If it weren’t for the fact I am sat on the floor in the new Birmingham Academy listening to the first headlining band, Editors, playing I might not believe it to actually be open.

They’ve been talking about this move forever, so it’s good to see it finally happen. I spent a fair amount of time in the old academy and it was a woefully depressing music venue. The air conditioning stopped working, the loos always flooded and you could barely see anything on the Academy2 stage. Bar academy was a smelly tunnel and completely useless for an audience of more than 15. I spent a lot of time at the academy because it was where the bands I wanted to see were playing. As a music venue it was horrible.

But enough about the old. This is a new Academy. The new paint smell is still lingering and the carpet has that freshly laid bounce. It’s shiny and brand new. It has at least 44 ladies loos. More importantly, there are three very seperate venues. Something the old one never really managed. I’ve only seen two so far, as Academy2 isn’t open to the public yet, but The main and third academy look like good spaces.

Main Academy holds around 3000, I think, with a balcony area which is currently holding the VIPs so I’ve not been up. I’m not overly keen on balconies, so we’ll leave it at that. The floor, however, feels better. There are three quite large bars on two adjacent walls, a nice big merchandise area and a few good spaces to sit – although still not enough, in my opinion, hence sitting on the floor. More importantly there’s a good view from the room. But there’s still quite a lot of those blind spits the old Academy suffered from, they just don’t seem as bad.

Academy3 is very plush. It holds about 250 and looks like the kind of place you’d put on nice singer-songwriter gigs who weren’t going to make a mess. It’s also where the good carpet is. Waiting to see how long that survives.

The Academy team have done well, this place looks great. I’m looking forward to seeing the middle-sized room and hopefully the increase in bands and artists playing in brum. Hopefully when the fresh paint smell us replaced with spilt beer the shine or the Academy won’t go with it.

*This was originally posted on my old blog BeanHeartBatman*

Birmingham’s Academy is finally moving. They’ve been threatening this since I started secondary school back in 1996, but it’s finally going off to the old Dome II just off from Smallbrook Queensway to some place apparently called Horse Fair. Editors play the opening night on 10th September.

This is fantastic news. The current Academy really isn’t fit for purpose. The main room is fairly lacking in atmosphere and the two smaller rooms have incredibly bad views if you’re any further than five people back. Hopefully the new main room will have that same sense of purpose as the Wolverhampton Civic, where the stage is viewable from anywhere within the room and feels like a venue for live music – if a little too mainstream.

The location isn’t ideal though. Sure, it’s better for students living in Selly Oak (and using the 60’s buses) but worse for the general public as it seems further out from the core city centre and public transport – particularly those coming from out of town needing the train or bus stations. And last time I was around there the pedestrian access seemed lacking, which is concerning given the amount of traffic around that area and the level of drunk people from club nights.

But I am slightly disappointed that the new academy is essentially replacing like for like and there are no extra venues to match, say, the Manchester Academy.  There is a perception that bands get too big for the B’ham Academy but too small for the NEC/NIA and so go to Wolverhampton. In fact the Civic is the same size as the largest Academy room, the Wulfrun holds 1134 and the Little Civic holds 140. Whereas the Academy 2, old and new, holds 600 (the current one can be reduced to 400) and the Academy 3 currently holds 200 with the newer one holding 250.  So that can’t be the case, but it feels like it.

The Wolverhampton venues also have the added advantage of being separate venues so three bands can play at once. There rarely seems to be more than one gig hapening at the current academy on an evening and when there is it seems like a real hassle. Something which doesn’t occur in Manchester or Liverpool’s Academys. Hopefully this is something they’ll rectify for the new Academy so more established bands will play in Birmingham instead of Wolves!

*This was originally posted on my old blog BeanHeartBatman*

It’s been well reported that the hospital I work at has been preparing for things just in case there should be an outbreak of swine flu. And between delivering leaflets to wards to let staff know just how this would pan out and researching online communications, I’ve seem how both things work – and don’t.

There’s always been the issue of whether staff on the ground get access to the computers to read the things we’ve put out online, so we do both to make sure – put it online and provide it in paper form. Something that even with all the advances in social technology will not alter any time soon. Frontline staff don’t sit in front of a computer all day like those of us office based and may not always be able to read the things online as soon as we put it on. I know when I worked on the frontline in another job I would scan through emails once a day if I was lucky.  Other people did it once a week and a select few monthly.  Social media is great for getting things out, but not if the people can’t get to it regularly.

Then, on the other hand, until the information about the Redditch woman infected with swine flu was confirmed we had numerous calls from journalists trying to find out if the Prime Minister’s announcement of someone infected in Birmingham was at our hospital (She wasn’t. Redditch isn’t even in Birmingham.  Most sites have now updated to show this). We fielded calls from all sorts of news outlets all asking the same question and we had the same answer for them. This information could’ve been released once on social media sites like a Trust blog (and/or Twitter) and prevented having to repeat the same thing. We could always alter the information as and when it changed – like we’ve been able to do with linking to the up to date Health Protect Agency’s algorithm when the World Health Organisation upped the pandemic level.

I think it’s pretty easy to see that both methods have their strengths and weaknesses. Online media allows rapid, regularly updated information to be disseminated to a large number of people, but only if they have access to it and you don’t always know who has read it (I know there are trackers, but still). Paper-based and/or one face-to-face conversation means you know people get the information but it’s stagnant and updating it can be time consuming. This is not exactly a groundbreaking analysis, – I know that. But seeing this in the space of two days has been really quite fascinating.

*This was originally posted on my old blog BeanHeartBatman*