In The Que: Celebrating the Que Club

In The Que at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is a sensory celebration of one of the UK’s greatest music venues, The Que Club, developed and curated by Jez Collins from the Birmingham Music Archive.

Located in one of Birmingham’s most beautiful buildings, the Grade II* listed Methodist Central Hall, the Que Club was a live music venue and home of Rave and Dance culture in the city and beyond. With its cavernous central hall and myriad of rooms, the Que Club was the perfect venue for live music and all-night raving.

The group exhibition includes personal artefacts, photographs, flyers, posters, other materials and a new thirty-five minute film, In The Que celebrates the promoters, the musicians, the performers and the ravers who came to together in musical worship on the Que Club dancefloor.

Donovan visited the Que Club in January 1996, following an invitation from his son Terry who was a guest DJ there and had recently graduated from Birmingham University: “House of God is one of the few places I DJ where the crowd can overwhelm the sound system. The roar of the crowd is kind of visceral. So it was an incredible privilege to DJ there then and now, and so I just wanted Dad to see that and he showed up with his camera. He understood the energy and picked out some incredible characters.”

Obviously a departure from Donovan’s usual, more glamorous, surroundings of the photographic studio, the images he took in The Que Club are grainy and evocative, capturing the unpolished exuberance of the iconic club night. In some ways the series re-visits the grittier, more photojournalistic approach Donovan adopted when he was starting out in the 1960s.

A couple of the pictures have been published in the twenty five years since they were taken but they have never been previously exhibited. Jez Collins came across them when he went to speak to one of the club’s founders, Chris Wishart: “I interviewed [Chris] for an hour and a half and he didn’t mention Terence coming to the club or the photographs. But as we were walking out the door, he said ‘Jez, I think you might be interested in this.’ And I opened this drawer, and there was this box of Terence Donovan photographs. They were just stunning.”

**In The Que

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery**

Free Entry

On until 30 October 2022

For further information please visit the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery website.