how strange it is

I managed to make it down to Brighton on Saturday for the last day of a new music festival called The Great Escape.

The festival was similar to the Camden Crawl, in that a ticket gave you access to any of the several venues which had acts performing over the three days. Brighton’s compact city centre made this very convenient, and of the 25 or so venues which were taking part, the majority were within about ten minutes walk of each other.

The problem was that the popular venues tended fill up early in the evening, meaning if you wanted to see a band playing at 10pm, you would have to arrive at the venue at 8pm to sit through whatever else was on if you wanted to stand a chance of seeing the main act.

That said, I still managed to see two very good bands which I imagine will be big news in the coming months.

The first was Bon Iver, a three piece indie-folk band from Wisconsin whose first album For Emma, Forever Ago has been receiving universal acclaim from the music press.

The band is very much the vehicle of front man Justin Vernon, who wrote the album in a Wisconsin cabin retreat which he had planned to hibernate in for three months with no intention of producing an album.

They played in a temporary tent which has been erected next to the St Peter’s Church on the Old Steine for the duration of the Brighton Festival, which ran concurrently with the The Great Escape.

Although originally a solo project, (Vernon performed Skinny Love alone on Jools Holland last week,) the band worked best when drummer Mike Noyce and second guitarist Sean Carey added their vocals to tracks, and it was a bit of a disappointment when Vernon sent the other two away and closed the set by himself.

Afterwards I ankled over to a Brighton University theatre five minutes away, and following half an hour in the queue was admitted just in time to see Noah and the Whale perform. The band are probably best known for having Laura Marling as a backing singer, and sing upbeat folk ditties about love, zoos and James Dean.

The highlight of a short set was a rendition of ‘Five Years Time,’ (mp3 here) a song which will surely become a festival favourite this summer.

The show was notable as it was announced at the end that it would be Marling’s last with the band, as the teenage folk singer has already moved on to bigger (although arguably not better) things. She in fact played a solo set after Noah and the Whale, although I missed it queuing up for 45 minutes outside another venue in a futile attempt to see a different band.

Still, all in all an enjoyable evening, with two new bands that we are likely to hear a lot more of later in the year.