birmingham bands 1980s
Successful Birmingham singer-songwriters and musicians include Steve Gibbons, Mike Kellie (of Spooky Tooth), Blaze Bayley (former vocalist of Wolfsbane and Iron Maiden), Keith Law (of Velvett Fogg & Jardine) Jeff Lynne, Phil Lynott, Jamelia, Kelli Dayton of The Sneaker Pimps, Martin Barre (guitarist with Jethro Tull), Steve Cradock (guitarist for Ocean Colour Scene and Paul Weller), Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy, Fritz Mcintyre (keyboardist of Simply Red), Christine Perfect (of Fleetwood Mac), Nick Rhodes, John Henry Rostill (bass guitarist/composer for The Shadows), Mike Skinner, John Taylor, Roger Taylor, Ted Turner (guitar/vocals, Wishbone Ash), Peter Overend Watts and Dave Mason. [47] Swarbrick's former colleague from the Ian Campbell Folk Group Dave Pegg joined as the 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.[48]. This is a List of Birmingham bands, a growing list of significant musical groups based in the Birmingham area, organized by the decade of their emergence. then look no further! Alan, Andy, Martin and Dave started their career in Basildon. [194], The most successful of Birmingham's eclectic soul- and jazz-influenced post-punks were Fine Young Cannibals, established in 1984 by two former members of The Beat guitarist Andy Cox and bassist David Steele who recruited Sparkhill-born former punk Roland Gift as a vocalist. [34] 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. [222] With their repertoire ranging from negro spirituals to traditional Southern gospel and carrying a distinct Caribbean influence, their appeal transcended cultural barriers to a then-unprecedented degree[221] and although they refused to sing secular music[221] their audience extended to white non-churchgoers across Europe. [339] Their minimalist and abrasive 1992 debut Gash stood out from the grunge and shoegazing that dominated alternative music at the time, instead anticipating later developments like lo-fi and post-rock,[340] and their musical palette broadened rapidly over subsequent releases to encompass jazz and hip-hop elements and unusual instrumentation including glockenspiels, toy pianos and a Hawaiian bubble machine. [90] The industrial basis of Birmingham society in the 1960s and 1970s was also significant: early heavy metal artists described the mechanical monotony of industrial life, the bleakness of the post-war urban environment and the pulsating sound of factory machinery as influences on the sound they developed,[91] and Black Sabbath's use of loosely stringed down-tuned guitars and power chords partly resulted from lead guitarist Tony Iommi's loss of the ends of two fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident with a sheet metal cutting machine. Also in the late 1960s, there were psychedelic rock bands, such as Velvett Fogg a cult British psychedelic rock band. [291] Wright has also released more dancefloor focused work as Tube Jerk. [2] The New Musical Express calculated that in 1964 there were over 500 groups operating within the city. Available for both RF and RM licensing. [116] Their 1978 album Stained Class established the sonic template for the new wave of British heavy metal that would follow, removing the last traces of blues rock from the metal sound and taking it to new levels of power, speed, malevolence and musicality. Liberty's, an old nightclub in Birmingham 10. By Dave Freak 29th Jan 2022, 1:31pm West End Bar was a major meeting place before parties, with Steve Wells and Steve Griffiths and was another important venue throughout this period of time. [37] Jaki Graham was one of the most popular British R&B acts of the 1980s with a string of hits including "Could It Be I'm Falling in Love," "Round and Round" and "Set Me Free". [168] The Prefects had no interest in making records, their sole recorded output being a single released after they had split up, and two Peel Sessions eventually released in 2004 as the compilation album The Prefects are Amateur Wankers. [359][360], A short lived music festival was Gigbeth, first piloted in March 2006 and now annual on the first weekend of November in Digbeth. Tony Iommi was a member in mid-1968, but soon left to form Black Sabbath. "[171] Describing the "legendary Birmingham group" the journalist Jon Savage later wrote "The Prefects were always one of the most hermetic and confrontational groups. [307] Harris also released ambient and dub influenced albums under his own name in collaboration with musicians such as New York City's James Plotkin,[308] and Bill Laswell[309] and Italy's Eraldo Bernocchi. This was a time when very few people took photos at gigs and I was lucky enough to capture several soon-to-be-huge bands playing small venues, including Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, New Order and Duran Duran. [251] Napalm Death soon became almost the house band at the Mermaid, with their growing local following ensuring good crowds for visiting bands. [148] With its eerie wailing noises, stabbing brass, doom-laden middle eastern musical motifs and dub-style breaks laid over a loping reggae beat, "Ghost Town" marked