The Kings Suite at the Metropole is the kind of room where the band plays at the centre of a full production. The corporate events we play here come with LED walls, intelligent lighting, haze and a top-tier PA - L-Acoustics, d&b, the systems a production company rigs for a thousand-cover awards night - and the job is to put a live showband at the heart of all that and make it the moment the room remembers, as we did on a recent night in the Kings Suite. It is a grand suite in the biggest conference hotel in the country outside London, and it is built for events at this scale.
A grand suite at the NEC
The Hilton Birmingham Metropole is the UK’s largest conference and accommodation hotel outside London - 31 function rooms across 6,000 square metres, right on the NEC and minutes from Birmingham Airport, so it draws national conferences and awards bodies pulling delegates in from everywhere. We play the Kings Suite, a grand room of around 10,000 square feet seating up to 720 for a dinner, with its own foyer for the drinks reception and the option to open through to the Palace Suite alongside it. It is a hotel ballroom rather than a flat-floor hall, but a big one, and it carries serious production when an event wants it. It is the biggest room on our Birmingham and Midlands corporate circuit - we also play ICC Birmingham in the city centre and Telford International Centre out in Shropshire.
The get-in: a barrier, a licence plate, and back-to-back doors
This is the bit worth knowing before the day. Load-in to the Kings Suite is genuinely good for a hotel - there are back-to-back doors at the rear of the room with proper vehicle access right up to them, so the kit goes straight in off the truck rather than through the lobby. The catch is the route in: it runs down a barrier-protected side road, so access has to be arranged ahead with the vehicle registration plates passed to reception, who lift the barrier for you. Turn up without that sorted and you sit at the barrier; sort it in advance and it is one of the smoother big-room get-ins going. With full production in the room, we work to the schedule the AV crew are building to, loading in and line-checking around their rig.
Sized for the room, with or without brass
The Kings Suite takes a big band, and we have played it both ways - the eight-piece and the full eleven-piece showband with a brass section. Which one depends on the event and the budget rather than the room needing convincing: eight pieces already fills it, and the brass is the lift for a gala that wants the extra punch. Either way it is a band sized to match the production around it - there is no point putting a four-piece under a wall of LED and a rig built for thousands. We mix on the supplied PA with our own engineer and run in-ears, never wedges, which keeps the stage clean inside a busy production setup.
Knowing your way around
The Metropole is a vast, sprawling complex - genuinely easy to get lost in, and a first-time band burns half the afternoon just finding the right corridor to the stage. We know our way around it, which sounds trivial until you have watched a crew lose an hour to the back-of-house maze. The hotel looks after the band and crew well too: the food is consistently excellent, usually laid on in one of the restaurants set aside for crew, which on a long day up from South Wales matters more than it should. Around all that the night runs the way a big corporate evening does - drinks in the foyer, dinner and awards in the suite, then the band, two hour-long sets blended and loaded with floor-fillers, a DJ carrying the late end.
The Brotherhood are South Wales’ go-to corporate band, working Birmingham and the Midlands regularly. Check our availability for your awards night, conference or gala at the Hilton Birmingham Metropole.
