Documenting Birmingham's Alternative Music Scene: The Click Club Exhibition
The Making of Popular Music Heritage
A 1986 single titled “Is There Anyone Out There?” by Mighty Mighty, a Birmingham-based pop band, channels the anxieties of young romance. Decades later, that same question lent its name to a 2016 exhibition at Birmingham City University’s Parkside Gallery: ‘Is There Anyone Out There?’: Documenting Birmingham’s Alternative Music Scene 1986–1990. The exhibition set out to preserve a local network built around the Click Club, an alternative discotheque and venue brand founded by Dave Travis and Steve Coxon in 1986—the year Mighty Mighty released their song, and a venue the band played multiple times. The title served double duty: asking who still remembered the Click Club and whether anyone beyond that circle would care enough to visit.
The exhibition followed a path now common in popular music heritage, bringing intangible culture back into physical view and marking the club’s 30th anniversary. For the lead curator, who had himself frequented the Click Club in its heyday, this project opened multiple research pathways. It offered a chance to weigh the club’s role in Birmingham’s economy and cultural landscape. It also deepened an understanding of curation as a mode of public history, raising questions about how visitors respond to music heritage as both an idea and an event.
This chapter begins by sketching the Click Club’s history and the online archive and community that gave birth to the exhibition. The discussion then frames exhibition development within current scholarship on popular music heritage, archives, history, and memory, treating curation itself as a research method. Empirical encounters from the exhibition are examined for what they reveal about the particular experiences offered to visitors—the memories and sensibilities stirred by a specific historical moment, its broader music culture, and heritage practices in general. The central question is: what is the affective character of the sounds, objects, and mediations of the past, and how do they resonate for consumers?
Placing the Click Club in Context
D. J. Fontana (the alias of regular Derek Hammond), writing in the New Musical Express (1986, 53), described the newly launched Click Club as a “Parasitic residency in an up-market meat market.” The club operated inside Burberries-on-the-Street, a nightclub that embodied 1980s glamour and aspiration with its plush carpets, mirrored walls, and exclusivity at the door. Given permission to use Tuesday nights—the slowest of the week—Travis and Coxon shaped a space that measured its alternative credibility against the mainstream ambitions of its host venue. They programmed acts reflecting the pluralism of the 1980s independent music sector, including bands from the NME’s C86 compilations: Primal Scream, We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It, The Mighty Lemon Drops, and Mighty Mighty. The club helped launch “grebo” acts from the Black Country, such as Pop Will Eat Itself, The Wonder Stuff, and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Alongside gothic rock—Balaam and the Angel, Fields of the Nephilim, Rose of Avalanche—it nurtured the “baggy” scene with appearances from The Charlatans, James, Ocean Colour Scene, and Blur, all later swept up by the Britpop label. Less common bookings, like US bands Jane’s Addiction, The Pixies, and Throwing Muses, UK hardcore punk from The Stupids, acid jazz from the James Taylor Quartet, DJ Fatboy Slim, and Zimbabwean outfit The Bhundu Boys (holder of the venue’s attendance record), underlined just how broad the independent scene had become.
The Click Club mattered locally, nationally, and internationally. It stood as a node in a touring circuit, working with distributors and local retailers in a music economy still organised around the physical record. It operated where DIY production met consumption, helped along by subcultural intermediaries—fanzines and other commentary on taste, meaning, and community—who shaped both the aesthetic and the social bonds of attendees.
Like so many vital music spaces, the Click Club’s original home no longer exists. The brand resurfaced elsewhere, but the last night at Burberries-on-the-Street was in 1990, and the building itself was demolished soon after, leaving site vacant. Yet the club’s legacy lives on through a Facebook page that, at the time of writing, attracted over 700 likes from individual users. Travis launched the page on the 25th anniversary of opening night, 10 June 2011, populated with digitised images from the in-house magazine Click!, previously unseen photographs, scans of original posters, tickets, and copies of the magazine itself. Former club-goers responded with detailed posts, creating a dense digital memory-space where they recall bands, events, and specific people, while sharing their own digitised artefacts. The researcher’s recognition of this activity spurred both the Facebook community and the eventual exhibition.
