1 Month Down, 11 To Go - JJ#8

Hello readers of my irregularly-updated blog, it is February 1st, so I thought I'd do a bit of a brief round-up of the most interesting things that happened in the first month of 2026......

Birmingham Calling...

That's supposed to be a reference to 'London Calling', the song by The Clash, but it doesn't really work if you can't hear me sing it...

In the last few months I've been travelling to and from Birmingham quite a lot! It's not too difficult for me to get there from where I live in the south of Nottingham.

B-town is a nickname for Birmingham but also the name of a small indie music scene centred around the Digbeth area of Birmingham (so says Wikipedia). Once a month, there's a gig night that happens called B-Town Indie Night, where a bunch of local bands get together and showcase their talent, and it's amazing!

Me and a few friends went to the one that happened on 15th January, and it was SO fun, I absolutely loved the sense of community around it, and the fact that all the bands playing that night were mates with each other and shared instruments (and often shared members too!) was so cool to me. It's exactly what a music scene feels like it should be.

In Nottingham, I feel like there isn't a tight-knit scene like that. It's a little more disjointed and less organised. Then again, I'm not the kind of person to go to venues/gigs regularly once or twice a week, and I don't live in the city centre, so if there were any proper "scenes" I wouldn't be able to count myself as part of any anyway. Which I kinda feel a bit sad about, but I know just by nature I've always been the type of guy to be on the side-lines doing my own thing rather than becoming part of a bigger crowd, which is a trait I'm ultimately grateful for.

The gig was hosted at The Rainbow, which is this pub in Digbeth with a really nice basement music venue. I had been there once before as Dorset Caravan (my friend Ollie's band) played their 2nd show there.

Northampton Calling...?

My good mate Rhys has a girlfriend who lives in Northampton, which is about 65 miles away from Nottingham, so it's fairly long distance. (For UK standards at least... I know the US it's probably normal to travel 65 miles just to get to the next town over)

Since I'm one of the only people among my friend group to have a car, I'm naturally the taxi man. So on the Saturday after B-town, it was my job to drive Rhys down to Northampton to see his girlfriend, and to be fair he paid for the fuel money so I really didn't mind having a day out like this. I brought Alfie along with me though, so I'd actually have someone to keep me company for the whole day while Rhys was at his girlfriend's house.

Alfie and I found it absolutely hilarious, because it was as if we were Rhys' parents (I'm the dad), and to make it even funnier, at the end of the day when we came to pick Rhys up, his girlfriend's mum invited us in for a cup of tea to say hi!!

We chatted for a little bit and it was nice. There was a shabby little upright piano in their house, so I knocked out a quick rendition of No Golf, No Motorcycling before we all headed out.

Oh yeah, during the day to kill time Alfie and I watched that new film that came out recently called The Housemaid. Personally, I absolutely loved it, I thought it was amazing! It was a psychological thriller, very tense. Alfie read some reviews afterwards and people said they weren't impressed by it and found it quite comedic and laughable... And also there's the whole Sydney Sweeny thing, people don't really like her. I'll be 100% honest, I'm so out of the loop in popular culture that I had no idea who Sydney Sweeny was until after watching this film LMAO

Do you ever get that weird feeling of embarrassment where you thought something was really good but then everyone else around you wasn't impressed in the slightest?? Yeah, I think that's how we felt. I genuinely thought it was really good as a film in itself though and I don't care what other people say... but let's just say watching it once is enough for me... if you know, you know...

Dead Stops and False Endings

...is the name of Knutmo Five's debut album, which has officially come out now!

It actually was released a few days late due to a technical issue with the distribution to streaming platforms. The original intended release date was January 23rd. On that day, I had a bunch of friends over for an in-person listening party for the whole album, which was really fun!

Then the next day, Alfie and I played our first gig as Knutmo Five together. Of course, Ollie was supposed to play at the gig as well since he's in the band, but he couldn't make it. Originally the gig was supposed to be on Friday 23rd, but there was a double booking at the venue, so we got moved to Saturday 24th instead. Ollie already had another gig he was set to play on the 24th, meaning he couldn't play with us. Which was a real shame and I missed him lots and lots.

Regardless though, Alfie and I managed to hold down the fort as best we could, and judging by the amount of people who were there at the start and STILL there by the end, we kept everyone entertained :-)

Someone actually filmed the entire thing and uploaded it to YouTube, so if you have a spare 45 minutes you can watch that here >>>

Haven't watched it myself though so I have no idea how good of a recording it is...

Here are some photos from the night.

The end.

Looking forward to whatever February brings!!! I sense a change in hairstyle coming along, I think I'm going to bleach it again sometime next month. I'll see where the wind takes me.