Dancing. It’s a weird thing. In my formative slash naive slash oblivious to the world of personal grace years in Wakefield’s Club Ikon I used to adopt the classic teenager-out-of-place-and-out-of-time-flail until I’d sweated all over my nice garish shirt. You probably had a similar dance technique of your own (I hope it wasn’t just me). In context it was entirely appropriate as the old limb flail was the perfect distraction from the fact that the DJ had just played Cher’s smash hit ‘Believe’ for the third time in one evening.

At around the same time I’d discovered indiepop via The Field Mice. This was not vocoded voice and arm flailing, this was the sound track to the fact that teenage dancesteps would never find you a girlfriend.

There was a different set of ground rules to indiepop dancing, which relies almost entirely on bobbing up and down. There was no side to side, no backwards and forward, and no arms flailing - this was a dance style designed for the cramped spaces of your bedroom.

MJ Hibbett has dedicated his new single - Do The Indie Kid - to firmly pinning down this dance style. And here are it’s dance steps from the song -

Hands behind your back
Bounce your hips
Move your feet around
And do the Indie Kid

Which just about sums it up.

The song has a lovely groove to it which is *perfect* for doing the dance steps to, and includes the usual humour and tunefullnessness which is typical of Hibbett’s work.

I love the music of the future break down in this song too (Hibbett describes accidentally falling asleep for 500 years and treats us to a small snippet of the music he heard in the future - it’s frequently genius to watch live), and there is different music of the future on different formats of the song.

It’ll certainly be getting a spin down at the Autumn Store, so get practicing your indie kid.

You can listen to the song on MJ Hibbett and The Validators myspace.

I’m just getting my act together to send off details about The Deirdres gig to online places round Brum, so I just thought I’d list the ones I use for you.

Firstly, JDTraynor’s Birmingham and West Midlands gigs myspace group is usually very well researched and collated but if you’re starting up it’s probably worth dropping him a note. He has a nice list of local promoters too along with how often they promote and where. I sometimes quite like to just click through all the bands linked to make sure I’m not missing something amazing.

There’s a few blogs, all with a slightly different take on things -

Birmingham Gig Guide (myspace or myspace) has been running for a while now and covers mainly indie, big and small.

Birmingham Music (myspace) who also seem to have a bit of a news thing running, venues list, and other bits and bobs.

Coming Up Birmingham (myspace) added me on myspace yesterday and promises to cover all styles of music with a focus on smaller events and venues.

Have I missed any? Let me know in the comments and I’ll update the list. Likewise if I come across anything then I’ll update this post.

I quite like it when people do stuff like Pete’s Gig Guide or Russ L’s monthly roundup and put together a more personal list - which makes it exceptionally useful if you click with someone’s musical bubble. I should be doing more of this with this blog to be honest. It’s no good you reading a review on here and thinking “I’d have liked to have gone to that if you’d have told me dunc, you git.”.

I promise to use the Upcoming Gigs tag more…

Edit 27/03/08 - Additions
Birmingham:INS have rightly pointed out that Birmingham Alive and feeltheheat also have listings, and Upcoming is also a good site to use. Anymore for the online listings listings?

Edit 09/04/08 - Additions
One more called Live Brum. They have a twitter.

Edit 06/05/08 - Additions
Just come across What’s On In Brum?. Oooh, it’s got a promoter’s area you say…

I came across You/Me at Emmaboda festival last year, on the second stage. I’ve just checked their myspace, and they have some… songs for download! Hurrah, free stuff for you.

They put in a really nice set when I saw them and I bought an EP, which seemed to be a bit like an Electro-indiepop Bjork, which can only be a good thing. Heavy use of synths perform the backing for some timid and sincere female vocals, and there’s some nice quiet/loud touches in the backing tracks - it’s really sweet. For something so tuneful, it’s quite nice to see Aphex Twin and Explosions in the Sky listed as influences.

I quite like the lyrical bases covered too. There’s a song called Jean Luc Picard and one called Stockholm City.

Go clicky and download while they’re there.

I played a gig a few weeks back at Bohemian Jukebox supporting The Voluntary Butler Scheme, who I’ve talked about before - but also on the bill was another solo performer called Superman Revenge Squad. From Croydon.

He has a nice guitar style which I think is pretty and Malcolm Middletonesque, and he picks out nice notes behind the melodies and lots of open strings to make nice full use of the guitar.

Best of all he went into streams of poetrywords from time to time too while the guitar dropped out a touch - which is always something which bands don’t seem to do much, or indeed enough. Maybe because writing humorous and meaningful lyrics are a forgotten art but it really adds so much if done properly. I still remember the smile I had on my face seeing The Courtesy Group doing poetry the first time I saw them.

I loved his song about how Dexy’s back catalogue became overlooked the day they wrote Come On Eileen (I have a similar ABBA gripe), one called ‘When Everyone’s Dead’ about getting into grunge, and of course Idiot Food (which you download from his website along with loads of other free music… woo! Go online free music revolution!)

I had a nice chat with him about some of the Birmingham bands of yore like Jameson and The Starries, before the gig too - which was good, and a bit suprising especially as he wasn’t in Birmingham at the time!

Ooh, it’s all been a bit quiet on the Autumn Store surface recently, but like a duck I’ve been paddling away under the surface to get gigs organised. Um, I’m sorry to subject you to the duck simile too.

I was keeping April free for a Japanese band called Andersens, who had penciled in a tour of the UK, though it had to be postponed for now (hopefully I’ll get them on tour later this year, and hopefully with The Starlets too…). I did then try to organise something for My Sad Captains but finding a venue was a little tricky as loads of places already had bookings.

Sooo… let’s quickly forget about what I’ve not done and talk about what is coming up!

May 10th sees the long awaited Birmingham debut of The Deirdres who I’ve talked about before on this blog. They’re lovely, if you missed the post. There are seven Deirdres all adding their own little brand of shambly joy to their songs, all of which have beautiful pop hooks. One of the thinks I find amazing about The Deirdres is that although they’d not come across ‘indiepop‘ as a genre before promoters started booking them with ‘indiepop’ bands, but their songs really should be the examples of the genres definition on Wikipedia - it’s everything I love in music, the hand made T-shirts and CD covers, glorious melodies which you hum all day, getting over the little mistakes by laughing, excessive numbers of twee instuments on stage, and songs which actually go somewhere rather than just verse-chorus-versing at you.

They also play with Amida, who apperared on the Kids at The Club compilation and whos guitars and loose vocals will take you take you right back to the days of Orange Juice.

Both of these bands are playing at the increasingly legendary Indietracks line up, which is of course, reason enought to come down to the Sunflower Lounge on the 10th May.

Winston Echo completes the line up with his lovely songs.

Speaking of Indietracks, I’ve agreed to host a pre Indietracks gig on Tuesday the 22nd of July so that some bands who are over from other countries can play a few warm up gigs and do a little tour. The Smittens from the US are already confirmed and we’ll see what other nice suprises the Indietracks line up throws up.

And that’s been my recent frantic paddling! Quack.