the birth of the tradition of sinister-sounding British pop that would later lead to the rise of trip hop and dubstep. [43] This was arguably the most important folk club in the United Kingdom during the 1960s,[44] and certainly the largest, attracting an audience that regularly reached 500 people a week. Alabama is a country music band from Fort Payne, Alabama. Any town with two is in dead trouble"[175] Dansette Damage were best known for their classic debut single, the "double b side" "N.M.E. [322] Most significant was the track "Dred Bass", released in 1994 by Asend & Ultravibe under the name Dead Dred, which managed to be highly innovative while remaining focused on the essence of jungle; its backwards bassline and skittering snare sound "constituted a landmark in jungle's development into a rhythmic psychedelia"[323] and established the ultra-heavy bass sound that would dominate jungle for the next two years "as complex and intelligent as any drum 'n' bass track ever made". Birmingham's culture of popular music first developed in the mid-1950s. . The Accused released a single EP in 1979,[173] their self-deprecating style illustrated by their two most popular songs: the self-explanatory "We're Crap", and "W.M.P.T.E." "[123], During the 1960s and 1970s, the West Midlands developed a culture of Black British music that was unique,[132] remaining far less segregated from the white music scene than was the case in London. The Best Pop Artists of the 1980s. Def Leppard was formed in 1977 by vocalist Joe Elliott and later released their only EP to date entitled "The Def Leppard E.P." in 1979. It's all perception and reality, which are completely different"[331] The American National Public Radio described Trish Keenan as "an ambassador between the parallel worlds of what happened and what might have been", noting that she was "interested in memory less for nostalgic reasons and more for the world and lives it distorted and rewrote. [45] 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. [citation needed]. . [145], In the late 1970s, under the influence of punk rock, the casually multi-ethnic ska culture emerged into a coherent movement called 2 Tone, which featured politically charged lyrics, multi-racial bands, and musical influences including Jamaican ska, bluebeat, reggae northern soul and white English music hall. [348] Their debut album Through the Windowpane was described by Mojo Magazine as marking "the rebirth of sweeping, experimental British rock music",[349] combining influences from indie pop, jazz, samba, swingbeat and psychedelia,[350] on an album that featured an orchestra, a colliery band, a guitar being played with an electric drill, a brass section and a song described by Stylus Magazine as "something approaching drum 'n' bass as played live and acoustic by idiot savants". Performs: Worldwide. With their distinctive peroxide blond mop tops, the quartet clocked up a run of independent chart hits, beginning with 1989's giddy Hollow Heart (on Lazy, also home to Coventry's The Primitives). [174] A review of The Sussed in 1978 called them "a shambles", concluding "every town should have one band like The Sussed. [65] Guitarist Roy Wood was soon persuaded to start writing original material, and his eccentric, melodically inventive songwriting and dark, ironic sense of humour[66] saw their first five singles all reach the UK Top 5. Birmingham band Duran Duran - who had formed in 1978 - came in with a demo tape and the Berr. Birmingham in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the birthplace of heavy metal music,[82][83][84] whose international success as a musical genre over subsequent decades has been rivalled only by hip-hop in the size of its global following,[85][86] and which bears many hallmarks of its Birmingham origins. They started in 1976 in Birmingham and helped to develop the new wave/English synth-pop sound. 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[9] that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South",[10] 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". [229] Success in the United States followed with her single "Ain't Nobody" spending five weeks at number 1 in the US dance charts in 1994. [280] Most closely identified with the city's Downwards Records label and its local producers Regis, Surgeon and Female, Birmingham techno's characteristic hard, fast and uncompromising style was influenced as much by the local industrial music scene that developed around Mick Harris of Napalm Death and Martyn Bates of Eyeless in Gaza as it was by the pioneers of American techno. Influences were detectable here and there, but the heart of the music was mysteriously original". "[315] Timeless was the first drum and bass record to achieve substantial mainstream success. [296] Oscillate incorporated these new sounds with surrounding visual effects to create what it called "heliocentric atmospheres",[297] becoming "The club of the moment, making waves far beyond the Midlands". I think that is why Birmingham is thriving musically because you got a lot of different cultures musically, and in everyday life. [25] The