The Electric Debut of Birmingham Electric
“I was in San Francisco some years ago,” says tech entrepreneur turned debut musician, Andy Evans. “On Market Street, you know, you have the tram line that runs up by the ferry terminal, which runs around the Embarcadero, and they run those historic trams from all around the world on that line. I was in a café, and I looked out the window of the café, and this tram had pulled up right outside the window, and it said ‘Birmingham Electric’ on it. I was with my business partner, and I turned to him and said, ‘That’s a band name.’ He said, ‘Write it down!’ I wrote it down, and some years later I needed a band name, and that was there. I wish there were a more poetic [story], but that’s where it came from.”
Not poetic, maybe, but a fitting origin story for Birmingham Electric, a band seemingly built from randomness, whose debut album drops today.
1980s Kid
Back in the early Reagan years, Evans was a budding musician in Washington, DC, with a job at a local recording studio and a drawer full of demo tapes.
Flash (way) forward, to the first decade of the 21st century: Evans had become a tech entrepreneur with decades of successful startups in his past, living a pretty flush life in a historic home in Haarlem, just outside of Amsterdam.
But he still had that drawer full of demo tapes. Plus, the memory of his recently deceased father’s never-completed, in-progress novel — and a dire ocular cancer scare in Evans’ own recent history, both of which had him thinking about dreams unfulfilled.
“I got diagnosed with a cancer,” Evans says, “where if you flip a coin, and if it comes up heads you live, and if it comes up tails, you’re dead in five years. And it seems like I came up heads, because I’m still here.”
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An Auspicious Meeting
In the fall of 2019, Evans went to see the renowned, chart-topping ‘eighties band, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in Utrecht, and he managed to corner OMD’s keyboardist Paul Humphreys.
“We were nerding out about stage-tech and keyboards,” Evans said, “and it was bringing back my former life. I left that show, just saying, I’ve got to take one of these singles and do something with it. That was the catalyst.”
Three years later, Birmingham Electric’s debut album and related singles feature OMD drummer Malcolm Holmes and electronic music pioneer Mark Reeder, a dream lineup for Evans, or for any child of the ‘80s.
By the time it all came together, in addition to his powerhouse musicians, illustrator Mark Matcho, who’s drawn a number of iconic Carl Hiaasen covers, had signed on to do the cover art, and fabled photographer Andy Earl (who created Bow Wow Wow’s controversial See Jungle album cover) took photos for the lyric booklet.
A 1980s Album, in 2022
The result, Communication, is the most 1980s album you can imagine this side of 2020, running the gamut from electropop to techno industrial tracks, music inspired by artists from Giorgio Moroder to New Order and Flock of Seagulls. The music’s retro-tinge was not always intentional — the band didn’t seek to cash in on any current 1980s vogue — but it also was not unwelcome.
“It is unapologetic ’eighties music,” Evans says, “because actually a lot of these tracks I wrote in the actual 1980s, and they are largely unchanged. So it’s not like a retro sort of homage to the 1980s, it is actual 1980s music to a large degree.”
And as for the more recent tunes, which have an equally authentic 1980s vibe?
“We weren’t saying, let’s make this sound 1980s, we were saying, what do I hear in my head? This is what I hear in my head, because I’m a product of the 1980s. I just picked up where I left off. If it sounds really antiquated and eighties, that’s because that’s what I’m still hearing.”
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Available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts
A Message for the Next Generation
The album’s closing track — the haunting “Remains of the Day” — is a message to the next generation, which uses the music of the 1980s generation to demonstrate how time can slip away, with dreams unfulfilled:
Let’s make the most of what/Are the remains of the day/Now the road not taken/Is dead and gone/And all that matters/Is the road, we’re on
“Get things done before you kick it,” Evans mused. “That was the motivator, I would say. That was what I had on my mind when I wrote that track.
^^^
Follow Birmingham Electric on YouTube and Instagram, and Buy Communication on CD, and listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp or wherever you get your tunes.
This article was written by Steven S. Drachman, who (full disclosure) went to school with Evans.
