May is far and away the best month to be in Brighton. It’s festival season, and the town centre is buried for four sweet weeks in performances, crowds and NOISE. And this weekend was the noisiest yet, as The Great Escape 2015 bowled into town to join Brighton Festival and the Fringe Festival, bringing with it hundreds of acts (not to mention the hundreds more acts in the co-occurring The Alternative Escape and all the totally off-the-grid gigs conveniently taking place all over the city this weekend). I could do in-depth reviews of all the gigs, but I’ll leave that to the music journalists, so instead, here is The Great Escape 2015 in pictures.
Every good day off starts with going out for breakfast. Eggs benedict and peach iced tea at Bill’s was my choiceI’m not really a beer drinker and I’m certainly not a street drinker, but on Friday I flouted both of these self-imposed rules and here is the evidenceWe watched some street performers do some acrobatics just moments before we bumped into Jake of Overdiluted.net… a true Made in Chelsea moment, except we genuinely didn’t know that the other one was thereYeah this is a little bit blurry, but I’ll blame that on the BURNING HEAT in the semi-refurbished Patterns rather than my unsteady hand. This was an Iceland Airwaves session with an Icelandic band called Vok and they were dreamy and luscious and greatThe saddest man to ever eat an ice cream with a Flake in itDan begged me to take a photo of him next to a sign with his favourite city council’s logo on itThis is Yosi Horikawa, Dan’s must-see artist, playing in the basement of Queen’s Hotel. Almost everyone sat on the floor, except for the guy on the right of the image who inexplicably stayed standing all the way through. Then a few people got up and started dancing. It’s not really music to dance to. I still don’t really understand what I was watching, but I quite liked it.We got a text about a secret gig taking place at OhSo Social, so we went to have a peek after Yosi Horikawa. Going in seemed like too much effort, so we hung over the railings on the seafront to watch Kanzi from our vantage point. They were quite good. Someone was blowing giant bubbles and wanted people to pay to take photos of them at the time. Thanks for the generous offer but no thanksI made Dan get to The Old Market a REAL COOL 2hrs 45mins before Mew came on to make sure we’d a) get in and b) get a good spot. This was Groenland, the band before, and I’m glad we saw them because they were ace.This is Mew, the band I came to see! As I tweeted, the best problem imaginable is being so close to one of your favourite bands ever that you struggle to get them all in one photo. We obviously wormed our way to the very front and I was fangirling the whole way through. I was expecting greatness and it was about a hundred million times greater.
Look, I didn’t really think about taking good pictures because that wasn’t really the point in going. The fact is, it was a bloody brilliant weekend and I WILL be going again next year.
And as for the hygge? Yeah it was everywhere. Live music does that. Thousands of people together being part of the same thing does that. Being slightly tipsy for two days does that too. The Great Escape 2015 really was a great escape (now how many other people have already said that?) and I’m so very glad that one of my longest-standing favourite bands (Mew) brought me to a festival with so many artists I never would’ve come across otherwise. And that is exactly the point.
Hello Hygge 