The Great Escape Festival Preview
- Written by Rob Crozier
Prior to attending this year's Great Escape for us Rob Crozier has put together his thoughts about one of his favourite events by way of previewing what you can expect to read about next week.
It's the most wonderful time of the year. If you like your music new and slightly undiscovered. The Great Escape festival in the wonderful setting of Brighton features a host of clubs and bar venues usually reserved for party people.
Alongside this is a host of more unusual venues such as churches. Throw into the mix a strong 500+ of bands and quite quickly you see how this has grown into the UK's answer to SXSW. It's obviously impossible for anyone to see it all. The wonderful phone app helps us listen to new and exciting acts and plot our listening preferences. However one of the attractions is linking up with friends, mates and fellow musos to discover the acts we missed.
The frequent conversations of "OMG did u catch The Parrots who played on Brighton pier" is one of the festival's highlights
Alongside this is the ability to wander, sometimes with purpose, sometimes not, throughout Brighton's clubbing heartland waving our lanyards and carrying our goody bags with simply a name of a band as a point of reference. This comes sometimes from a friend of a friend’s recommendation and it’s a wonderful way to discover new music.
Modern technology has given us phone apps and Spotify playlists but still the feeling of standing in front of a band with no idea of their sound or stage presence is for us one of the reasons we love live music.
So with all the best will in the world and with our running order sorted I still hope we stumble across some random noise band or equally the Jam Tarts Choir.
We will be trying to tweet all the bands we see so please follow us via the festival hashtag #TGE16 and obviously via @musosguide.
Our current recommendations include The Parrots, The Hunna, Kiko Bun and Rag 'n' Bone Man to name but a very small few.
But who knows what else we will discover? We will bring you all three days in their hazy glory with the amazing acts we found, the ones we missed and even the ones we wish we didn't bother to queue for.
Last minute tickets for The Great Escape are available here.