If you hadn’t noticed, it’s just been The Great Escape Festival around town. What a weekend! Officially I was taking photos for the festival themselves, which I’ve done for the last few years. Unofficially, I made it my mission to get around as many Brighton bands as I could. Over the course of the weekend, I saw Abi Wade at Unitarian Church, Dear Prudence at Above Audio, Us Baby Bear Bones at Green Door Store, Abi Wade (again) at Latest, Catherine Ireton at Latest, Fear of Men at Queens Hotel, Nordic Giants at Komedia, Speak Galactic at Latest, Thomas White at Shipwrights yard, Us Baby Bear Bones (again) at Latest, Woodpecker Wooliams at the Fishbowl and Kinnie The Explorer at The Haunt. Phew!
In the run up to his new long player The Tweed Album, Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer has put on a show at the Komedia for several nights during Brighton Fringe called Chap Hop Hurrah!
For those not familiar with Mr B, he peddles a genre that he calls Chap Hop, which isn’t a million miles away from Electro Swing – retro sounds mixed with modern beats. The main premise is hip hop sung in a plummy Queens English accent, and accompanied on banjolele over heavy bass – sometimes covers of classic hip hop tunes, sometimes his own creations. The saying goes “know your audience”, and Mr B does – those who remember tunes from around 1990 with fondness, and who won’t get offended by songs abour raping goats. It’s certainly quite a niche audience, but one that has quite a wide catchment, in Brighton at least – The two shows this week were sold out (there’s another show next week which I think there are still tickets for). It’s not the most serious of musical pursuits, but then it doesn’t pretend to be. In my opinion, it’s worth the ticket price along for his cover of Orbital’s Chime.
This month’s Bleeding Hearts Club fell on a bank holiday, which threw me a bit off kilter. Normally the timings work out quite nicely for me to come home from work of an evening, have a spot of dinner, and then head out to the Albert, but what with it feeling like a Sunday my timings were all out, and I missed out on all of this month’s first act Tandy Hard and most of Davo. Oops!
Thankfully the last two acts of the night were both amazing. Jane Bartholomew was positively magical – Beautiful yet fragile tunes backed with lush arrangements on accordion, violin, drums, guitar and autoharp, with a voice reminiscent of Joanna Newsom stripped of the cloying annoyingness.
Jane Bartholomew
Headliners Crayola Lectern are cut from a different cloth to most bands. Disregarding the normal constraints of verses, choruses, and for the most part vocals, Crayola Lectern are more a contemporary pianist act than a traditional band. Piano is augmented by trumpet, sometimes played normally, and other times used to create the effect of heavy breathing or snoring. Piles of percussion are spread across the stage and played seemingly at random, although I suspect that actually everything is perfectly choreographed. The rule book was left at the door. As wilfully independent as the setup of the band is, it’s not at the expense of accessibility – their songs are warm and engaging and intelligent and funny. By the end of the evening the whole room was smiling – entertained and inspired by a band who are prepared to be a bit different.
Once upon a time there was a three piece band from Belfast who made rather nice dreamy folk music. Then main protagonist Richard Davis relocated to Brighton, and found that being in a band where your bandmates are on a completely different landmass was a bit tricky. For a while, Richard tried his own thing, putting together layers of sound on his laptop, calling his new project Lumo. He played a few gigs which were mostly improvised, and got approached by Brighton label Precious Metal, who have started putting out releases on cassette.
When Richard agreed his original thought was two put out two longer tracks of about ten minutes each, with one on each side, but things grew and grew. Guitarist Niall Harden had also moved to Brighton, and they couldn’t turn their back on Chris McCorry who was still back in Belfast. The release would be as a new, bolder, more ambitious Heliopause, and instead of two tracks, a whole album’s worth of material was recorded.
The result is the Lumo Tape. It’s recognisable as the old Heliopause, but the songs are bigger, richer and more atmospheric. Guitars are run through numerous pedals making them distorted and fuzzy. Electronica generated on the laptop twinkles and burbles in the background. Layers of reverb are added to the songs making the whole sound much warmer – like Sigur Ros with intelligible lyrics remixed by Kieran Hebden.
The album was launched at an intimate gig at Brighton Electric Studios on Saturday 5th May. Support came from local electronica act Krill, and Before Machines, a post-indie band who are old friends of Heliopause’s from Belfast.
Only fifty cassettes have been produced, which went on general release at the gig. Soon they’ll be taking some to Canada – the band are performing at this year’s NXNE festival in Toronto in June.
