Bacardi B Live presents Eclectricity: Boutique Autumn Festival @ The Custard Factory, Birmingham – Saturday 18 ^th October 2008

by Kristian Dando

Birmingham’s not a city to blow its own trumpet. Sure, London, Manchester and to a lesser extent, Liverpool can hammer home their own epochal cultural significance and general centre-of-the universe credentials ‘til they’re blue in the face. But self-aggrandising just isn’t the Brummy way. They operate rather differently there.

The thing is, in the great city nightlife steeplechase, Brum sometimes sells itself short. And it shouldn’t do – at least not on this evening’s evidence. The second city is hardly shy of a dirty great knees up – and while whopping line-ups like this evenings aren’t of the almost embarrassing frequency as they are in London, or even Manchester post-Warehouse Project, when they do come round, Birmingham goes off.

For the uninitiated, the Custard Factory is an urban regeneration project in industrial Digbeth on the site of – and you’ll like this – the old Bird’s Custard Factory. While by day it’s home to various Nathan Barley-style “meeja” creative outfits, by night it’s one of the best venues in Britain. When the large pool outside the main club space is drained and full of punters, you can count the amount of venues on one hand that even get close.

And it’s in that mode tonight. But the thing is, you can’t get in the main arena for love ‘nor money. With the city’s student population descended en masse for BBC Radio 1’s increasingly inescapable Annie Mac, it’s a strictly one-in, one-out affair.
Unperturbed, your humble scribe meanders to the vast grubby warehouse space where Spectrum mainman Pete Jordan is rolling out some grubby, chunky electro breaks justice with much aplomb. Outside, in another drained pool is some chunky tech-house, and elsewhere some drum & bass. In all honesty, there’s so much to take in across the six or so stages it’s impossible to keep up as the hours pass by. Does It Offend You Yeah? are surprisingly good, while Pendulum’s brand of sports metal-inflected breaks and D&B whips up the crowd, but disappoints a few chinstrokers.

Deciding once and for all that we’re going to get a look in the main arena, we sneak into the front end of the queue – all in the name of journalism, of course. When we get in, Annie Mac’s dropping some heavy dubstep at the end of her set, and the throng love it. While it’s easy to be cynical about the Northern Irish radio presenter – there’s something not quite right about somebody who attempts to be all things to all people to the extent she does – it’s unquestionable the level of sheer devotion she inspires. One lass was heard literally shrieking outside the toilet that Mac touched her hand (hopefully pre-toilet).

While there are lots of problems with tonight’s event – rumours abound of 200 paying punters being turned away, D&B man Friction getting a measly half hour slot and an early 4.20 bath when the flyers promised 6.00 – the sheer amount of grinning loons points to something of a triumph, despite a bit of adversity.