It’s easy to get lazy at festivals, regardless of how many bands are playing that you’ve been waiting years to see, somehow you still manage to spend the whole weekend sitting in a broken tent, drinking warm cider and cooking bad food to an awful standard. The Great Escape is a bit different. For a start it’s in a city, Brighton, so you’d have a job hammering your guy ropes in anywhere. On top of that if you’re lazy at Great Escape you will miss literally everything.
Now in its fifth year, the festival is pulling in some big acts. Groove Armada, Chase and Status, and Broken Social Scene were some of the headliners but with 30 venues hosting gigs, there was plenty more to choose from over the three days. For the weekend, every venue had bands playing all night and day; even places that weren’t venues had a go. One of these makeshift venues is the Queens Hotel, which gives gigs more of a wedding-disco vibe than most of the bands would have liked. Despite this, Detroit Social Club’s Kasabian-esque indie still could have filled a quarry with the amount of reverb they layered over it. There could be a danger of the songs losing substance with this much echo but they still manage to hold themselves together with some beefy riffs every now and then.
The mid-afternoon ‘headline’ act were even less appropriate to the setting. The Chapman Family follow a quiet start to their set with a chaotic, frantic explosion of noisy post-punk. However after an angsty half hour, they finish the set with ‘Kids’, which could quite easily find it’s way into the charts if they hadn’t drenched it in delicious, filthy distortion. It makes it a better song and is a slightly more appropriate accompaniment to vocalist, Kingsley asphyxiating himself with the microphone cable.
As well as some odd buildings turning themselves into venues, a few impromptu street gigs crop up over the weekend. The spontaneity of this kind of thing is spoilt a bit though when Relentless decide to sponsor it and build a specific stage for these so-called ‘street gigs’ on the pier. It’s not even a street. Outside Concorde 2, the Red Stripe (more sponsorship) acoustic caravan is a nicer idea and if you can handle the trek down to it there’s a chance of catching something a bit different.
Aside from the walking (which my laziness may have exaggerated) the only issue with having so many separate venues is actually getting into them. The queues for some gigs did get a bit ridiculous, so much so that you end up not even bothering in some cases. Most venues have two separate queues, one for normal ticket holders and another for ‘priority’, but seeing as they were usually both a similar length, that didn’t make too much sense either. Great Escape is the kind of festival where it really is better to go to the smaller venues and find some new bands. Although not completely unknown, Young Legionnaire proved to be one of my highlights for Saturday. Comprised of Bloc Party bassist, Gordon Moakes, La Roux and I Was A Cub Scout drummer William Bowerman and former Youcodenameis:milo vocalist Paul Mullen, they delivered a powerful, heavy show to a venue that deserved to be packed. Somewhere between At The Drive In and Death From Above 1979, it was certainly a change from what Moakes has been doing with Bloc Party recently, but more than welcome during their hiatus.
My choice of headliner was Canada’s Born Ruffians and after some more bizarre queue issues, they showed exactly why their debut album was so good and that their second LP (out May 31st) is well worth a listen too. Retard Canard and Sole Brother stood out from the new tracks showcased and closing on Foxes Mate For Life ended the night nicely. Obviously in a city like Brighton there’s plenty more to do till the early hours, after the bands have finished. I ended up spending two hours strolling the streets in search of a house I’d never been to be before, but hey, that’s just how I roll. There were plenty of much better, less moronic things to do than that and although you can spend a lot of time walking around and queuing up, with the sheer amount of bands playing at Great Escape, it’s definitely worth going just for the few you do see.
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