Big Bren's fucking dead.
Birmingham is dead
and Poetry is dead.
Shopping is dead
and Fucking is dead.
Every day is fucking dead.
Even death is almost dead.
Friday, January 05, 2024
Big Bren is Dead
Big Bren's Combo
After Zephaniah passed only a matter of weeks ago, I just heard that Big Bren (Brendan Higgins, the Bard of Yardley) has sadly died. Another poetry mascot of Brum lost to time. In his honour, I dedicate the following story, which I was prompted to recall, formalise, and commit to text after hearing the upsetting news from my good friend Santa, who was also there on that fateful and formative night, on which we both came of creative age.
I first saw Big Bren at the Lamp Tavern as part of "Big Bren's Combo" supported by The New Jerusalem. Santa and I had found a flyer that piqued our interest, stuck to a wall in one of the music shops (Swordfish, perhaps?) The flyer had been so badly photocopied that the black and white inverted image of Bren's face was severely stretched, and the address was mostly cut off at the bottom corner, forcing us to do some forensic triangulation to narrow down which pub might be the venue. Some of the address was still visible: "Barf--d st", and half a post code. A few words on the flyer served as decorative scripture. "Impure freak jazz scum noise ace". That sounded like only good things could come from it. In the face of all likelihoods, the message had reached its intended audience, and so we committed to checking it out. With the help of an online A-Z (google maps did not yet exist), we eventually worked out it was most likely The Lamp Tavern in Digbeth. Neither of us had ever been there before and it was hell to find, buried as it was deep in the belly of Digbeth back alleys and heavy industry.
Santa and I were both underage, so we wore our leathers to make us look older. We'd brought some supplies with us so we could tank up before getting to the venue where booze would be expensive: a couple of stubbies each and a cheap stick of hash from the Nellies. After going down a few wrong roads (you had to find new places by memory and intuition back then), the pub eventually emerged at the end of a street by the corner of a deserted car park. It felt like the end of the world, a concrete dead end. It was twilight and the pub was tall and impossibly thin, giving the facade an eery and imposing character, medieval almost. The Lamp Tavern may well be the thinnest pub I've ever frequented. It certainly didn't look like any gig venue we'd ever been too.
We downed the bottles that had accompanied us on the journey and gingerly made our way into the pub. It was a classic case of entering a local, stirring the contents like a gust of wind disturbing the dust. All of three people looked up in half-interest. I distinctly remember feeling that the only reference point I had for such a situation was the surreal TV sitcom The League of Gentlemen, which only added to the weirdness. The musty room was narrow and poorly lit, but I could peripherally make out an array of wall-mounted decorations that I didn't have time to take in, but which gave the place a presence of being both busy and humdrum: home-like, as though we had intruded on something private. Santa and I looked at each other, clearly in mutual agreement that we must be in the wrong place. At the very least, it felt as though we were in the wrong place.
I gestured awkwardly towards the bar. On reflection, I had at this point in my life so infrequently been an autonomous free agent in a pub, that it wasn't obvious how you were supposed to behave. I was still at that stage of adolescence marked by "adulthood" being something you imitated, rather than inhabited. I had no protocol or template for seeking adult attention or making enquiries at such an establishment. As I shuffled barwards, an old man emerged - chameleon-like - from a wall of savoury snacks behind the bar. Had he really been there the whole time?
"Is there ...a gig here?" I asked, sceptically.
"In the back" came the response from the withered caricature of a bartender. This was a great relief. Being young and poor, the bus fare into town had already been a noticeable expense and we were both worried we would never find it and it would all have been for nothing. Everything in the process of getting this far had been markedly esoteric, so we half-expected there to be a code-word, a burnt offering to give, a shibboleth of some sort. The interaction at the bar was consequently graceless and stammering as I second guessed myself in anticipation of not getting served. In all likelihood we were also stoned out of our gourds, which wouldn’t have helped lubricate the situation. I had enough money to buy a single pint and eventually managed to summon enough of the act of manliness to order a guest ale called "Saints and Sinners", whose label I had been drawn to because it bore a cartoon of a nun with her tits out. I'd never had an off-brand pint in a pub before. It was tasty and novel: a real ale, back when it was much rarer than it is today, in this hoppy goldrush in which we live.
Feeling like we had passed the adult test and were now initiates of the pub, Santa and I made our way through a set of double doors, grinning at each other as we entered a small foyer where sound was now audible. It was really quite impressive how much those double doors isolated the sound, as only moments earlier we had heard absolutely nothing. The impish frame of Mike Hurley met us with a heart-warming smile at the second set of doors, from which a menacing and compelling noise was emanating.
