Scene Report: Brighton April 2007
Brighton is a town encapsulated in live music at the moment and long-haired skinny lads with guitars resting on backs look like ants, building an empire as they swam the shops and dirty alleys. It's all a long way from the dance culture that was hugely popular in the nineties. Fatboy Slim had a god-like status back then and trapped in the capitalist rat race, generation X(-tacy) couldn't wait to spend Fridays and Saturdays dressed in crazy clothes, chewing their faces off...
But no more! The rock n roll scene is back - revolving like a can of baked beans in the microwave ready to burst. And its not all about the music either - Brighton bands are beginning to get quite the reputation for their crazy style and naughty behaviour off as well as on stage.
Cat the Dog are a Brighton band about to make the papers again this week (last time was for making Steve Coogan leave a Brighton Restaurant), this time because the band, newly signed to Virgin, have somehow found themselves kicked off their tour... Having been handed a great five-show slot supporting The Enemy, today the Brighton based band announced that after just one show, they've been dropped from the bill. The boys however seem surprisingly up beat about the whole thing;
"Ah man, the equipment just wasn't working - Andy ended up doing this massive drum solo while he waited for our shit to work, and then we just thought f**k it, and trashed it! We shouldn't have done, really - the venue warned us after last time that if we did it again we would be banned, but f**k it, right?!" Chris exclaims as the others, wearing vintage clothes and gold winkle pickers laugh around.
All jokes aside though, its interesting how out of the vast number of talented bands in this city, Cat The Dog were signed to Virgin (on their 2nd gig), a band renowned for their kooky dress sense and party animal antics, the very things that are now getting them into trouble!
You may have heard of Blood Red Shoes (now signed to V2, no less - the same label as both The Stereophonics and Bloc Party), a band who are soon to release their fourth single, entitled 'It's Getting Boring by the Sea'. Their attitude is typical of the Brighton musician - excited and passionate about music, yet massively cynical about the music industry;
"With our music we just write whatever feels right to us at the time of writing it, so there's a variation of lyrical themes and musical ideas. We don't tend to sit on straightforward structures or ways to play our instruments because we'd get bored and we don't want to make cheap-shit predictable music. we want to move people, make them dance or shout or get excited, and we don't want to come off like rock stars or some amazing otherworldly beings - we're just two people making music and the whole "fan" and "band" divide is boring and old now. We're all part of the same thing. We're not in this for fame and fortune; we're in this because we just always wanted to be in a band."
These days the typical Brightonian is nonchalant, musical, arty and isn't caught dead in anything that is not skinny fit. A musical microcosm (perhaps due to Brighton's infamous Institute Of Modern Music) this is a city where a gig constitutes a room of musicians playing to musicians and I think Ollie Liddiard (drummer from Brighton based band I-Koma) said it best when he articulated 'the over saturation of the music business down here is a good thing in one way - as it means you have to be something special to make it out of the City, but its shit because no one really enjoys gigs here anymore. You either sit there nit picking the other bands, or play knowing that everyone else in the room is nit picking at you!"
As musically over saturated as Brighton maybe, we are yet again at the dawn of this years Great Escape Festival, so now is the time to strap your guitar to your back and make pilgrimage to what is fast becoming England's musical capital.