In pursuit of Birmingham’s clubbing yesteryear

Can a VR night out beat its IRL equivalent?

Dear Patchers: If you could trade a present-day night out for a night hitting up the warehouses and clubs of 1989 Brum, would you? I imagine for a lot of you the response would be a resounding YES. While there are plenty of decent nights to attend these days, it’s hard to vie with what was probably Birmingham’s acid house peak. Thankfully, this is now possible — with the help of a VR headset. But when it comes to memorialising the raves of the late 80s and early 90s, should we be thinking, first and foremost about fun, or the politics of dance music? Writer Dan Cave took a trip to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery to visit their rave VR experience In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats to try and answer that question.

Editor’s note: As is tradition on a Wednesday, this piece is paywalled partway down. This is because our journalism takes time and money to produce and edit — and our paywall is a prompt for you to join our cohort of paying subscribers — now at a huge 800! We are so grateful that you have all taken a punt on a new way of doing news and that this community is growing rapidly, less than a year after we were founded. We’d like to hit that 1000 mark before the year is out which will allow us to develop the team and take on more complex and meaty stories. So, please tell your friends and family about us — and subscribe now if you haven’t already.

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Brum in Brief

🥊Invictus Games for Brum: Birmingham will host the 2027 Invictus Games, which will be the second time the event has been held in the UK since its 2014 inauguration. The games, for wounded, injured and sick military personnel and veterans, was founded by Prince Harry, and could see the Duke of Sussex head to the second city for the event. Planned to be held at the NEC in three years time, Brum’s bid beat off competition from Washington DC to win, with the Prince saying the city’s military ties made it a “formidable contender”. Full story. 

🏗️Ladywood regen dispute: The £2.2bn planned regeneration of Ladywood — said to be the biggest single-site estate regeneration in Europe —has set emotions soaring and has been described as “economic violence”. Plans include tearing down the homes of up to 6,000 people with over 1,200 council homes potentially repossessed. In their place, 7,500 homes will be built in a high-density housing plan with about 1,000 of these designated as affordable council-owned homes. But residents and campaigners have hit back, saying the plans amount to “psychological economic violence”, ignore derelict land that could be built on, and that the council isn’t engaging with families as it should. More here.

🚌Bus control beckons: Mayor Richard Parker is a step closer to a franchised bus system after WMCA leaders okayed an initial report into the issue. The report said the scheme could cost circa £22m, with this cash coming from existing budgets, and once the scheme is up it will be self-funding. Mr Parker said: "Our buses are failing. The West Midlands is paying an additional £50 million subsidy every year to private operators and yet they increase prices and cut services year-on-year.” All the details.

🚆White elephant Curzon St? The decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2 means the £460m Curzon St station will sit largely unused, says a new report by the National Audit Office. With seven platforms being built, only three will be regularly used but it is cheaper to continue building the station to full specification. The new Labour government has said it will not revive the northern leg. Full story in The i [with paywall].

🎺Jazz hands: The University of Birmingham and Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival have teamed up to bring families lunchtime jazz at The Exchange café this Thursday. While reserved seating is already taken, families are being encouraged to come before 11am to take unreserved seating without needing to book. Described as suitable for ages five and upwards. More details.

🎶Northern Soul takeover: Birmingham’s so-called oldest pub, The Old Crown, is hosting a Northern Soul takeover this Saturday from 3pm. DJ Russ Winstanley, founder of the original Wigan Casino all-nighters, will be bringing all the best in Northern Soul classics, Soul & Rhythm and Blues grooves. It’s free entry, too.

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In pursuit of Birmingham’s clubbing yesteryear

By Dan Cave

It’s a rare dry evening in Birmingham. There’s a crisp twenty in the pocket of your 501s and a bubbling desire to cut loose. Job, family, that weird thing your flatmate said at the pub last week? Forget about it. Tonight is the bit that makes the drudgery of day-to-day life worthwhile — the night is yours. 

You want to dance to a bassline that shakes you from sternum to toe. The one challenge is deciding where: The Que Club for hard house, or Powerhouse for gnarled acid? You could even head for a marathon dance session at the Rag Market. After all, the second city is an unending panoply of warehouses, industrial spaces, DIY dancefloors and multi-storey clubs. At night, Birmingham is everything you could ever want. 

It’s the memory of such vibrancy and choice in our region’s historic rave scene that greets punters heading to In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery’s exhibition-cum-virtual reality experience transports you back to 1989, when the acid house movement was just starting to gain momentum. 

Inside the red Peugeot. Image courtesy of East City Films.

Improbably, it was created by one Darren Emerson — not that Darren Emerson, the ex-Underworld member and DJ, but a London-based artist/director/writer/producer with the same name. Still, the lack of former Underworld member input doesn’t seem to have hurt the VR experience’s chances — it was originally commissioned by Coventry UK City of Culture in 2021 and since then has swept up any number of award nominations and curatorial selections across the world (including, amongst others, being nominated for Best Immersive Art and XR award at the BFI London Film Festival and winning at the Adelaide Fringe). Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is just its first stop of a tour across the UK. It’s been designed to give punters insight into the history of the West Midlands acid house scene, as well as its mechanics and feel.

An exhibition about rave wouldn’t do its subject justice if it wasn’t fun — and, believe me, this is. But visiting raised questions for me about how an experience-first look at rave might gloss over the more political aspects of a scene that has been dubbed the “biggest youth revolution for decades”. What did rave give us? And what do we owe rave, when trying to record what it meant for this region?

From the get go, it’s the experience of both the club, and getting to it, that In Pursuit recreates most impressively. Emerson’s VR adventure tracks three friends and yourself, the fourth, cramming themselves into a red Peugeot, driving down the M6 and dodging police in pursuit of a hard-to-find warehouse party. 

Even prior to the Peugeot, plenty of time and energy has been invested in giving you that club night feel. You’re accosted by a host in rave garb after entering via the museum’s Edmund St side entrance — she wants to give you a neon wristband. Despite the absence of bouncers, there’s the tension common to club queues while we wait — with exhibition goers booking specific hourly slots, you have to wait for the previous set to finish before, not quite knowing what you’re about to enter into. 

Photo: Copyright Birmingham Museums Trust

Unlike the average club queue, where the only entertainment is cigarettes, gossip and side-eyeing the group in front for smuggling several people ahead of you, there’s something to look at while you wait here. Namely, an exhibition from local music archivists Jez Collins and Lee Fisher, housed by an old-style BT telephone booth, where the collage of flyers show just how much choice was on offer — as well as evidence of how police wanted to crack down on the scene.

Finally, you’re called through to the VR part, heading down a mocked-up graffitied and flyered warehouse club tunnel, before entering a darkened ‘dancefloor’ area, where attendants deck you out with headset, hand controls, a haptic vest — which does a great job of interpreting the impact of a big sound system on the body. As Emerson previously told the BBC: “It's very much a documentary but it's a documentary that you're in."