4Talent at Gigbeth 8th November

Iain Woods & The Psychologist

Following on from the announcement of the 4Talent Award Winners, I’m now pretty pleased to be able to plug 4Talent’s Gigbeth festival stage line-up in full, including the announcement that the winner of the Music Award, Iain Woods, will be performing as Iain Woods & The Psychologist (he takes his band name from his own battles with panic attacks).

We’re running the stage in the Dragon Bar in Digbeth High Street Birmingham’s Barfly venue from 18:00 – midnight on Saturday 8th November, and hopefully it’ll be a pretty special night.

There were a few different ways we could have gone with the style of line-up – obviously you get access to a certain type of act via the C4 brand – but in the end I thought it would be much more in keeping with what 4Talent is supposed to be about (and frankly, my own musical inclinations) to make the line-up all about discovering stuff you’ve never heard before from genuinely interesting genre hybrids (rather than pimping the latest NME haircut of the moment types). I’m pretty much biting my nails off wondering whether audience attendance will actually prove my faith in Birmingham audience’s curiosity, but I guess time will tell on that front.

Enough of my waffle. Below in brief is the line-up, and you can go to the 4Talent site for the full text about the acts.

THE LINE-UP:

18:30 – Rich Batsford’s virtuoso pianical tinklings ease us into the evening.

19:00 – The Icarus hail from Scotland and ask you to get your head around the concept of shoe-gaze hip-hop.

20:00 – Iain Woods & The Psychologist are the aforementioned 4Talent Award Winners and play gospel-grime.

21:00 – The Keyboard Choir are one of my favourite acts of the evening. It’s electronic. It’s sample-driven. It’s all keyboard and laptops. And it impressed Brian Eno enough to play at his 60th birthday party.

22:00 – Einstellung. Powerful Krautyness from Birmingham’s finest riff-driven rockers, and a great headline act.

23:00 – Robot vs Dinosaur. Can you find me another electro DJ set with Venetian Snares and Holy Fuck on the playlist? Can you? (Their playlist – scroll down – makes me so happy).

Also lots of fun: Pete Ashton’s light sensitive synthesiser Thingamagoop, star of the winning Film Dash film Dunkirk will be appearing between acts, with audience participation encouraged…

After we’ve closed down, Drop Beats Not Bombs is on til 5 a.m, so I’ll be heading over there afterwards to dance my sweaty socks off with Boogie Dave and co at the Rainbow Warehouse 10 mins away. You can rather cunningly buy combined Gigbeth and Drop Beats tickets if that’s your plan too. And if you aim, as I do, to take in the complete weekend’s Gigbeth entertainments, get your tickets and find out more about the rest of the line-up here. £18 for the Saturday, £25 for the whole weekend.