Accord and discord

On a wet Tuesday evening in December my partner Polly and I went to the Lamp Tavern, a tiny back street pub in the industrial district of Highgate, on the next block from the river Rea. My multi-instrumentalist cousin Mike Adcock was playing a gig in the back room with his band Flying Down Trio (Get it? I had to have it explained). The gig was one in a series of Improvised and Experimental Music that runs every second Tuesday, of which I had previously been unaware. The audience numbered seven, so perhaps a lot of other people are also unaware of these esoteric events happening in an unlikely place.

It reminded me that one of the great virtues of cities is their ability, through number and diversity, to support minority interests (though in this case the support barely extended to covering the band’s petrol costs from Cheltenham and back). I think I learned this from Jane Jacobs’ second book that gets overlooked a bit, The Economy of Cities, in which she had some insightful things to say about the resilience of Birmingham’s diverse economy, in comparison to Manchester. The music at the Lamp was eccentric and fascinating, with the percussionist in particular extracting varied and delightful sounds from the array of metal objects suspended and standing in front of him, as well as from hitting and bowing the Robin Day stackable chair that he (sometimes) sat on.

Mike began the first set on accordion, playing a beautiful Italian instrument that he bought last year in Birmingham, from a place that also illustrates this same urban virtue. You would never find the Birmingham Accordion Centre without a map, and perhaps not with one. It is hidden away in an obscure rhombus of land bounded by three railway lines and a canal. (You can see it as you arrive on a train from Euston, but you wouldn’t know it). An anonymous-looking 1840s house with shuttered windows and originally part of a railway station that has long disappeared, it is full of accordions. There is a fascinating workshop where accordions are mended, from which a harmonic wheeze occasionally escapes as an instrument is operated on.

One kilometre away, a different inner city music is heard in the new Eastside Park, opened last year. I was forwarded an email from West Midlands Police to the security manager at Millennium Point, which adjoins the park. Eastside Park, designed in the modern French manner by Patel Taylor and Alain Provost, has proved very popular but has had some problems of anti-social behaviour. Policing and private security has been stepped up, but the email describes another initiative. It reads ‘…Jennens Court (Unite Students) has provided the funding and fitted loudspeakers, playing classical music to stop any form of loitering on top of Fox Street and we are seeing a noticeable difference in ASB related incidents. I know this works as I was in the park earlier in the afternoon and as soon as the music was turned on, approximately 6-7 males left within minutes from that location’.

I feel ambivalent about this initiative, quite apart from the fact that loitering with your mates is a perfectly proper activity for young people in a park, and always has been. Playing music over loudspeakers in a park can be pleasant: a bit Soviet maybe, but it can add to the gaiety of the place. But using music to drive people away from a park does injury to the integrity of both music and landscape. When I was last there, it sounded like Bruckner: but who are the most deterrent composers? I would like to know. I fear one of them might be Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose British premiere of Sternklang in Cannon Hill Park on midsummer’s day 1992 I remember vividly, with the white-suited composer strolling around the park supervising his dispersed groups of musicians. A wonderful day – I stayed until the very end, when in the dusk a mallet struck the giant gong, suspended from a tree.