The Great Escape 2011

Fes­ti­val sea­son starts early in Brighton (or does it ever end?), and just a few days back from Madeira we took a lit­tle more hol­i­day to enjoy our first fes­ti­val together, The Brighton Great Escape. Three days spread across the city, with over 100 acts play­ing, I’d ded­i­cated a good por­tion of the week to plan­ning who to see, lis­ten­ing to fes­ti­val playlists and dis­cov­er­ing new music.

We were joined by Sarah and Mark, trav­el­ling down from Bris­tol they arrived early on Thurs­day morn­ing. After some cof­fee, fresh crois­sants and a lot of com­par­ing sched­ules we started our fes­ti­val. Sam was still work­ing, so for now it was just the three of us.

At Jubilee square we picked up our shiny red week­end wrist­bands and searched for the Queen’s Hotel on the seafront. Luluc, Rhob Cun­ning­ham, Moddi and 22 were play­ing what we called the “morn­ing ses­sion”, which ran from 12 ‘til 4pm. On a car­peted hotel room we caught the end of Luluc’s set; gui­tar and deep beau­ti­ful vocals, their track made famous by Grey’s Anatomy. Rhob Cun­ning­ham was up next, an irish­man, his songs were sto­ries with gui­tar and they were lovely. And between tracks he had sto­ries too, seems he was attacked by a falling starfish when he arrived in Brighton. Moddi fol­lowed, a beau­ti­ful serene nor­we­gian folk act with cello and accor­dion, this set turned out to be a fes­ti­val high­light. The music so incred­i­bly pow­er­ful and dif­fer­ent from every­thing else on offer. With Becks and Corona in plas­tic beer cups, 22 took the stage, nor­we­gian again but very very dif­fer­ent – com­pared to Muse and The Mars Volta, they were an extremely ener­getic young band that liked to jump around and punch their fists through the ceil­ing, I can’t say we were overly impressed. The weird half-backwards-mohican the lead singer sported was enter­tain­ing however.

Image by Rob Orchard

Ready for more music, we nipped into an alter­na­tive escape venue, the appro­pri­ately named “Live music bar”, to see Brother and Bones and Model Soci­ety per­form. On the way back we were lucky enough to catch Cloud Con­trol per­form three songs, includ­ing my favourite, “There’s noth­ing in the water we can’t fight”, at Jubilee square.

Home for piz­zas and back out again with Sam, we headed to St Mary’s church for the fat cat records event. Sat in the pews at the front, sip­ping wine (beer in a church feels awfully wrong), a stage with grand piano and pro­jec­tor was setup beneath the dim light of a chan­de­lier and the dying stained glass sun­light. Dustin O’Halloran opened the show, with a gor­geous, decep­tively sim­ple piano com­po­si­tion, accom­pa­nied by a string quar­tet. It was rem­i­nis­cent of Ludovico Ein­audi. Sit­ting a lit­tle awk­wardly in the wooden seats, we watched Hauschka per­form his pecu­liar strain of piano music, heavy on the obscure per­cus­sion and end­ing with ping pong balls being thrown into the grand, it was delight­fully dif­fer­ent. We spent most of the act try­ing to work out how he was mak­ing such incred­i­ble noises. In the dark now, all sun­light van­ished, Max Richter cul­mi­nated the show with a per­fect ren­di­tion of his Infra album, com­plete with strings, he also played my favourite, “On the nature of day­light”. All in all an excel­lent post-classical event, and now onto some­thing very different.

Image by Andy Sturmey

At 10:30 we arrived at the Pavil­ion The­atre (the Uncut stage) to catch the end of Babe,Terror’s (not “Baby tor­ture”, I might add), impro­vised and very clever drone set, but con­sist­ing of a sin­gle man sur­rounded by fairy lights and hum­ming into a mic occa­sion­ally, it wasn’t the most riv­et­ing view­ing. I love this sort of music, but with the room fill­ing up for Gang Gang Dance, the vibe wasn’t there. And then the main set, the rea­son we were here, the very loud and awe­some Gang Gang Dance, play­ing their new album “Eye Con­tact”. With tribal drums, Kate Bush-esque vocals, and a flag waver, the gang dance kicked into full swing. It was phe­nom­e­nal and I’ve had their albums on repeat ever since. In their viet­cong hats they danced with us, and we went home, ears ring­ing, ready for two more days of awe­some music.

Image by Ricardo Vamp