Live Review

Brighton City Festival – Tru,

• 6th Nov 2007

12 Hours, 14 Arenas, 100 Acts, 6000 people, 1 ticket

There a line in the class film Wayne’s World 2 that goes “Book them and they will come” 99% of the time that is the case. It’s the other 1% of the time you have to worry about and this festival obviously had been stock piling those moments.

This led to the amount of venues taking part in this urban based festival dramatically falling with the start and ending times also being moved closer together. This was not helped by the fact that a lot of people had misread the line up and expected bands to be playing live, only on arrival at the venue to eventually find out that in most cases it was in fact just a DJ set. A list not being made available which detailed who and when people were playing did not help the cause either.

Then there was the problem with the security not being made aware of how the entry system was going to work which led to long queues into the venues taking part. This and the aforementioned all added up to a very hacked off public.

But there were some highlights in the night, the aforementioned problem with entry made it more or less impossible to leave one venue once in and get in to another with out a long long delay. This in turn led many people to visit the recently opened Tru.
The reason why? Simple, for many it was because 2 Many DJ’s were playing early on in the morning. Before this though, there were live sets by Soulwax (Nite versions), Dan Le Sac VS Scroobius pip and Late of the Pier.

Brighton has always had a loving connection with dance music, this festival embraced that. Late of the Pier don’t really find a good footing with many of the generally alcohol filled clubber in attendance tonight. Maybe they are just that little bit too different for them, never the less what we do get is a solid set from these young upstarts. Set closer ‘Bathroom Gurgle’ sounds like a throwback to the eighties pop scene, at one moment sounding like Kate Bush the next partly like Dead or Alive.

Due to time delays Dan Le Sac’s and Scroobius Pip’s performance now unfortunately now clashes with Soulwax, so I miss out on their fast paced spoken word poetry being spitted out over electro beats.

Soulwax are a bit like Howard Marks in that they have many guises, there is the original standard band orientated version of Soulwax, there’s them in DJ mode under the name of 2 Mang DJ’s and there’s the Nite version which is a darker more dance orientated version of the first. That’s before we take into account the version that churns out remixes. Tonight Soulwax have transformed themselves into the Nite version but this Nite version is very different from the previous Nite version from a couple of years ago. Gone are the reinterpretations of their own songs, in their place we are presented with them instead performing reinterpretations of their many remixes. The four of them stand on stage, all dressed head to toe in white and then with little warning it starts. Ladytrons ‘Seventeen’ is transformed into a much beefier version, with the bass line being punked up to becomes the main driving force. On top of this vocals are squeezed through effects so thick that they end up barely sounding like they originally did. Their version of The Gossips ‘Standing in the way of control’ also stands out. Through out the originals get viciously ripped apart, the bare essentials left remaining are transformed into danceable, highly rhythmic streams
of songs which glide seamlessly into the next which does seem over rather too quickly.

Tonight like many festivals in their infancy had its faults, hopefully tonight was a steep learning call for them and if there’s a next time round, things will run a whole lot more smoothly.