Danny Smith is a writer, degenerate, and malcontent. He has done lots of things for money; He has worked behind, and on the doors of, some of the roughest pubs in Birmingham. He sold cd-roms door to door in the suburbs of one of the most isolated cities in the world. He’s wrestled children of various sizes, taught kids from the ghettos of New Jersey how to shoot a bow, talked down the strung out at various festivals, and protected people against nightmares.
Danny started blogging in the late nineties and through his art degree became involved with the Birmingham art scene and the arts and culture blogs ‘Created In Birmingham’ and ‘Birmingham: It’s Not Shit’ (later relaunched as ‘Paradise Circus’). Around this time he launched a literature magazine for new writers and illustrators called ‘Dirty Bristow’ and also wrote for New Arts Festival in Birmingham.
In 2012 Danny and his friend Jon Bounds drove around the coast of England and Wales visiting all of the 55 pleasure piers in two weeks, this eventually became the book Pier Review: A Road Trip in Search of the Great British Seaside published by Summersdale books in 2016. Through this he did press interviews for Radio 2, local and national radio and appeared on Victoria Derbyshire as a pier ‘expert’. He also got involved with the Guardian’s citizen journalism project Contributoria and had articles published in magazines like Fused, Area, and Vice.
Through Paradise Circus Danny helped write and publish two hugely popular books 101 Things Birmingham Gave The World, and Birmingham It’s Not Shit: 50 Things That Delight About Brum. Most recently he published a solo project about his three month trip to Mexico called Staring Death in the Face: Searching for The Reaper Across Mexico.
Danny has been in the mosh pit for Pantera, danced at illegal raves and in the big rooms of the dawning of the ‘super clubs’. He’s spun drunk in the streets of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, jived to live rock and roll in an abandoned restaurant in Venice, and skanked at a skinhead stomp in the heart of Mexico City. He has watched the sunrise from MontMartre in Paris and the sunset on Palolem Beach in Goa, he’s met the kangaroos in Australia, the rats of New York City, the bats of Bear Mountain and watched whales breach off the coast of the Margaret River.
He maintains the only reason he started writing in the first place was to keep a record of the head full of memories.