Music Heritage in an Online Age
Alongside a growing literature on popular music heritage and preservation (Cohen et al. 2014; Brandellero and Janssen 2014; Baker 2015; Bennett and Janssen 2016), there is a still under-explored, possibly un-mappable, parallel activity online. Elsewhere I have written about the many websites dedicated to popular music’s past, ranging in labels from remembrance to history to archive to heritage (Long 2015; Long and Collins 2016; Collins and Long 2012). The Click Club page shares generic features with these and, owing to Travis’s use of his own materials and intellectual property, can best be understood as a self-authorised practice under Roberts and Cohen’s (2014) typology of music heritage.
Much online activity of this kind focuses on geographically and temporally specific spaces of music culture. Pages exist for the Paradise Garage in New York City; for the Goldmine Nightclub on Canvey Island, UK fans ask: “Anybody out there remember the most famous nightclub in Essex the gold mine back in the good old days?” Contributors perform memory work that reconvenes a historic community of practice—evident among Click Club attendees who populated the Facebook page. These digital communities collectively retrieve lost spaces and practices, recalling sounds, people, and events. One way to interpret these sites is as acts of public history, where the form of assembly matters as much as the content, building a vernacular archive that is continually debated and refined.
The growth of the Click Club Facebook page signals that while it holds significant value for its core community, it may also matter to a wider audience. Connections across online sites are easy to imagine, yet whether this activity extends beyond those digital groups into the physical world is a different matter—one that prompted the exhibition emerging from the memory site. What would happen if archival and online material were staged in a physical space to engage a larger audience, many with no direct experience of the Click Club at all?
Travis endorsed the idea of an exhibition using the archive material from the Facebook page and became a energetic contributor to its development and promotion. For the community, the exhibition celebrated the 30th anniversary; for the research team, its development offered a chance to explore public history and heritage practice from the inside, expanding an approach established in an earlier exhibit, Punk Rock!! So What?, in the same gallery. In short, researchers became curators. Drawing from Leonard (2007; 2010; Leonard and Strachen 2010), this meant interrogating the nature of popular music culture and how to represent it as heritage object. Aware of the blurred boundaries between history, heritage, memory, and nostalgia, the exhibition team proceeded with the opportunities and challenges inherent in each category. Academic writing clamours for analysis; curation demands decisions about choice, focus, interpretation, and presentation. Both required explanatory frameworks.
To address these tensions, the curatorial process respected the co-creative, “do-it-together” ethos of music communities, as Collins (2015) describes. From the outset, the Click Club Facebook page and other platforms invited contributions from the public. This iterative practice of translating insights about popular music heritage into curation enabled the further development of research objectives. As Wulf Kansteiner (2002) argues, much attention has gone to producing and mediating memory through heritage, but the actual consumers of that memory tend to be overlooked. He posits a “hermeneutical triangle” of meaning construction requiring “focussing on the communications among memory makers, memory users, and the visual and discursive objective and traditions of representations” (Kansteiner 2002, 197). A central aim of this exhibition was to prompt reaction among consumers, both to the specificity of the Click Club and to the broader concepts of music heritage and history. Following Doreen Massey’s (1991, 28) framing of places as “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings,” the exhibition presented both the memory of the Click Club and the exhibition itself in that light.
Building Cultural Space Inside the Gallery
Anchored by Travis’s vast archive—film and video shot in and around the venue, posters, magazines, promotional items like t-shirts and badges, and miscellaneous ephemera—the exhibition revolved around a photographic archive estimated at over 100,000 images produced over years of promotion at many venues. Travis began his career as a photographer for music magazines such as Sounds, NME, and the local BrumBeat, and his trained eye was always visible. His stake in how images were reproduced demanded careful consideration: decisions around size, the grain visible from negatives in the darkroom or through digital rendering, and hanging method.
Displayed on movable boards, the exhibition approximated the literal and symbolic feel of the Click Club. The space included a defined entrance, carved into an “inside” and an “outside.” The external part reproduced, in part, a late-1980s photographic panorama of the actual street where the venue sat, placed beside colour reproductions of Click Club fly-posters arranged to imitate the practice of the day—plastered to any available wall.
At the true entrance sat an introductory text alongside reproductions of the logos for both the host venue (Burberries-on-the-Street) and the Click Club. A photo of the venue’s long-serving doormen appeared here, next to an image looking into the empty club. A framed original poster announcing the first night of operation was also present. Many such original posters were framed, not merely to landmark significant nights but to preserve their uniqueness: they were printed on low-quality paper, and the cloth-colour, hand-painted pieces produced for the Click Club were rare, essentially individualised variants of what were mass-produced items.