Emma Gatrill (of Laish, Sons of Noel and Adrian etc) launched her first solo album ‘Chapter One’ in the beautiful environment of the Church of Annunciation last Friday night. The quirky but holy surroundings perfectly suited Emma’s hushed yet accessibly moving harp-based songs. The album is really lovely and well worth checking out – available now from the Willkommen label http://www.willkommenrecords.co.uk/shop/releases/emma-gatrill-chapter-i
Support acts on Friday came from two local acts I had not seen before – the Steve Aston Trio who played some beautiful jazz-based guitar in the style of Django Reinhardt (whose name I surprisingly spelled correctly at the first attempt!), and the opener who was the amazing Nick Edward Harris, who managed to play some extrordinary songs on the guitar using some impressive slapping and tapping and quite original ways of playing that instrument. Both supports are also well worth catching if you get the chance.
Beat Express are a local band with a difference – they’re the UK’s first all learning disabled band. They’ve been going for ten years, and are supported by Carousel – a Brighton charity which works with disabled people and the arts. Earlier this year, they submitted a song to a competition where the prize to play at the Irish Performing Arts Festival & European Song Festival in Cork which is an international performing arts festival for people with disability, and not only have the band been invited to play but they’ve also been invited to host a workshop.
Beat Express
This is all very good news, but taking a band to a festival is a lot more expensive than you or I buying a ticket to festival and jumping on the train. Factor in disability and the fact that the festival is in a different country, and the costs mount up. To help with all of this, the charity have set up a crowdfunding page to help give the band the support they need.
Here at the blog, we wish all local bands every success, but I’m sure you’ll all agree that seeing Beat Express doing well would be something special.
It seems like forever since Fear of Men put out the debut 7″ Ritual Confession last year. It’s probably been barely six months, and in that time one of their early cassette released tracks, Doldrums, appeared on the Sea Monsters 2 compilation, but now the band are just about ready to put out their next single.
Green Sea is coming out on limited 300 only 7″ on June 18th on Sexbeat records, backed with another new track called Born, which they claim is “hook laden”. If you want to hear what Green Sea sounds like before then, you can because they’ve put it up on Soundcloud:
If you want to hear what they sound like playing it live, then they’re playing at the Great Escape Festival, Friday 11th May at 9.30pm at Queens Hotel, and they’re back again supporting Best Coast at Coalition on 21st June. Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually play the new single, but I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t.
Before last night’s gig I’d had a listen to The New Union on soundcloud and what caught my ear was the slick production. Great studio production isn’t a guarantee of a great live performance though, so I was impressed by their display supporting Clock Opera. All dressed in black, the group gave the impression of a band with a unified look, rather than just four guys who happened to be on stage together. The songs were well written, obviously well rehearsed, and sounding tight. If anyone was looking for Brighton’s next big guitar pop hope after The Maccabees, they need look no further than The New Union.
Another month, another Juice FM night at The Haunt, and another three Brighton bands who are all completely new to me. Where do they find them all? I guess it’s probably the endless demos they get sent because they’re the local radio station. But they certainly do a good job of picking great bands for their regular nights.
First up were Tigercub, who distracted me with double denim and a haircut last seen spotted on Dave Hill from Slade in the 1970s. A late start meant that their set of rock stompers was over far too soon.
Tigercub
Having thought after the first band that the night would be a rock night, Holy Vessels mixed things up by kicking off their set with a song with a very predominant banjo. It was their only track that used banjo, but it was a strong statement of intent for their half an hour on stage, which mixed up country, rock and Americana and was a far more melodic affair.
Holy Vessels
Once upon a time, post-rock was noisy and angular, but then Sigur Ros came along and made it all a bit twee. thedealwasforthediamond hark back to the way it was, sounding like Mogwai at their loudest, or Rothko with the bass leading proceedings. thedealwasforthediamond turned things up to eleven, and quite literally blew the audience away. I was quite glad I had ear plugs in my bag!
The premise of Brighton Music Blog is nice and simple – write about bands from Brighton. So what am I doing interviewing Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs? The band have a greatest hits called London Conversations, and London Belongs To Me from Foxbase Alpha came 19th in Time Out’s 100 best London songs last year. Surely I can’t be branching out so soon? Don’t worry. The blog is still dedicated to Brightonians – Pete Wiggs is a Hove resident these days, so I caught up with him over a pint or two at his local to talk about moving away from London, his new album, and making remixes for a new generation of artists.
Saint Etienne on Brighton Beach (photo (c) Elaine Constantine)
It’s funny because even now we still do interviews where people ask me my favourite London haunts. I’ve been down here for four years now. I still feel like a tourist now and again here. We’d always intended to move down here at some point, and now I can sometimes go a couple of weeks without going into London. I suppose it’s easier with internet – you can bat things around. Continue reading →
Brighton Music Blog 