The lure of organising music festivals can attract both greedy unscrupulous types and naive fantasists, but Supersonic are definitely among the good guys - so it's heartbreaking and infuriating to learn that once again they've been shafted by the forces of gentrification in Birmingham, left to find a new venue for the festival hub at short notice.
While performances will be taking place elsewhere (at XOYO and the O2 Institute) as planned, their announcement makes clear that the hub is - via bar sales, largely - "absolutely crucial to making Supersonic viable". Having to frantically source an alternative site must have been an enormous amount of stress, and caused significant concerns about the festival's future. Full credit to the organisers for pulling it off.
It's clear from the comments about the erasure of independent spaces in Digbeth, "replaced with soulless, profit-driven developments that leave no room for culture to breathe", that we lived in Birmingham during something of a halcyon period - the mid-noughties, when things were starting to bubble up but before the money men moved in. Those days, it seems, are long gone - in Digbeth, at least.
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