Inside the club, Travis’s images covered the inner walls, showing bands in performance or backstage as well as shots of audiences and dancers. These featured individual explanations alongside enlarged clips from music press reviews. Former attendees who contributed memories and actual materials to calls informed those displays—inserting community voice directly into the exhibition narrative.
Music naturally anchored the experience. A television screen inside the shell showed concert footage from the club, including sets by Blur, Charlatans, Ride, and Lush. Another screen ran a permanent slideshow of Travis’s images backed by a soundtrack of the club itself. Other curatorial choices: a wall devoted to 1980s independent record sleeves, a blow-up page from Click! magazine reproducing the club’s top 20 DJ charts. Club-goers who responded to another Facebook call guided song selection atop a wall named for attendees.
Ephemera entered by original attendees paralleled the small-display cases directly on view.
Audience responses were collected both in the space: opening-night visitors were interviewed; many attendees spent extended time at the venue across the whole run, deeply immersed. On Twitter feeds, at the Birmingham Music Archive online, and at the Click Club’s home site, participation took the form of personal photographic presence, often juxtaposed to that favourite display or taking what—to them, unavoidably—lived representation through the doorway of that made environment as film-still wallpaper behind them. An exhibition-gathered installation came from a large-scale “music map” beyond a walls-based framework of passive reading: copies from longer runs filled a wall-sized board where fellows added “notes or signs about important venues, places, spaces and so on—recognizing things in extended features that shift possibility about why and what place-specific affordances mean.”
Alternate Reading: Inherit Meaning
The feedback we provided itself reflexively annotated the limitations achieved within process and within incomplete. As the exhibition’s own survey card reads: “What is represented in this exhibition is a partial snapshot of a place in space and time.” That reflection helped orient any careful attendees toward an underlying interest straddling both specifically that period ambience and the larger culture of reminiscing mechanics that architecture generated—to what extent that listening and reproduction set stable points; alternatively fragmented: potential visitor frequency shaped many outside-in passive trajectories far fewer high participants in deep personal practice. So the echo-locative encounter what with the site bound some readings clearly heavily foreground “innate and prior emotional acquisition”—foreclose group naturally formed during time performed substantive.”
Examining consumer engagements through the lens of affect proves a productive analytical prism. According to Gilbert Rodman and Cheyanne Vanderdonckt (2006), affect encompasses emotional and psychological reactions to cultural phenomena, often experienced and remembered physically. This approach highlights dimensions of cultural participation that “cannot readily be reduced to (much less explained by) matters of semantics, semiotics, or ideology: where the central question is ‘how does it feel?’ instead of ‘what does it mean?’” (Rodman and Vanderdonckt 2006, 260). Weaving together both questions may be most fruitful, but this framework resonates with Lawrence Grossberg’s (1984, 227) concept of “affective alliances” in fandom, along with the values embedded in one’s devotion to music and orientations toward its practices and fellow fans. Baker and Huber (2013, 522) capture this idea in their study of physical DIY music archives, describing them as “affective institutions” marked by individual and communal commitments to music cultures.
In the compiled responses, consumers of the memories, heritage, and history on display recounted visceral engagements that colored their own affective memories and judgments. As Sara Ahmed (2010, 31) has argued, being affected by an experience, event, or object involves a simultaneous evaluation. Indeed, evaluation and judgment are central to music culture, the creation of memory within it, and modes of feeling and expression. Unsurprisingly, much feedback for the exhibition was confined to simple approval or appreciation: “Brilliant!” “Fantastic!” More detailed comments were mostly similarly benign, yet Theresa noted her anxiety about the emotions the exhibition might provoke: “I wondered before coming if it’ll make me think of unhappy or negative thoughts of that period.”
David offered a more typical observation, reflecting on how the encounter gave him “Happy times to look back on.” Laura described how her spirits were lifted by the nostalgic journey prompted by the images, music, and ephemera. Debbie captured this collective sentiment: “Lots of lost memories come flooding back.”
For some visitors, the exhibition filled gaps in their personal recollections. This was especially significant for those whose memories of performances or the alternative disco were shaped by youthful excess. Laura explained: “We were always drunk.” Haley conveyed a more coherent perspective, endorsing the exhibition as a truthful witness that “Truly captured the atmosphere.” For Theresa, still images served as powerful triggers for nostalgia and happiness, “because that’s how it is in my head.” Speaking at the exhibition’s launch, Andy said: “This evening brought me back there, and it’s such a great thing to be able to remember the place through the pictures.”
