Daily Archive

I’ve never been to Birmingham.  I’ve been to most of the UK’s biggest cities.  I’ve been to every corner of the UK (actually I’ve checked the map – apparently we don’t have corners, but a long and highly irregular coastline.  We look a bit like a man with a mohican.  Sticking his tongue out.  Hee hee hee, what a funny shape)  I’ve been to some of the really scenic places and to many (too many) of the places which don’t feature in the official tourist guides.  Only the joke ones.  But I’ve never been to Birmingham.

This means I have always been free to come up with my own vividly bleak imagining of what Birmingham is like.  Smoke billowing from factories; big grey factories populated by sad faced men.  Dirty children running through terraced streets chasing emaciated burglar’s dogs.  Entire suburbs populated only by guns.  A sprawling city shuffling to a sick industrial beat.

However, if only I thought about it a bit, I would realise that this was not the case.  I have been aware of the work of Brum band Broadcast for at least a decade; long enough for me to have made some reasonable extrapolations:

1) Birmingham is a bit exotic and interesting.
2) Birmingham is in space.
3) Birmingham is a movie.
4) Birmingham exists mainly in the late 1960s.

Future Crayon is the second (after 1997’s Work and Non Work) round-up show featuring highlights from EPs, B-sides, various artists compilations and so on.  And, like fellow travellers Stereolab (see their Switched On series), the group seem to keep some of their most interesting work for such distant outposts of their starry universe.

Future Crayon takes us from the brilliant Morricone down the krautrock disco of “Still Feels Like Tears” to the brilliant Morricone down the krautrock disco of “Hammer Like A Master” (oh, alright, taking a pretty experimental route in between, marking the bands journey from their lush 1960s radio workshop beginnings, through the early sparse albums to their more recent fizzy electronic phase).  Somehow, from such crude space dust, they have fashioned one of their sparkliest and strongest records.