It’s nearly summer and deep in your entrails, smothered in pounds of rotting Easter egg, your body’s spark-plug is desperately trying to engender that first globule of post-winter adrenalin. Recorded music no longer suffices: even your Christmas treats are beginning to pall – the Everley Bros. boxed set, The Gun Club’s live bootleg, that special edition wax cylinder by ultra-folkists Farm Crisis. You need some live sounds.
If you live in the Brum area (as the locals insist on calling Birmingham, England), like smart-lyric, jangly pop, and can’t wait for torpid Brummie hibernationists Yeah Yeah Noh’s next outing (with Subway Sect in London, sometime on the outskirts of the future), you could do worse – much worse; this is Birmingham, after all – than investigate folk/indie/roots clublet The Tower of Song. On the recommendation of a friend (see more below), I checked it out last summer with some subsequently very bemused Chinese university students. I was bemused myself, but pleasantly so.
The gaff is about the size of Kanye West’s sock drawer, but – no, therefore – a great place to see bands. The beer is cheap, the staff friendly. And the acts? First up was a local rapper in a floor-length anorak and interesting headgear. His lyrics were a superlatively bizarre mash-up of Old Testament gibberish, apocalyptic weather forecasts and extended reflections on the Japanese nuclear spillage. Although I could have listened to him all night – hypnotised, I think – the affable MC Tom Martin decided he had outstayed his fifteen minutes of fame and virtually manhandled him off the stage. When an Ulsterman tells you your time is up, it’s best to leave, and quickly.
Another highlight was a retired teacher and his hilariously mawkish tale of a former pupil, a squaddie who, although willing to kill strangers for money, possessed a distinctly sensitive side, as exemplified by his desert hankering for The Bells of Bournville. This was timeless music, in the sense that time also has no prospect of an end.
Most of the acts, though, did not furnish the delights of inadvertent comedy. They were good, some very good. They varied in style: there was fancy, folky guitar work, an acapella singer of various world musics, some singer-songwriters of the traditional kind. The Tower also features occasional professional guests. The night I went it was The Rosellys, an accomplished country outfit who yielded several yee-ha! moments, when even the Shanghai posse showed signs of recovery from the vicarious ravages of Soldier Blue’s PTSD.
I was sort of dreading my mate’s spot. What if he was terrible? In the event, he was fine. Nifty guitar work, a pleasing, high voice – and no references to Leviticus or Cadbury World.
Now he’s got a CD out and it’s rather impressive – nice echoes of The Byrds, The La’s, a bit of The Go Betweens, all done at home and on his own. All the instruments are real, apart from the digital drums. These are the only weak aspect of the album; they’re a bit 80s-indie snare and hi-hat. Dave is not known as The Funkster at work, and when he once told me that he didn’t have a black bone in his body he wasn’t referring to satisfying the membership criteria of the Cotteridge White Power Collective.
Dave has an attractive upper-register voice, sibilant and slightly fey in character, and harmonises quite splendidly with himself. The songs meander along in an easy-going fashion, rather like the man himself (half-way into the hellish ordeal of an observed lesson last year he sauntered into my room and asked if I fancied a cup of coffee.) I particularly like the way the songs resist the grating cliché of verse-bridge-chorus and simply go their own sweet, melodic, unhurried way. There is something odd structurally about them, which my musician brother tells me is because they repeatedly use a 2-chord structure, and the variations which stand in for standard bridges or choruses wander surprisingly into the occasional dissonant chord, yet resolve harmoniously to the fifth note of the tonic. Mystifed, I nodded agreement. To recoup my credibility, I ventured, ‘I like that bit,’ to which Dermot replied, ‘An arpeggiated riff.’
So there you have it: if you appreciate bell-like guitar, considered lyrics, a fine voice, singalong la-la-la hooks and arpeggiated riffs, check out Antenna by Fireseed. You can get it by dropping Dave a line at soundcloud.com/fireseed-uk. Or you can get along to The Tower of Song on a Wednesday night. Dave’s usually on, and if you’re lucky, you may also get to hear south Birmingham’s foremost rapper’s thoughts on Donald Trump, Gravity Waves and the scriptural justifications of Pancake Tuesday.
