WHEELS OF DARKNESS
City car drivers with urgent places to be have been known to curse and shake their fists at the London to Brighton bike ride every year, as sunburnt martyrs puff and wheeze all over the damn roads. So hats off to the good people at the Martlets Hospice, who are organising a two-wheel jaunt that leaves Hyde Park at midnight, catching the sunrise atop Ditchling Beacon before freewheeling all the way down to breakfast on the beach – all the while avoiding the rage of Brighton petrol heads. There’s no fee to take part, you just need two legs, two wheels and a willingness to raise dough for a worthy cause. Call 01273 747455 to register.
NEW NEW YEAR
Those of you for whom New Year is all too infrequent in its traditional once-annually scheduling, will be cockle-warmed to realise Chinese New Year is upon us. It’s a tiger this year, whatever that means, and the celebrations are admittedly more culturally based than drinking yourself into blindness and making a tit of yourself. Hove Town Hall is the place to be on Saturday 6th, where you can make lanterns, eat Chinese food and get some Chinese theatre, music and activities under your belt. City schools are also getting in on the act with their own homage; hopefully they’ll be avoiding a schedule of atrocious human rights abuses despite their inherent authenticity.
BIDDY-FREE CRAFT FAIR
The days when craft fairs were the exclusive domain of gnarly old spinsters are thankfully over, as the bi-monthly Handmade Brighton alternative craft and fashion market at Komedia will attest. It’s a showcase for local talent knocking out original and unique jewellery, furniture, toys and paintings – so no crappy crocheted doilies or painted seashells here. From the sellers’ point of view it’s a good way in to the local market without having to shell out for a regular pitch. The whole event plays out to an eclectic soundtrack and purse strings are inevitably loosened by the Komedia bar, which is open throughout the day. Get along on Saturday 6th at 11am.
MAX UP YOUR MIXING
If you’re a turntable terrorist on the wheels of steel, dropping phat ones all over the shop, your tinnitus-ruined ears will doubtless prick up at the news of local floor filler Krafty Kuts’ new iPhone app, Against The Grain. Without recourse to a mic or an effervescent DJ personality, you can pepper your mixes with refrains like “make some noise”, “watch out” and “bring that beat”, as well as whooshes, lasers, sirens and the like. £2.99 is all that stands between you and this amusing trifle.
ENO’S GOOD ART WHEN HE SEES IT
The Brighton Festival is always a glorious schedule of absolutely bonkers events, so it’s with a good degree of excitement that we predict this tradition continuing apace with the Guest Artistic Director’s hat being worn by the brigadier of bonkers himself, Brian Eno. For the culturally illiterate, he was a founder member of Roxy Music, before inventing ambient music and carving out an amazing and eclectic solo performance and production career that’s seen him shaping records for Bowie, U2 and Coldplay among an illustrious list of others. Early indicators of the line-up suggest an enticing array of inaccessibility; we’ll give you full details when we get them.
EXPOSE YOURSELVES
If you want to get your music in front of a load of record industry big knobs (before your constant illegal downloading of their product bankrupts their backwards-thinking companies), then registering for the Exposure Music Awards might be a sensible thing to do. The panel of experts from EMI, Sony and Virgin who give your warblings the once-over will be selecting a few to go on some compilation CD. This sounds a bit vague to say the least but a few previous participants have signed development deals and stuff. Might be worth a punt – type these words into the internet to register: exposuremusicawards.org
RAMPLING DOES IT FOR THE KIDS
It’s not on until 7th March, but we thought we’d bring you the news now in case it’s sold out by the time our March issue hits the streets. DJ royalty Danny Rampling is teaming up with Manc legends A Certain Ratio as well as Justin Robertson, Kenny Hawkes, Transformer, Steve Mac and Andy Mac for The Sunday Social – a charity all-dayer at the Concorde with all profits going to the Children’s Burns Trust. Burned and scalded kids have a pretty tough time of it obviously, so every £350 the Trust raises sends one of them to summer camp where they receive therapy and get to hang out with little pals in the same position. From 5pm til 1am, that’s eight hours of DJs and live music for just £15 – top entertainment for under £2 an hour. Get in.
