Betty & the Id played at The Autumn Store, um, about a year ago now - and put in an excellent set. Since then I’ve seen them a few times and it’s always been enjoyable and often quite intense. If you’ve not come across them before, they’re a modern garage four piece made of:

Jim Smith (guitars and singing),
Antony Cook (drums),
Simon Maragh (bass and keyboards), and
Allan R Murphy (guitars)

And here they are -

I asked Jim a few questions about the world of Betty & The Id, and the questions and answers are here below, in an interview format!

I know you’ve all played in bands before including L’Augmentation and The Beemen - but how did Betty & the Id come about?

I’d had spells in L’Augmentation, The Bee Men, The Courtesy Group and finally an improvised space rock group called V-unf. When this fizzled out in mid 2005 I began going through all of the four track tape recordings I’d made at home and found that I had a lot of good unfinished ideas. This coincided with me buying a second hand digital 8 track recorder and so being at a bit of a loose end I began transferring them all onto 8 track adding overdubs as I went. I roped in my partner Jenny Kiely to do harmony vocals, drum tracks, percussion and auto-harp. Once the songs were finished we decided to put them up on the web to get some feedback as we had no band to play them live.

I can’t remember exactly how we came up with the name but we were obsessed by 60’s garage punk music and it sounded like a band name that could have come off one of those compilations like “Back From The Grave” etc. It was through myspace that I met Allan who said that he liked the tunes and knew a drummer Antony. I invited Jenny and Simon to come along and we had our first proper band practice in January 2007.

What do you think about Birmingham music at the moment?

I think that generally Birmingham is ignored by the music biz which means that bands are able to develop in their own way creating a lot of unique sounding bands with a strong independent streak. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of scene with a lot of similar sounding bands but there are a lot of bands ploughing their own furrow despite little or no support and I like that stubbornness.

How has Birmingham changed since you’ve been playing in bands?

There seems to be more places to play now despite some big recent closures such as the Jug of Ale. There’s also a lot more promoters some of them excellent, some of them extremely dodgy “pay to play” merchants. I wrote about our experiences of Birmingham promoters in this blog.

You organised your own gig last year with The People’s Republic of Mercia. How did it go, and what would you say to bands wanting to put a gig on themselves?

That gig was organised by our drummer Antony and it went really well, you can read about it in this blog.

I would thoroughly recommend bands put their own gigs on. We had got frustrated playing gigs where the bands we were playing with had nothing in common with us musically. Also playing for promoters who don’t promote and then wont pay you unless you bring 25 people. It’s really not that difficult to book a room in a pub, book some bands that you have something in common with, get your mate to d.j and email listings pages with your poster. The only real expense is the cost of the room and hiring the sound man.

The first time I did it was when I was in L’Augmentation. Every time we had played the Flapper we had never got paid despite there being crowds of 30-40 people. So I hired The Flapper on a night the main promoters weren’t using it, booked an interesting band from Leicester to support, (The Freed Unit) got my mate to d.j and used the in house sound man. I think we got about 35 people in and even after expenses everyone got paid.

You’ve already released one EP - where next for Betty & the Id?

We are releasing our debut album “The Wrong Side of Everything” in Spring 2009. We financed the recording ourselves and recorded and mixed it in two days at Toe Rag studios in London. It’s a purely analogue studio, probably best known as being the place where The White Stripes recorded Elephant.

We are going to release it ourselves initially and sell it at gigs so I guess we’re going to be doing a lot of gigging to try and sell enough albums to break even.

Thank’s Jim!

And there’s some more links here if you want to investigate -
Betty & The Id Website
Betty & The Id Myspace

Hopefully there’ll be a more interviews with a few more Birmingham bands and music people over the next few months too.

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