"Two students", he infered. "That's £3 each. Have you been before?"
"No", I said, handing over my fee. Mike grinned at us mischievously, like someone about to share some particularly potent contraband with a friend. "Excellent. Enjoy", he said in a hushed but excited tone, before opening the door and ushering us inside.
The room was tiny, the size of a living room, with a defunct bar taking up a corner. Ten to fifteen people were hunched around on tiny stools, sipping beer at equally tiny circular tables, and nodding to a non-existent beat. Most were dressed in a shaggy assortment of earthy greens, greys and browns, with a smattering of denim, leather, and corduroy. Memorably, one man wore a set of bright gold, reflective clown shoes with blue laces that did not otherwise match his outfit at all, a sartorial choice that screamed "I'm fucking eccentric". As far as I can recall, there were no women present. I wasn't there for the women (whazup jazz sluts?). We took the easiest seats we could and looked up to watch Jimmy Fantastic stamping on an electric guitar with several strings missing as he played cassettes of what sounded like quotes from the Dalai Lama played backwards out of a boombox, while shouting at the audience through a megaphone. Jimmy, then under the stage name of The New Jerusalem, would become an unlikely friend and inspiration to us both over the next few years.
"I WANT PEOPLE TO DANCE AT MY PARTY!!" he screamed, over and over, until it became a mantra, all the while still stomping the guitar, occasionally stopping to pick it up and then unceremoniously drop it onto the floor again, where it would crash and wail in overdriven cacophony. Jimmy rummaged and rotated the tapes, revealing an eclectic collection of material that was to be abused. A radio was tuned to various states of half-static to fit with the buzz and clang of the guitar, harmonising together in a truly disgusting and cathartic fashion.
I first saw Big Bren at the Lamp Tavern as part of "Big Bren's Combo" supported by The New Jerusalem. Santa and I had found a flyer that piqued our interest, stuck to a wall in one of the music shops (Swordfish, perhaps?) The flyer had been so badly photocopied that the black and white inverted image of Bren's face was severely stretched, and the address was mostly cut off at the bottom corner, forcing us to do some forensic triangulation to narrow down which pub might be the venue. Some of the address was still visible: "Barf--d st", and half a post code. A few words on the flyer served as decorative scripture. "Impure freak jazz scum noise ace". That sounded like only good things could come from it. In the face of all likelihoods, the message had reached its intended audience, and so we committed to checking it out. With the help of an online A-Z (google maps did not yet exist), we eventually worked out it was most likely The Lamp Tavern in Digbeth. Neither of us had ever been there before and it was hell to find, buried as it was deep in the belly of Digbeth back alleys and heavy industry.
Santa and I were both underage, so we wore our leathers to make us look older. We'd brought some supplies with us so we could tank up before getting to the venue where booze would be expensive: a couple of stubbies each and a cheap stick of hash from the Nellies. After going down a few wrong roads (you had to find new places by memory and intuition back then), the pub eventually emerged at the end of a street by the corner of a deserted car park. It felt like the end of the world, a concrete dead end. It was twilight and the pub was tall and impossibly thin, giving the facade an eery and imposing character, medieval almost. The Lamp Tavern may well be the thinnest pub I've ever frequented. It certainly didn't look like any gig venue we'd ever been too.
We downed the bottles that had accompanied us on the journey and gingerly made our way into the pub. It was a classic case of entering a local, stirring the contents like a gust of wind disturbing the dust. All of three people looked up in half-interest. I distinctly remember feeling that the only reference point I had for such a situation was the surreal TV sitcom The League of Gentlemen, which only added to the weirdness. The musty room was narrow and poorly lit, but I could peripherally make out an array of wall-mounted decorations that I didn't have time to take in, but which gave the place a presence of being both busy and humdrum: home-like, as though we had intruded on something private. Santa and I looked at each other, clearly in mutual agreement that we must be in the wrong place. At the very least, it felt as though we were in the wrong place.
I gestured awkwardly towards the bar. On reflection, I had at this point in my life so infrequently been an autonomous free agent in a pub, that it wasn't obvious how you were supposed to behave. I was still at that stage of adolescence marked by "adulthood" being something you imitated, rather than inhabited. I had no protocol or template for seeking adult attention or making enquiries at such an establishment. As I shuffled barwards, an old man emerged - chameleon-like - from a wall of savoury snacks behind the bar. Had he really been there the whole time?
"Is there ...a gig here?" I asked, sceptically.
