When I go away on holiday I like to take at least one book with me which relates to the place I am going to. Fortunately this year I had acquired one in the form of Ian Penman’s recent brilliant Fassbiner: Thousands of Mirrors a longform, semi-autobiographical essay about the post-war German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
This said, when I recently went away for a fortnight towards the end of August I found that I had no fiction books I wanted to read apart from Eliza Clarke’s superb, but pretty hefty new book Penance. So, shortly before my departure on my way home from work I stepped into the central branch of Waterstone’s to see which relatively slim fiction paperbacks I could pick up.
I browsed for about ten minutes near to closing time not encountering anything that I especially wanted to read while I was on holiday. Then in pretty much the last corner I looked in I came across a little stack of copies of Joel Lane’s From Blue to Black. Having recently finished his novella The Witnesses Are Gone and been gripped by it I instantly decided that it was what I would purchase. Fittingly I then read the book in spurts during a sixteen hour train journey across Europe back to Birmingham.
It feels strange to review a book which was first published nearly a quarter of a century ago in 2000. Joel Lane passed away in 2013, though now thankfully Influx Press are reissuing his work, with the new edition of From Blue to Black being published in 2022.
Joel Lane lived for much of his life in Birmingham and the city, its hinterland and the wider western Midlands provides the setting for much of his work.
From Blue to Black is primarily a story about rock music. It contains all of the genres’ well worn cliches and follows the usual narrative arc for a story about a band, however, part of the book’s genius comes from the way in which it flips them on their side, remixes and distorts them. As Kerry Hadley-Pryce astutely observes in her introduction to the book it is a story deeply intertwined with music, very much mirroring a song or an album’s cadences, rhythms and flows. However, it is also a love story about the relationship between a gay and a bisexual man. A meditation on migration, prejudice, bullying and belonging. How it feels to hurtle towards the end of your third decade. And critically, and what I most want to reflect on, a deep, brilliantly observed and complex reflection upon Birmingham and the wider western Midlands.
The book primarily takes place in Birmingham, principally the south of the city, the city centre and Erdington, during 1992 and 1993. It is set amidst the city’s alternative music scene in a milieu of people who are working class, highly educated (whether formally or not), erudite in a nerdy kind of way and typically engaged in jobs which grant them the headspace and the leeway to create a vibrant music scene, drink the equivalent of an Elan Valley reservoir full of booze and consume a Sainsbury’s SavaCentre worth of drugs.
Some aspects of the book, and life in Birmingham Joel Lane paints, are familiar to anybody who has ever been young, underemployed, and striving to find ways to pursue their creative passions. Others feel drawn from a very different era, one where a casually employed mailorder assistant at an independent record label could rent a flat in Moseley, large teams of people were needed to produce and market new music, and even little independent record labels were seemingly rolling in money.
Everybody who encounters Joel Lane’s work remarks upon his uncannily close and atmospheric ability to capture the feel and texture of Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. On the day I read From Blue to Black I felt this deeply heading down the Bristol Road in a cab just after 01:00 in the morning, having caught the train back from eastern Germany. Many scenes in the book take place on or around the Bristol Road, with a particularly atmospheric section set at night on the section between Balsall Heath and Selly Oak. Peering out the taxi window on the last stretch of my journey home I felt both awe and slightly unnerved at just how well the book captures its essence. Birmingham – unsurprisingly – has changed a lot since From Blue to Black was written, let alone its setting, yet reading Joel Lane now shows that in truth it has changed only to stay the same.
Perhaps the most interesting and often remarked upon strand of Birmingham’s history and culture that Joel Lane teases out is the city’s close ties to Britain’s celtic fringe in particular Wales and Ireland. Many of the book’s key characters are the children or grandchildren of Irish migrants to Birmingham or the Black Country and they are depicted as feeling this migrant past and familial connections to their ancestral home country deeply.
Celtic themes are constantly described as being a key part of Triangle, the book’s principal band’s lyrics, music and aesthetic. Although this is strongly presented as being of an alienated, gloomy, post-industrial strain rather than falling back on any kind of cliches. Many of the venues that feature in the book are in explicitly Irish pubs or pubs with Irish seeming connections like the Hibernian in Stirchley. In a graveyard scene the number of celtic crosses serving as headstones is pointedly foregrounded.
Birmingham is noted, albeit to nowhere near the extent of Liverpool or Glasgow, as being a city heavily settled by Irish migrants. This is something shared with the Black Country as well as more northerly bastions of Irish migration like Manchester or the Durham Coalfield, where an Irish cultural influence is acknowledged by those outside the city or region, but only those who live there truly appreciate the extent of the connections.
Wales by contrast is a more submerged cultural influence upon Birmingham as it is upon other cities like Liverpool and Manchester. My own Welsh ancestors moved to Manchester in the 1870s before heading back west to the Merseyside region where they joined the predominantly Irish bulk of my mother’s family. In Birmingham’s case, long before it became a centre of metalworking and manufacture, Welsh cattle herds would stop to water their cattle in the River Rea. This is perhaps the reason for the city’s foundation. Later as it grew Welsh people came to work in the burgeoning industries, something quite literally uncovered when the preparatory works for the central HS2 station in the 2010s uncovered numerous 19th Century skeletons interred with Welsh style grave goods.
Today these close connections between Birmingham and Wales continue. To this day there is a little Welsh church on the northern edge of the city centre. Birmingham International is amongst the most easterly points served by Transport for Wales, the nation’s nationalised train operator. Nor is the traffic all one way, as the crush of denizens of Birmingham and the Black Country flocking onto westward Transport for Wales services into the Cambrian Mountains or headed for the coast attests. Some years ago I saw an infographic produced using telephone connection data illustrating where people in different regions of the country tended to call outside their local area. In the case of Birmingham and the Black Country the connections were by far the thickest heading out west right across mid-Wales. It is perhaps unsurprising and deeply fitting that the setting for From Blue to Black’s denouncement is a caravan in Wales. A tribute to the role that this smaller Welsh nation has played and continues to play in the life of Birmingham and the Black Country.
This aside there is a definite pleasure for a Birmingham resident in reading a story set in the city and wider region’s recent past. A story which is richly textured with a sense of Birmingham both as it was 30 years ago and how it remains. For me the story is given an extra charge by the fact that given the story’s tight, and closely observed chronology, I was born at the point in time that lies at roughly page sixty. It is unusual enough to encounter a story like From Blue to Black set in Birmingham, or indeed anywhere else in the Midlands, but I was especially taken with the fact that it takes for its setting the period just before my memories kick in.
As it happens this point in the novel is set during the immediate aftermath of the 1992 General Election seeing the characters reeling from the blow of the fourth Conservative General Election victory in a row and dreading in anticipation the hideous aftereffects. Something which I can more than relate to. It is at this point that the narrative begins to take a turn for the truly weird, fractured and chilling.
I look forward to getting to know more of Joel Lane’s work in the near future. Like The Witnesses Are Gone I know that From Blue to Black will long continue to shape how I understand Birmingham, the wider region and its connections elsewhere for a long time to come.
“From Blue to Black” by Joel Lane (2000) was republished by Influx Press in March 2022. It can be purchased from them direct here (£9.99).
Header image is the cover of Influx Press’ 2022 edition of “From Blue to Black”. All rights reserved by the publisher.