Birmingham Town Hall is a splendid building, and kudos to Capsule for commandeering it to show us some of Birmingham’s experimental bands. Birmingham has always felt quite an experimental city and I still remember buying We Brought Our Friends and an Epic45 single on my first trip to Tempest.

Two of tonight’s bands I’d seen previously at The Flapper so it seemed strange to be seeing them in a different and more grandiose setting - especially at the neck straining angle provided by the middle of the front row. To be honest, sadly I don’t think this position was advantageous in terms of sound and I have the feeling that much of the sound sailed straight over my head.

Shady Bard kicked things off. I’m not sure I would have put them in the ‘experimental’ bracket but it’s shades of grey I suppose. Penguins remains as ever a beautiful song - guitars dance around each other building up to drop away to leave the female vocal. Sadly Treeology was left out of the set but the new song about underwater (who’s name I forget) was good.

When Modified Toy Orchestra came on I felt foolish. a) for never seeing them before and b) for never modifying a toy before. Seriously, Modified Toy Orchestra went straight onto my list of reasons to live in Birmingham. Bleeping delights. Oooh, gush gush gush. Black Star was one of the highlights of this set.

Pram were Pram. Using a range of instruments to build up interesting rhythms over which gentle tunes lie, and that might be very well what you’ll read if you look up Pram in a dictionary. It’s always good to see a theramin used on stage, though by the end I’d reached saturation point - it was a lot of music to take in and even when I’m familiar with a bands work, anything over 40 minutes is too much.

It did make me chuckle to read on the Town Hall website that, 17 years and 9 albums in, they were described as ‘hotly-tipped’. Nothing like telling people that they might be watching the next big thing to increase audience sizes.

We listened to Modified Toy Orchestra on the way home and why not.

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