What a weekend: four mini festivals in the same city on the same two days. Here goes…
First up, The Wedding Present return to the Concorde for their annual get together, At The Edge Of The Sea, this time promising to play two of their mid 90s EPs from start to finish. Whatever you make of Dave Gedge’s lovelorn indie ditties, you can’t doubt the band’s commitment: like some sort of deep geological process they’ve remained essentially the same for 30 years, always there, still doing their thing. Which makes the varied line-up a nice surprise. This year they’ve booked Scottish singer songwriter Emma Pollock (formerly of The Delgados) and Blackpool post punks The Membranes to compete with the witty spoken word alt rock of Art Brut and the sax-led noise punk of Redditch legends, The Cravats. As always The Wedding Present themselves will swap instruments and pretend to be a different band called Cinerama.
Two Three Four is Green Door Store’s two-day showcase of Brighton bands with a few out-of-towners thrown in for good measure. Last year’s festival was pretty special (see our review here) and it looks even better this time round. Heading the bill on Saturday is Fear Of Men, local indiepop favourites who survived a couple of line-up shuffles to release a splendid debut LP earlier this year. Sunday’s headliners are The Black Tambourines, lo-fi surf rockers who made a splash here during the Great Escape when they drove up from Cornwall and did a gig from the back of their van – not that they were actually part of the festival. Elsewhere on the bill we have the mathsy shoegaze of Hundredth Anniversary, the oh-so-young teen pop punk of grasshopper (they insist on the lower case) and the mean noise pop of Tyrannosaurus Dead.
The New Untouchables Weekender was first held on this weekend ten years ago, to mark, we suppose, the famous mod-rocker beach battle forty years before. Far from being part of a demonised youth cult, mods are often now treated as a venerable British tradition, like real ale or routemaster buses. Anyhow, the music’s great and the style can’t be matched, so maybe the rest of the country caught up. Friday and Saturday’s club nights at the Komedia have already sold out so they’ve put an extra event at the Volks. Even if you don’t get in, there’s still plenty going on during the day: live bands, a mod market, the hotly-anticipated scooter comp and a mass cruise to Beachy Head.
Not to be outdone, Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar are weighing in with their own weekender: Fuzz 4 Freaks. It’s two (late) nights of psychedelia and 60s garage rock, featuring live music from Exploding Sound Machine, The Dials, and The Hypnotic Eye. DJs Dr Robert and Holly Calder are on hand to ply those of a ‘paisley persuasion’ with the required doses of freakbeat, garage and psych. Mousetrap meets UFO, they say.
