Brighton
Thomas H. Green
The default setting for Brighton indie quartet Black Honey is pop-grunge. There are plenty of moments during their fourth album when Nineties femme-rockers L7 spring to mind. But Black Honey also spread their wings and fly in other directions. The latter songs tend to be Soak’s most noticeable, although whatever style the band chose, they know enough about hooks to keep listeners onside.Singer Izzy B Phillips, newly sober and with a recent autism diagnosis, veers lyrically between cinematic impressionism and a more specific observational approach. The album’s closing song, “Medication”, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Today gradually blossoms from unpromising beginnings. LouderUK’s On The Beach event series takes place throughout the summer and runs the gamut from indie pop-rock, such as Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party, to dance events featuring DJs such as Bonobo and Carl Cox. As the name suggests, it all happens on Brighton’s pebbled seashore, overseen by clifftop Georgian houses. Success is dictated, to some extent, by the whims of British weather. Today is Eighties day. It’s a case in point.Beneath cloudy skies, on a muggy early evening, to a less-than-quarter full arena, Toyah (pictured left) starts her Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.Quarter of an hour later, the singer Luna Roja (pictured left) takes to the small indoor stage. She tells the small crowd that she wants her music to “connect South America and spaghetti westerns”. With long straight black hair, she’s clad in a powder blue fringed jacket, pale jeans and a cowboy hat. Her guitar adds the Morricone twang but the songs mostly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As every social space in Brighton once again transforms into a mire of self-important music biz sorts loudly bellowing about “waterfalling on Spotify”, it’s also a great time for those who relish gigs by new talent from all over the world. For three days (four, if you count warm-up Wednesday), every nook and cranny has half-hour showcases running from lunchtime until close. And on top of that are the freebie Alternative Escape fringe events.This writer starts in Chalk, arguably Brighton's best venue, an approximately 800-capacity space, open and airy, with great sightlines and an acceptable Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Forty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk architects of what became Americana. Now he’s 61 and playing in a sold-out pub back-room in Hassocks, a downland commuter village near Brighton, still giving his all during two hours of humour and humane passion as if this is the biggest stage, and this crowd a community clearly worth serving.Green On Red proved to be a youthful waystation of high times and burnout, on the road to a greater career spent reinvigorating rock’n’roll’s essential language with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s something exhilarating about seeing bands right at the very, very dawn of their careers. Will they be headlining the Houston Astrodome in five years’ time or working in chip shops? It’s all to play for. But it’s right now that counts. Of course, it only feels that way if they’re any good. When they are, it peps the spirit.This evening is a showcase by Brighton label Goo Records. Only a couple of years old, they’ve built a reputation by firing out solely singles and EPs, career kick-starting releases for an array of guitar bands. Their best-known act is light-hearted, sportswear- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ro first saw Fat Dog, before anyone had heard of them, at the Windmill in Brixton in front of a crowd of about 25 people. Their manic energy blew her head off. Vanessa and Al K first caught Fat Dog at the Rockaway Beach Weekender in Bognor Regis Butlins in January ’24. The tightly choreographed, manic show was the best thing all weekend.I first saw Fat Dog on the packed-to-capacity slope of Strummerville at Glastonbury last year. There was a wild frenetic buzz in the air. First exposure to Fat Dog’s unlikely, frenzied musical gumbo sent all our brains reeling and our feet moving. But Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“I really am the repository for all your shit,” Nina Conti’s famous Monkey hand puppet tells her. Monkey may have a point.The brilliance of Conti’s ventriloquism is that it seems to burst, unedited, from her id. Filth, surrealism and lightning-fast gags spume in a torrent whenever her teeth are closed tight. Her non-puppet stage persona is, by contrast, all light and loveliness, apparently bemused by what’s being dredged up. Quite apart from how she has the Brighton Dome in stitches, watched purely on the level of technical skill and psychological tightrope walking, her shows are astonishing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brighton band Squid are not in the business of straightforward. Combining jazz chops with a sensibility that’s at once post-punk, prog and avant-garde, their music is wilfully tricksy. Yet it does groove, upon occasion, it does funk. Tunes do pop in for a visit.Throughout their near-decade career, they’ve fired out some tasty off-the-wall cuts, from skronk-rock bangers to wigged-out alt-pop. Just check “Houseplants”, “The Narrator” or “Fugue (Bin Song)” for evidence. Their third album contains a couple of equally intriguing songs but whether it’s a wholesale listen will depend on the Squid- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The quandary is this. Middlesbrough singer Amelia Coburn made one of my favourite albums of last year, her debut, Between the Moon and the Milkman, and I hear she’s playing live near me on the south coast, not something that happens every day.Then I learn the gig is supporting Jim Moray (pictured below left), a much more established folk singer, originally from Staffordshire. So, I check out his music. It’s not my bag. But, sometimes, in concert these things persuade…The short of it is that, live, Moray is still not for me. An accomplished producer outside his own work (Art Brut, Blair Dunlop Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ricky Gervais begins by bringing us up to date with the latest “outrage” he has caused; two Netflix specials, SuperNature and Armageddon, upset some people, he tells us, thus giving them even more attention than they might otherwise have had. So now with Mortality he's probably going to upset some more, thus making the Netflix special that will follow its lengthy tour (ending in November next year) even more successful. “Stupid cunts.”Well, yes, Gervais is very good at needling those who no doubt will take umbrage at some of the jokes in Mortality, the ones about slavery, or paedophiles and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kiri Pritchard-McLean has spoken on stage before about her interest in helping young people – including in her 2017 show, Appropriate Adult, in which she talked about being a mentor to a vulnerable youngster. In Peacock, her latest touring show which I saw as part of the inaugural Brighton Dome Comedy Festival, she talks about how she and her partner, Dan, came to be foster carers.There are, the comic informs us, more than 100,000 children in the care system in the UK. It's a subject that in less assured hands could be dull, preachy or an exercise in virtue-signalling – she Read more ...