Fortunes had their 1964 recording "Caroline" adopted as its theme song by the pirate radio station Radio Caroline,[26] 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 last concert at Odeon Birmingham was on June 20, 1987. Hundreds of people, including an 80-strong party of sailors from H.M.S. Top 80s Bands near Birmingham, AL (31 results) Distance Availability Rosie Cuckston of Pram, originally from Yorkshire, recalled how "coming to Birmingham, you suddenly realise that there's life outside of your pop or punk, and other influences start to feed in". [44], 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. Here are . Since 1992, the band has consisted of Joe Elliott (vocals), Rick Savage (bass guitar), Rick Allen (drums), Phil Collen (guitar), and Vivian Campbell (guitar). [197], The genesis of Birmingham's New Romantic scene "the only one outside of London that ever really mattered"[199] lay in the 1975 opening of the Hurst Street boutique of fashion designers Kahn and Bell, whose influence was to ensure that Birmingham didn't wholly conform to the uniform punk aesthetic that dominated the rest of the country. [185], During the late 1970s and early 1980s Birmingham was the home of a "vibrant but infamously fragmented and undervalued" post-punk scene. In the 1960s Birmingham was the birthplace of modern bhangra,[13] a form of music which combines the influence of traditional Punjabi dance music with western popular music and urban black music such as reggae and hip-hop. Rod Stewart - vocals. [149] More significant still were the song's lyrics: the day before "Ghost Town" reached number 1, Britain's inner cities erupted in rioting,[150] and the song's despairing portrait of the collapse of Britain's cities come to symbolise the era, with its nihilistic line "can't go on no more the people getting angry" seeming retrospectively prophetic. [6] The first of these was The Move, formed in December 1965 by musicians from several existing Birmingham bands including Mike Sheridan and The Nightriders, Carl Wayne and The Vikings and the Mayfair Set; initially performing covers of American West Coast acts such as The Byrds alongside Motown and early rock 'n' roll classics. [179] The success of their wild and snarling first single "Johnny won't go to Heaven" in 1977 saw the NME declare Rowland to be Johnny Rotton's successor as the voice of punk protest, but Rowland was already expressing dissatisfaction with punk's uniformity, complaining that "The original idea of punk was to be different and say what you wanted not just to copy everybody else". Birmingham music: Do you remember these Birmingham bands of the 1980s? [3] The Ivy League, founded by the Small Heath-born songwriting partnership of John Carter and Ken Lewis,[25] had three UK hits in 1965: "Funny How Love Can Be", "That's Why I'm Crying" and "Tossing And Turning". [86][116], Birmingham's booming post-war economy made it the main area alongside London for the settlement of West Indian immigrants from 1948 and throughout the 1950s. [citation needed], Birmingham was the birthplace of Street Soul Productions, a record label established in 2005, which became a community organisation in 2008, and since then has concentrated on music workshops and events alongside online broadcasting. The New Dance Sound of Detroit that first identified techno as a distinct musical genre, also being responsible for giving the genre its name,[276] and his Network Records label, based in Stratford House in Birmingham's Camp Hill, that would be instrumental in introducing Detroit techno to British and European audiences over the following years. [274] By the time of their fourth album Evansecence, however, Scorn's work had lost its metal elements and was increasingly based on sampling and electronic music, moving deeply into ambient dub. When was the last concert at Birmingham NEC? Alabama Concert History. RE-LIVE THE FUN OF THE 1980STHE BEST DECADE FOR MUSIC! [260], By this point Napalm Death had already developed the fusion of punk and metal styles described by Bullen as their objective: "we wanted that hardcore energy meeting slowed down, primitive metal riffs, and to basically marry that to a political message". The Garryowen, Small Heath: This used to be a 24-hour open venue that was shut down. [61], Virtually unknown at his death, Drake has since become one of the greatest examples of an artist achieving posthumous fame and influence. [285] Sandwell District's sound built upon the minimalism that the earlier Birmingham sound had established as the dominant techno aesthetic of the early 2000s, but also challenged it, being characterised by a greater degree of subtlety and refinement[285] and showing influences from wider musical genres including post-punk, shoegaze and death rock. [248], In the mid 1980s The Mermaid in Birmingham's Sparkhill district lay at the centre of the emergence of grindcore,[249] which combined the influence of hardcore punk and death metal to form arguably the most extreme of all musical genres;[15] and the band Napalm Death, the most influential and commercially successful band of all of the various