Music anchored these recollections, as suggested by crowd-sourced playlists and accompanying commentary. Memories of songs translated into evocations of the visceral intimacy of the venue. Clare wrote: “Wonderful to remember what live music was all about – the sound! The smell! The sweat!” Prompted by the image of the club at the exhibition entrance, Theresa noted that it conjured what she called a quintessential gig moment: “when bands walk through the people to get to the stage. We call it ‘running the gauntlet.’” Ethan was similarly moved by a photograph of the band James, “as I remember seeing them at Burberries twice, on one occasion the audience surrounded the stage and would not let the band leave! They had to play a bit longer and then force their way through the crowd.” Theresa also stressed the wider landscape of participation rituals. She recalled reaching the club by bus and walking to the venue, adding: “A lot of the drama that started inside, continued on the street in front of the Click Club, all the fighting, the break-ups, although it happened outside, it was all part of the same experience.”
Haley was left “Wishing I was there,” a yearning echoed by others who experienced a palpable frisson while communing with this representation of their youthful selves and the cherished haunt. For Michelle, the exhibition and its evoked past held “Lots of memories, lots of laughs, lots of feeling 20 again.” Paul said the exhibition stirred feelings from his youth, particularly at the opening night when many original attendees “were all brought in together into the same place”—reminiscent of these communities reconvening in online groups. He spotted people across the room he thought he recognized: “we looked at each other as if to say ‘Is that you? Yes, is that you?’ Without even needing to know each other’s names, we recognised each other and had a chat: first in years!”
Such interactions expose the affective bonds individuals brought to the club or cultivated there, referenced frequently in responses. The emotional experience of this memory work is anchored to attachments to music, place, and a broader set of experiences where friendships formed and romantic partnerships began. Maria recalled meeting her partner in 1986, instantly smitten (“he took a bit more persuading!”): “Anyway reader, I married him. And we’re still together 30 years later.”
Meaningful affective connections—with friends, partners, or the larger “crowd”—aligned with recurring affirmations of the Click Club’s worth, its social dynamics, and the culture it fostered. These were expressed in passionate testimonies celebrating its liberal, inclusive character. Ed, a regular throughout the club’s existence, traveled from Brighton to see the exhibition. He recalled “always interesting” bands and
fantastic DJ sets, where musicians and fans mingled freely, where “it normalised being right in the mix of what was happening.” Andy, a schoolboy when he first attended the club covertly, remembered it as a unique space—somewhere he could hear bands and records unavailable elsewhere. Above all, “we had something in our own city that made us all proud, a family, a crew.” There were “No alpha males. No egos, we didn’t care if you were gay or straight. We only cared about the music.” Paul similarly noted how Travis’ images reminded him of the Click Club’s conviviality compared to other city spaces and conservative attitudes:
you’d go in with your second-hand cardigan, trousers, and no one cares what you are wearing, no violence and no-one would beat you up. We were all part of an extended family and the photographs reflect that. No nicknames, no surnames.
A personal affirmation also emerged; as Steve put it, his encounter “Reinforces that I had/have great taste in music and was/am part of a great scene.” Steve’s comment hints at endurance—how what was affirmed, founded, and nurtured at the Click Club has persisted. Lara reflected: “what has never left me is the sense of friendship and like-mindedness that surrounded the club. I still make my initial judgments on people’s record collections.” Many described their participation in the Click Club as transformative, shaping their life’s direction and lasting in fond memories, friendships, and dispositions. As Sarah wrote:
I still love music, go to gigs when I can and still count as good friends many of the people I had fun with at Burberries. Most of us run our own small businesses or still make art. The indie spirit fostered there survives.
Alongside these positive accounts of endurance, memories of music and the memorialization of people and cultural spaces also convey a sense of loss. Sonya wrote ruefully: “Great memories – we didn’t appreciate it enough at the time. Wish I’d come more often.” This loss surfaced through various affective touchpoints. While some were swept into affective reverie about their younger selves, others like Menna pondered how the club’s spirit “seems like a lifetime ago,” aware of their distance from the moment captured in the exhibition. Justine asked rhetorically: “How old does this make me feel?” Michelle noted attending more recent concerts by bands first seen at the Click Club: “still as fantastic as then [I’m] just not able to jump up and down like a maniac.” These memories compound the passing of time, a sense of finality, and mortality. Mournfully, Theresa noted the absence at the exhibition of “The people who aren’t here or alive anymore.” John commented: “because we were young we thought it would never end and like all good things it did. It was a special time and a special club.”