"In the back" came the response from the withered caricature of a bartender. This was a great relief. Being young and poor, the bus fare into town had already been a noticeable expense and we were both worried we would never find it and it would all have been for nothing. Everything in the process of getting this far had been markedly esoteric, so we half-expected there to be a code-word, a burnt offering to give, a shibboleth of some sort. The interaction at the bar was consequently graceless and stammering as I second guessed myself in anticipation of not getting served. In all likelihood we were also stoned out of our gourds, which wouldn’t have helped lubricate the situation. I had enough money to buy a single pint and eventually managed to summon enough of the act of manliness to order a guest ale called "Saints and Sinners", whose label I had been drawn to because it bore a cartoon of a nun with her tits out. I'd never had an off-brand pint in a pub before. It was tasty and novel: a real ale, back when it was much rarer than it is today, in this hoppy goldrush in which we live.
Feeling like we had passed the adult test and were now initiates of the pub, Santa and I made our way through a set of double doors, grinning at each other as we entered a small foyer where sound was now audible. It was really quite impressive how much those double doors isolated the sound, as only moments earlier we had heard absolutely nothing. The impish frame of Mike Hurley met us with a heart-warming smile at the second set of doors, from which a menacing and compelling noise was emanating.
"Two students", he infered. "That's £3 each. Have you been before?"
"No", I said, handing over my fee. Mike grinned at us mischievously, like someone about to share some particularly potent contraband with a friend. "Excellent. Enjoy", he said in a hushed but excited tone, before opening the door and ushering us inside.
The room was tiny, the size of a living room, with a defunct bar taking up a corner. Ten to fifteen people were hunched around on tiny stools, sipping beer at equally tiny circular tables, and nodding to a non-existent beat. Most were dressed in a shaggy assortment of earthy greens, greys and browns, with a smattering of denim, leather, and corduroy. Memorably, one man wore a set of bright gold, reflective clown shoes with blue laces that did not otherwise match his outfit at all, a sartorial choice that screamed "I'm fucking eccentric". As far as I can recall, there were no women present. I wasn't there for the women (whazup jazz sluts?). We took the easiest seats we could and looked up to watch Jimmy Fantastic stamping on an electric guitar with several strings missing as he played cassettes of what sounded like quotes from the Dalai Lama played backwards out of a boombox, while shouting at the audience through a megaphone. Jimmy, then under the stage name of The New Jerusalem, would become an unlikely friend and inspiration to us both over the next few years.
"I WANT PEOPLE TO DANCE AT MY PARTY!!" he screamed, over and over, until it became a mantra, all the while still stomping the guitar, occasionally stopping to pick it up and then unceremoniously drop it onto the floor again, where it would crash and wail in overdriven cacophony. Jimmy rummaged and rotated the tapes, revealing an eclectic collection of material that was to be abused. A radio was tuned to various states of half-static to fit with the buzz and clang of the guitar, harmonising together in a truly disgusting and cathartic fashion.
This was followed by Big Bren's Combo, consisting of Bren peforming his unique qualia of poetry over the top of discordant free jazz, supplied by a backing band which may or may not have included the great Paul Dunmall and Mark Sanders. I'd heard some free jazz stuff before, through Frank Zappa and the burnt crispy ends of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, but I'd never given it a serious listen, let alone seen it performed live in the flesh.
"SHOPPING SHOPPING SHOPPING, every fucking day! SHOPPING SHOPPING SHOPPING, get out my fucking way!" Bren yelled, clutching what looked like his entire back catalogue of poetry in a biblically enormous office folder. Bren really launched the lines at the audience, spit in the air, stumbling forward into the lines with emphasis on conviction and urgency, rather than on fidelity of phonics. It was the first time I'd heard poetry read like that. I'd heard some spoken word, but this was different. The band got more and more intense as Bren's proselytizing became wilder, squealing brass and wind over the violent dirge of words. The drummer was really beating the shit out of the kit, like he had a demon to purge, bashing and scraping at the cymbals with a whole assortment of torture devices, percussifying the snare with blocks of wood and shrapnel. In the close-enough-to-touch environment of the throbbing living room, the whole thing felt altogether anarchic, closer to punk or danger music than poetry and jazz.
This was it, I remember thinking. This was it. We had found the underground. No more was it tales in magazines and the trickle-down elders' embellishments of oral tradition, through which we had to vicariously experience rock and roll heroism. This time we were part of the story. From there we got information about other gigs, poetry nights, open mics, which preoccupied us for the coming years. More easily pinpointed than most epicentres, that night at The Lamp Tavern with Big Bren served as a joyful springboard into Birmingham's beer-soaked creative underbelly that lived and breathed in Digbeth.