genres of extreme metal. But while those acts are justifiably mainstays of any decent '80s mixtape or playlist, the city produced dozens of other acts who packed such venues as The Rum Runner and Botanical Gardens, and . "[29], 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[9] that "stood with any of the gritty hardcore soul music coming out of the American South". [203] Suky Sohal from the band Achanak has also highlighted the importance of Birmingham's tradition of interaction between eclectic musical cultures: "It's such a thriving place for music, it's very sort of inspirational in that sense to produce music with the mixture of different cultures in the city. [334] The architectural critic Owen Hatherley has also linked the scene to Birmingham's unique recent history, as the booming economy and futuristic rebuilding of the postwar era gave way to the economic collapse and melancholic cityscape of the 1980s. [23] Instead the city's music was characterised by a "rampant eclecticism",[6] its style ranging from traditional blues, rock and roll and rhythm and blues through to folk, folk rock, psychedelia and soul,[23] with its influence extending into the 1970s and beyond. [271], In 1991 Mick Harris also left Napalm Death to pursue more experimental musical directions, teaming up with Nik Bullen to form Scorn,[272] whose first three albums brought a strong dub influence to bear on music that resembled Napalm Death slowed down to a crawl,[273] forming a hybrid ambient metal sound. This list of famous Birmingham musiciansincludes both bands and solo artists, as well as many singers/groupsof indie and underground status. [339] The best known exponents of the scene were Broadcast, who formed in 1995 and of all the Birmingham retrofuturist bands were the most directly influenced by 1960s psychedelia. While Toyah found fame in post-punk pop, UB40 were at the forefront of British reggae and Duran Duran became the. By Dave Freak 29th Jan 2022, 1:31pm Jim Cregan - guitars, vocals. Land of Oz at The Dome with Paul Oakenfold and Trevor Fung in 1989 which occurred on a Wednesday night, the same night The Happy Mondays played at The Hummingbird. [251] Justin Broadrick later remembered: "it was really just a shitty pub in a really shitty area, which just meant that you could get away with a lot more. Birmingham Contemporary Music Group: 1990s - 2010s : Classical, . [234], Steve Winwood, who had been one of the leading figures of Birmingham music in the 1960s with the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, returned as a solo artist in the 1980s with a hugely successful synthesiser-driven blue-eyed soul sound. [321] Later Back 2 Basics work continued this trend with sparse bottom-heavy tracks such Northern Connexion's "Spanish Guitar" and Murphy's Law's even more pared-back "20 Seconds",[324] while a set of releases placing gangsta rap samples over "incredibly evil basslines" laid the foundations of the G-funk-based direction of jump-up.[324]. Rhythm Doctor worked in one of the shops selling a lot of the early house 12"'s, Tempest. [301], Rockers Hi-Fi was formed in 1991 by the former punk Richard "DJ Dick" Whittingham and former rock & roller Glyn Bush,[302] who'd both fallen under the influence of Jamaican dub pioneers King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry in the Birmingham club scene of the mid 1980s. The last concert at Birmingham NEC was on January 15, 2023. A 1980 Lee High School grad, Sharp was listening to bands like Alice Cooper and Aerosmith before he got into punk. It had a 1400-seat auditorium and hosted some famous acts in its time. [80] Their first two singles "Paper Sun" and "Hole in My Shoe" highlighted the groups instrumental virtuosity and reached the UK Top 5.[81]. The brothers agree to give the band rehearsal space and jobs in the club so they wouldn't have to take day jobs. [95] Led Zeppelin formed in 1968 and was made up of two London-based musicians, one of whom was in The Yardbirds, and two from the Birmingham-based Band of Joy, marking an explicit combination of the musical influences of the two cities. [96] The Yardbirds had extended the instrumental textures of the blues through extended jamming sessions,[97] but it was the influence of the Midlands-based musicians drummer John Bonham and vocalist Robert Plant that would provide Led Zeppelin's harder edge and focus, and bring a more eclectic range of stylistic influences. DJs John . [254] First adopting their name and a settled line-up in late 1981,[255] they produced and traded cassette tapes internationally,[256] and first performed in public in April 1981. [14] Grindcore was born in Sparkbrook from fusing the separate influences of extreme metal and hardcore punk. [223] In 1969 they became the first Gospel Group to be recorded by a major record company when their classic and now extremely rare album Oh Happy Day was recorded by Cyril Stapleton for PYE Records. Electribe 101 hit the charts in 1988 with 'talking with myself'. The emotive Lovers rock song "Men Cry Too" by Beshara, is still considered to be one of the biggest and most popular songs within the subgenre.