Birmingham, day by day

Birmingham's calendar is the deepest in the West Midlands as we track it: 146 listings across 40 venues, 93 of them music and 22 comedy. The busiest single address is a surprise if you only know the city centre: Caffeine and Machine: The Hill, the motoring venue, holds 12 listings. After that come the rooms that define a Birmingham gig night: the O2 Institute2 with 11, KK's Steel Mill with 9, the O2 Academy and O2 Institute3 with 8 apiece, and the Sunflower Lounge with 8.

The one dated listing ahead as this page issues is a daytime one: Nashville Sounds in the Round, a songwriters' circle at B:Music on Saturday, Dec 5, at 11:30 am. Everything else on the page is the standing circuit, refreshed as venues publish. The Near row maps the region the way gig-goers actually move around it: Wolverhampton is 19 km, Coventry 27, and both keep their own pages, so a band that skips Birmingham often turns up on one of them within the same week.