21st century.

This diversity and culture of experimentation has made Birmingham a fertile birthplace of new musical styles, many of which have gone on to have a global influence. During the 1960s the Spencer Davis Group combined influences from folk, jazz, blues and soul and to create a wholly new rhythm and blues sound that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South", while The Move laid the way for the distinctive sound of English psychedelia by "putting everything in pop up to that point in one ultra-eclectic sonic blender". Heavy metal was born in the city in the early 1970s by combining the melodic pop influence of Liverpool, the high volume guitar-based blues sound of London and compositional techniques from Birmingham's own jazz tradition. Bhangra emerged from the Balsall Heath area in the 1960s and 1970s with the addition of western musical influences to traditional Punjabi music. The ska revival grew out of the West Midlands uniquely multi-racial musical culture. Grindcore was born in Sparkbrook from fusing the separate influences of extreme metal and hardcore punk. Techno's Birmingham sound combined the established sound of Detroit techno with the influence of Birmingham's own industrial music and post-punk culture.

Early Rock and Roll
Interest in rock and roll developed in Birmingham in the mid-1950s, after American recordings such as Bill Haley & His Comets' 1954 singles "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Rock Around the Clock"; and Elvis Presley's 1956 singles "Hound Dog" and "Blue Suede Shoes" began to appear on British airwaves.

Many performers who would be influential in the later growth of Birmingham music emerged during this era. Danny King had been receiving American blues and soul recordings by mail order from the United States since 1952, and soon afterwards began to perform covers of songs by artists such as Big Joe Turner in pubs such as The Gunmakers in the Jewellery Quarter. In 1957 he formed Danny King and the Dukes with Clint Warwick, performing rhythm and blues covers in local clubs and cinemas. Tex Detheridge and the Gators began performing Hank Williams covers on Saturday nights at The Mermaid in Sparkhill and on Sundays at the Bilberry Tea Rooms in Rednal in early 1956. The emergence of skiffle as a popular phenomenon in 1956 saw the birth of a new wave of Birmingham bands. The Vikings started as a skiffle group in Nechells in the spring 1957, with Pat Wayne and the Deltas also emerging as a skiffle group in Ladywood around the same time, spending the summer of 1957 busking on pleasure boats on the River Severn in Worcester.

The Brum Beat era
By the 1960s Birmingham had become the home of a popular music scene comparable to that of Liverpool: despite producing no one band as big as The Beatles the city was a "seething cauldron of musical activity", with several hundred groups whose memberships, names and musical activities were in a constant state of flux. The New Musical Express calculated that in 1964 there were over 500 groups operating within the city. Birmingham was a bigger and more diverse city than Liverpool, however, that was never subject to a single controlling influence such as that exercised by Liverpool's Brian Epstein; and as a result Birmingham's bands never conformed to a single homogenous sound comparable to Liverpool's Merseybeat. Instead the city's music was characterised by a "rampant eclecticism", its style ranging from traditional blues, rock and roll and rhythm and blues through to folk, folk rock, psychedelia and soul, with its influence extending into the 1970s and beyond.

It was in 1963 and 1964 that Birmingham's existing largely underground music scene began to attract national and international attention. The first single to be released commercially by a Birmingham band was "Sugar Baby" by Jimmy Powell and The Dimensions, released by Decca on March 23, 1962. The first Birmingham-based band to have a Top 10 hit were The Applejacks, who signed to Decca in late 1963 and whose debut single "Tell Me When" reached number 7 in the UK Singles Chart in February 1964. The Rockin' Berries made the Top 50 in September 1964 with "I Didn't Mean to Hurt You" and reached number 3 in October with "He's in Town", both songs featuring the distinctive falsetto vocals of Geoff Turton. The Fortunes had their 1964 recording "Caroline" adopted as its theme song by the pirate radio station Radio Caroline, and followed this with three major international hits in 1965 – "You've Got Your Troubles", a top 10 hit in both the UK and the US, "Here It Comes Again" and "This Golden Ring". The Uglys achieved a sizeable Australian hit, "Wake Up My Mind," in 1965. The Ivy League, founded by the Small Heath-born songwriting partnership of John Carter and Ken Lewis, had three UK hits in 1965: "Funny How Love Can Be", "That's Why I'm Crying" and "Tossing And Turning".

In early 1964 Dial Records and Decca both released compilation albums showcasing the breadth of the Birmingham music scene. The sleeve notes to the Decca compilation emphasised that Birmingham's characteristic musical diversity was already becoming clear: "But is there a Brum sound? This album surely proves beyond doubt that the answer is no. The reason: all the city’s groups, including those heard on this LP, are striving to achieve some degree of individuality."