GIGS UP FOR GRABS
In anticipation of another great year of live music in Brighton, before Brighton Live and the Great Escape arrive comes Shout Out Loud, a new three-day event from The Cable Club at the Prince Albert, from March 19th-21st. No fees to enrol, no pay-to-play, just them choosing the best of the best. The Friday sees a swanky signed band with three local supports, Saturday has a 15-minutes-each band-off in the afternoon, the winners of which open for the Electric Soft Parade that evening. Sunday is a ska/punk show, so all in all there’s plenty of opportunity to get on stage. Get your demo in at the Albert for a shot at a spot.
SNOW FEST IS NON FLAKEY
Those of you still blubbing about the big thaw can get your snow fix topped up at Austria’s Snowbombing festival from April 5th-10th. Why on earth would you? Well, there’s a crop of Brighton talent flying out to show the good people of Mayrhofen how we slush it up seaside style – Fatboy Slim, Krafty Kuts, Caged Baby, Mumdance and Evil Nine all packing extra warm socks and sick set-lists. It’s spendy as hell at £279 for a basic accommodation package, but if you’ve got it lying about you could do worse than spend it here.
MATT’S GOT THE RUNS
Brighton’s first ever full marathon, clocking in at a nipple-chafing 26 miles, takes place on Sunday 18th April, with around 9,000 coughers and wheezers hot-footing it around the city and beyond. Demand for places has been phenomenal, with only a few places still available for charity runners. One such selfless altruist is SOURCE’s designer Matt Barker, whose training thus far has involved sitting in the pub talking about his singlet and shorts colour scheme. He’s running for Rise – Freedom From Domestic Abuse, so if you want to sponsor him get in touch via the usual SOURCE email address and do some good.
FROGGER TEENS
Youngsters are notoriously empty-headed when it comes to road safety, wandering out onto busy roads while iPodding, texting, and Nintendo DSing all at the same time. So Qube Media are running a competition to make a road safety ad that will appeal to attention-deficit teens and prevent them from getting blood, snot and brain all over the bonnet of some poor sod’s Jag. There are three stages; the soundtrack, the concept and the finished ad, with zeitgeisty prizes for each along the way. Go to their Facebook page ‘Ideas Drive Sussex’ to get involved.
MONDO BINGO
If your life is an eternal conflict of two-fat-ladies-liking and B&H-reeking, pensioner prole avoidance, The Underground Rebel Bingo Club could be the answer to your demented prayers. It’s basically bingo, with shouting, loud music and the telltale house rules of ‘no boring people, no old people, no wankers’. Hear bingo calls like dirty whore – forty-four! Fucking pricks – sixty-six! We actually made these up but you get the picture. Because this is dirty, underground bingo, the venue remains unadvertised – you need to go to rebelbingo.com to find out where it’s at. It’s on Wednesday 10th though, we know that much.
BEST LAID PLANS AND BIG IDEAS
The recent bad weather has scuppered Brighton band A Citizen Above Suspicion’s plans to shoot their new promo video – not once, but twice. “We don’t seem to be having much luck with this one,” said guitarist Paul Shepherd. “We released our new song as a free download on Christmas day but each time we set a day to shoot the promo we seem to get shafted by the snow.” Hopefully by the time you read this, the video for Big Ideas will finally be up in all its glory.
GOODBYE GILDED PALACE
After nine years and nearly two hundred shows, Brighton’s much loved alt-country / Americana promoters The Gilded Palace of Sin finally decided to call it a day at the end of last year. Since 2001 the good folks of the Gilded Palace have brought some truly memorable and outstanding artists to this fair city, including the likes of My Morning Jacket, Gillian Welch, American Music Club and Dinosaur Jr, before going out in style on Thanksgiving night with an emotional farewell show from Carrie Elkin and Danny Schmidt. Gilded Palace, we salute you. You’ll be sadly missed.
OCEAN ROOMS SINK
Despite being a super-nice place on a good day, The Ocean Rooms hasn’t had a great time of it recently, culminating in an unfortunate death on New Year’s Day and the subsequent removal of their licence and immediate closure amid concerns about violence and the establishment’s lack of cooperation with the police. We’ve got some good memories of the old place – Cut Copy and Felix da Housecat to name a couple, and loads of others so good we don’t remember even being there at all. Hopefully it’ll be back on the venue landscape before too long, we’re sad to see it go.
Words by Ian Chambers, Nick Coquet and Paul Shepherd
