Despite a shedload of work to get through, it’s been a rather euphoric day. As ever, the perfect soundtrack courtesy of Ken’s show on WFMU. Amongst others: I Shall be Released (Nina Simone); I’m Happy (Ivor Cutler); Ding Dong The Witch is Dead! (Klaus Nomi); etc… If you can handle three hours of jollity they’ll have the show archived in a couple of days.

“The Bays incorporate a classical ensemble into their improvised electronic performance, using a unique system of real-time music scoring projected for the audience to see as well as hear.”

Sounds like there’s plenty of potential for disaster or triumph here. The Bays improvise, the composers throw the score at the orchestra as they go along, and the conductor hopes for the best… The video below gives you a bit more of an idea, and this writeup. Catch it on Friday as part of Integra; not the kind of thing you see at the Custard Factory everyday.

The imminent arrival of Julian Cope at Town Hall next week has resurrected heady teenage days when I wore a homemade ‘Julian Cope is God’ tshirt, played Peggy Suicide to death and pored over his declarations in the NME. Cope’s freewheeling memoirs are still a joy to read, and a reminder that Monday is almost a homecoming gig. He grew up in Tamworth, fled to Liverpool as a student and tasted pop infamy with The Teardrop Explodes, then after the group broke up in the early 80s holed up in his hometown to nurse various paranoid complexes, accumulate a huge collection of toy cars and gradually rebuild his life. In one of his more mental solo songs ‘Reynard the Fox’ the backdrop is provided by childhood memories of the countryside east of Tamworth (see Paul Drummond’s map below), and long before he was writing scholarly tomes about megalithic Britain Cope was making up his own pre-history of the ‘Alvecote mound’, a slag-heap which now overlooks the M42. (Pictured on the cover of Fried with emblematic toy truck, above.)

The internet does boast a ‘Tamworth Bands Heritage Trail’, but there’s no mention of Cope in there (too posh? too weird?) so I decided to rectify this with a little help from Google Maps (in the process discovering that you can now attach video clips to specific locations, which is very exciting). Now that’s quite enough stalking, time to get on with some proper work…

I’m doing a bit of moonlighting this week, writing press releases for Moseley Folk fest at the end of August. One of their guests on the Sunday afternoon is Ian Campbell, father of Ali and Robin from UB40 and a godfather of Birmingham’s folk scene. Back in the 60s his Jug O’ Punch folk club round the back of Digbeth Civic Hall (now the Barfly) gathered all the big names on the revival circuit - including Paul Simon, who went on to cover Campbell’s ‘The Sun is Burning’. The club helped to spawn the Red Lion folk club in Kings Heath, which is still going strong today and pays host to Peggy Seeger and assorted Watersons this Saturday. Big events like last month’s Town Hall sell-out English Originals and Moseley Folk owe a lot to these smaller pub promoters, who kept the folk circuit ticking over through many years of unfashionability.

Anyway, all of this is obviously a very roundabout way of plugging the final event in our spring season. Also jumping on the folk bandwagon, on Sunday 18 May 7inch will be screening a lovely 1965 film about the Watersons; Travelling For a Living. The director Derrick Knight will be up to introduce the film, and you can read a wee interview we did with him here.