Fizzle, the loosely-formed promoter of those free jazz nights at the Lamp Tavern, is still going, albeit in a more slick, conservatoire-adjacent guise. Virtually everyone present at that gig will have hundreds of creative attributions that I could never do justice, but certainly I saw Bren perform many times at the Sunday Xpress events at The Adam and Eve, as well as at other pubs and events, having, as he did, the habit of turning up all over the place. Bren was the kind of person you'd go to tell someone about and they'd go oh yeah, i know the guy, he did a poetry workshop at my school or some such anecdote. The Sunday Xpress, which Brendon ran, was the first place I ever performed my poetry and its hodgepodge of characters, unpretentious atmosphere and anything goes attitude provided fertile ground for growth and development. The first time I got on stage I was so nervous I could hardly hold my notes steadily enough to read and felt the need to apologise for not having all my materials with me. "Never apologise!", an older skinny punk of the John Cooper Clarke persuasion told me as I got off stage. It's exactly what I needed to hear. Friction Arts, Ikon Eastside, Vivid Cinema, The Custard Factory, Beats not Bombs, The Wagon and Horses, Rooty Fruity, The Anchor and The Spotted Dog were other places that were very important to me at the time, at which more of this sort of tomfoolery would play out. Santa is still in touch with Jimmy and I was lucky enough to see Mike Hurley's klezmer-punk band and Destroyers-breakaway outfit Mama Matrix perform at several memorable hoedowns, not least the free Moseley-Folk fringe event in the Prince of Wales, hay bales and all.
"SHOPPING SHOPPING SHOPPING, every fucking day! SHOPPING SHOPPING SHOPPING, get out my fucking way!" Bren yelled, clutching what looked like his entire back catalogue of poetry in a biblically enormous office folder. Bren really launched the lines at the audience, spit in the air, stumbling forward into the lines with emphasis on conviction and urgency, rather than on fidelity of phonics. It was the first time I'd heard poetry read like that. I'd heard some spoken word, but this was different. The band got more and more intense as Bren's proselytizing became wilder, squealing brass and wind over the violent dirge of words. The drummer was really beating the shit out of the kit, like he had a demon to purge, bashing and scraping at the cymbals with a whole assortment of torture devices, percussifying the snare with blocks of wood and shrapnel. In the close-enough-to-touch environment of the throbbing living room, the whole thing felt altogether anarchic, closer to punk or danger music than poetry and jazz.
This was it, I remember thinking. This was it. We had found the underground. No more was it tales in magazines and the trickle-down elders' embellishments of oral tradition, through which we had to vicariously experience rock and roll heroism. This time we were part of the story. From there we got information about other gigs, poetry nights, open mics, which preoccupied us for the coming years. More easily pinpointed than most epicentres, that night at The Lamp Tavern with Big Bren served as a joyful springboard into Birmingham's beer-soaked creative underbelly that lived and breathed in Digbeth.
Fizzle, the loosely-formed promoter of those free jazz nights at the Lamp Tavern, is still going, albeit in a more slick, conservatoire-adjacent guise. Virtually everyone present at that gig will have hundreds of creative attributions that I could never do justice, but certainly I saw Bren perform many times at the Sunday Xpress events at The Adam and Eve, as well as at other pubs and events, having, as he did, the habit of turning up all over the place. Bren was the kind of person you'd go to tell someone about and they'd go oh yeah, i know the guy, he did a poetry workshop at my school or some such anecdote. The Sunday Xpress, which Brendon ran, was the first place I ever performed my poetry and its hodgepodge of characters, unpretentious atmosphere and anything goes attitude provided fertile ground for growth and development. The first time I got on stage I was so nervous I could hardly hold my notes steadily enough to read and felt the need to apologise for not having all my materials with me. "Never apologise!", an older skinny punk of the John Cooper Clarke persuasion told me as I got off stage. It's exactly what I needed to hear. Friction Arts, Ikon Eastside, Vivid Cinema, The Custard Factory, Beats not Bombs, The Wagon and Horses, Rooty Fruity, The Anchor and The Spotted Dog were other places that were very important to me at the time, at which more of this sort of tomfoolery would play out. Santa is still in touch with Jimmy and I was lucky enough to see Mike Hurley's klezmer-punk band and Destroyers-breakaway outfit Mama Matrix perform at several memorable hoedowns, not least the free Moseley-Folk fringe event in the Prince of Wales, hay bales and all.
Brendan was great at pulling people together, which is easy to write in a sentence, but really difficult to actually do. Everyone who met him will instantly have recognised his humble, disarming charm and his embodiment of the city's creative character. After countless poems, parties, and performances, a Bren-shaped hole now sits at the centre of Birmingham.
Rest in poetry, Bren <3
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