Strange Days #1 - Strange Days are here... | Page 3

Editorial
Soooooo...

cynical and yet wonderfully, powerfully, optimistic?
This sprawling monument to progress caught
in suspension, is the hub around which the country turns.
Spokes radiate outwards, but always bringing people and
cultures of every kind to this glorious centre. The wheel
turns around it, but Brum is content to look inward, whirling constantly, and dragging new material to it.

I’ve been meaning to get this done for a while.
All this time I’ve been trying to ‘do the right thing’ on the
road to a career, when the answer was sat (sometimes
slumped, often slouched) around me the entire time. I
lived with some folks who have made my time so much
richer for their presence; they called me on my shit, and
I hope I gave as good as I got. All those evenings shooting the breeze about movies, music, books and art, they
gave me the chance to grow into who I am now. None of
us is the finished article yet, but these past few years
I’ve seen people start to do great things; make those
steps into a world that doesn’t coddle and comfort, that
takes from us only as much as we give. That’s what has
given me the kick up the ass to try and make something
that we could be proud of.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to be a
manifesto, or a rallying call, or anything that might be
misconstrued as noble. All I can promise is a space for
people to express themselves to whoever happens to pick
this up. Share it, blog it, give it to your mum (she might
dig it), but do it because YOU want to. Take chances:
write, draw, perform, smother yourself in goose fat and
film it. Aesthetic standards may appear to have slipped
in the last few centuries, but this was never going to be
a home for fine art and high literary aspirations. I want
this little endeavor to celebrate what matters to people
right now, be that the banal or the beautiful, the sentimental or the sublime

---

I said something about not wanting to do anything noble with this and I mean it. Even if I can’t help being a little hyperbolic in my language about Birmingham,
it hides a simple aim: it’s just a way of saying thanks
to a place that has been so good to me. I want to thank
people as well, but I worry it’d take too long and be embarrassing for everyone involved. So I’ll simply say: if
I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending some time with
you in Brum; if I’ve ever talked shite and you’ve had the
patience and good grace to listen and maybe try and set
me straight on a topic; if you’ve ever given me food, cigarettes, or provisions of any kind (especially tea and coffee): all you people, whether you realise it or not, have
my thanks.
More importantly you realise, I hope, that you
have helped me get to this point, to this page, and this
publication. So, without further ado, I’d like to hand over
to the great and the good who’ve really made this happen, the writers, artists and excellent types who’ve decided (maybe against their better judgment, but all the
better for that) to put their thoughts and feelings out
--there for you to witness. I want to thank them, and ask
The cover namechecks Brum because ever that you do the same if you know them or have the good
since I set foot in the second city, it’s given me more fortune to meet them.
This is the first. I can only hope not the last.
than I’d ever hoped for. I set out from little old Herefordshire without anything positive in mind when I thought
Charlie Bailey
of Birmingham except Black Sabbath. Whilst I might still
-Editor
hold that as the city’s greatest cultural achievement, the
last four years have shown me that Birmingham is full
to bursting of the best that people on these tiny islands
have to offer. Environment shapes us: that much is a truism now but I still hold that everyt