The most consistently successful Birmingham group of this era was The Spencer Davis Group, which fused its members' varied backgrounds in folk, blues, jazz and soul into a wholly new rhythm and blues sound that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South". Driven by the "astoundingly soulful" vocals of the young Steve Winwood, accompanied by his own searing keyboard style, the pounding bass riffs of his brother Muff Winwood, the jazz-influenced drumming of Pete York and the then-unique electric fuzz guitar effect of Spencer Davis, the band started off playing R&B covers but achieved their greatest success with their own compositions. Chris Blackwell of Island Records signed the band on the spot after hearing them at the Golden Eagle pub on Hill Street in April 1964, and after four minor hits in late 1964 and early 1965 they broke through with their late 1965 single "Keep on Running", which knocked The Beatles off the number 1 position in the UK in January 1966. Two more UK hit singles followed during 1966 alongside two highly successful albums, before the November 1966 release of their own composition "Gimme Some Loving" – the group's masterpiece and one of the great recordings of the 1960s. This and its 1967 Winwood-written follow up "I'm a Man" were top 10 hits on both sides of the Atlantic selling over a million copies and adding a huge fanbase in America to their existing European popularity.

The Moody Blues were also originally primarily an R&B band, formed in May 1964 with musicians from other Birmingham bands including El Riot & the Rebels, Denny and the Diplomats, Danny King and the Dukes and Gerry Levene and the Avengers. By November they had secured a major international hit with their multi-million selling single "Go Now", which reached number 1 in the UK and number 10 in the US, and whose "soulful, agonized" vocal performance established lead singer Denny Laine as one of the most recognisable voices in British music. Although at this stage still within the R&B tradition, the music of the early Moody Blues already showed signs of the more experimental approach that would characterise their later career, with highly original musical compositions by Laine and Mike Pinder; live four-part harmonies that were far more expansive than anything used by bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Hollies or The Dave Clark Five at the time; and the zen-like repetition and rhythmic complexity of their piano parts prefiguring their future psychedelic style.

The television programme Thank Your Lucky Stars, broadcast by ABC Television from its studios in Aston between 1961 and 1966, was a major showcase for British pop music of the period, hosting the network television debut of The Beatles on 13 January 1963. The show was best known for its catchphrase "Oi'll give it foive!", which entered nationwide consciousness as sixteen year-old West Bromwich-born Janice Nicholls gave her verdict on the week's singles in Spin-a-Disc in her broad Black Country accent.

Folk revival
Research by folk music scholars recorded a rich tradition of folk-songs from the West Midlands as late as the 1960s, including songs being performed by local traditional singers such as Cecilia Costello and George Dunn entirely within an oral tradition, and songs documented by other folk music collectors over the previous 70 years. These included songs of social protest and songs of everyday life referring to places in and around the city, and reflected the area's underlying native rural traditions, its industrial culture and the influence of successive waves of incomers bringing and assimilating musical traditions from elsewhere.

Ian Campbell, who moved to Birmingham from Aberdeen as a teenager, was one of the most important figures of the British folk revival during the early 1960s. During the 1950s he fell under the influence of the Marxist Birmingham writer George Thomson and in 1956 founded the Ian Campbell Folk Group, initially as a skiffle group, but from 1958 performing politically-charged folk songs including Fenian and Jacobite songs, and songs of miners, industrial workers and farmworkers. The group's 1962 record Ceilidh at the Crown was the first live folk club recording ever to be released, and in 1965 they were the first group outside the United States to record a Bob Dylan song, when their cover of "The Times They Are a-Changin'" reached the UK top 50. Campbell also ran the Jug o' Punch Folk Song Club, originally at The Crown in Station Street, but later at the Digbeth Civic Hall on Thursday nights. This was arguably the most important folk club in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, and certainly the largest, attracting an audience that regularly reached 500 people a week. Other notable Birmingham folk clubs during the mid-1960s included the Eagle Folk Club at the Golden Eagle on Hill Street and the Skillet Pot Club above the Old Contemptibles on Livery Street.

Two Birmingham musicians from the Ian Campbell Folk Group would become key exponents in the development of folk rock over the next decade through their involvement with the band Fairport Convention, which had formed in London in 1967. Fiddler Dave Swarbrick joined the band in 1969, his knowledge of traditional music becoming the biggest single influence on the following album Liege & Lief, generally considered the most important album both of Fairport Convention as a band and of the folk rock genre as a whole. Swarbrick's former colleague from the Ian Campbell Folk Group Dave Pegg joined the as bass player later in 1969, and by 1972 the two Birmingham musicians were the band's only remaining members, holding the group together over the following years of rapid personnel change.

Singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading was the first British woman to have significant commercial success in the field of folk music and the first Black British woman to enjoy international success in any musical genre. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, she brought up from the age of 7 in the Brookfields area of Handsworth. In 1972 she released her debut album Whatever's for Us and recorded the first of her eight Peel Sessions, but her commercial breakthrough in Britain was 1976's Joan Armatrading, which reached the top 20 and which included top 10 hit "Love and Affection".