Perceptions of loss and personal change also connect to perceptions of historical change in music specifically, with some feeling a tangible decline. Ceri remarked: “It’s sobering to think how much has changed since then already.” For Judy, the exhibition confirmed that once “Music was raw, organic and interesting.” Brian noted “that people and music never did need the internet or YouTube – just look inside [the display] cabinets.” Debra, like several visitors, brought her children to the exhibition, highlighting a world without mobile phones and
ubiquitous digital culture, thereby “Showing my children how it was is quite unbelievable for them, as it was for us looking at our parents’ generation.”
Loss produced by memory work, however positive the recalled moment in personal and cultural terms, also reinforced the value of the exhibition and its represented practices. Helen commented: “The exhibition made me realise that not enough is done to capture aspects of Birmingham’s musical history FULL STOP – unlike Manchester, which dines out on it.” A degree of local chauvinism influenced this, countering wider disparagement of the city in UK culture (see Kennedy 2004). Especially striking was Stan, a collector who had contributed to music-related museum exhibitions himself. He wrote: “I believe Birmingham and West Midlands artists/bands are under promoted for what they have achieved and it’s exhibitions like this one that hopefully reminds people what an influence they had on the country.” Dean’s appreciation might have been fueled by his “impossibly exciting” journeys to Birmingham for the Click Club, where experiences were “so intoxicating.” He compared the exhibition to a famous archeological find: “And they make all that fuss over the Staffordshire Horde – this is the real cultural treasure.” Philip summarized the overall argument for a wider audience: “if you’ve never been there, or are too young to have lived through that era you’re now seeing these pictures and saying ‘I wish I was there!’, and that’s enough for it to be important!”
The building that housed Burberries and the Click Club is gone, and the night is long over (the brand reappeared elsewhere, but exhibition visitors insisted “it wasn’t the same”). In Birmingham’s local popular-music economy, even when physical spaces persist, their use has changed. A case in point is Mothers, a rock club established in 1968 in a suburban dance hall above a former furniture shop (now closed). Pink Floyd recorded part of Ummagumma (1969) there. Similarly, Henry’s Blues House, a regular slot above a city-center pub, gave Black Sabbath and others an audience in the early 1970s. That pub was previously a folk club, famous for the Ian Campbell Band album Ceilidh at the Crown (1962), and later an important punk venue. The pub is now closed, earmarked for conversion into upmarket apartments.
Despite these transformations, the sites are not forgotten. Visit them and you may find individuals or groups lingering to commune with the spirit of the music and community that gathered there. Some travel considerable distances to do so—physically and temporally—only to experience their own sense of loss. These encounters, like the exhibition and visitor responses, attest to the deep attachments individuals form to such places. Attachments are to the music, the culture, communities, ethos, and the memories embedded in the bricks and mortar. These memories are both individual and communal, private and shared.
“‘Is There Anyone Out There?’” attempted to move an online archive and its associated memory work into a physical space to explore its meanings and value. It also offered a way to develop academic engagement with music heritage through curatorial
practice, involving its consumers and co-producers of memory. The responses summarized here demonstrate its value for many who were there. But what does it offer those who were not? How might this specific case study speak to a broader experience? What can it tell us about the wider social and cultural historical context?
I suggest that this exhibition and similar activities offer crucial ways of thinking about the past, particularly about popular culture’s importance in people’s lives. It responds to a call from British historians who argue their peers have shown little interest in youth culture and popular culture. They write:
the study of youth and youth culture provides an opportunity to uncover important aspects of social and political change, be they mediated through consumption, the construction of identity, the production of popular music, or in terms of providing a ‘space’ beyond the family, school and workplace in which formative cultural and political interests and perspectives are developed. (Garland et al. 2012, 265)
The references in this call seem relatively concrete when laid beside the affective qualities of reflections on the past investigated here. Such insights allow productive and creative approaches to understanding the intangible ways pop culture and its sounds have shaped feeling. As with the online world behind this exhibition and responses to it, such work can engage with how communities of interest innovatively produce and preserve their own memories and interpretations of what mattered and why.
“‘Is There Anyone Out There?’: Documenting Birmingham’s Alternative Music Scene 1986–1990”
Various resources convey the exhibition’s nature and are available online at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (archivingmediaculture.org). Resources include a podcast interview with Dave Travis and Steve Coxon, television and press reports and reviews, a Spotify playlist of exhibition music, a downloadable exhibition brochure, and a 3-D image walkthrough of the exhibition space.
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