The Great Escape Festival 2010 - Live Music Reviews from ChrisOnline.biz

Some may call it the Camden Crawl in Brighton, some might just call it an excuse to head down to the seaside – whichever, it certainly is an odd move to have a festival starting on Wednesday and ending Saturday.

Brighton is only two hours or so from London (less if you have your own car) and is a lovely setting for a festival. Various venues around the seaside town partake in making the Great Escape what it is, a crawl around Brighton’s top music venues. Of course this format also leaves it open to misuse and in particular, the lack of a campsite meant that everyone had to find a decently priced lodging for the nights. This of course leads to booked hotels and extortionate pricing from those that did have space. This disorganization is an unforgiveable faux pas.

Festival-goers were armed (if they thought ahead) with an undetailed location map which was responsible for seaside navigation. If you’ve never been to Brighton before and you can’t read maps then unlucky as it wasn’t the most accurate. Press passes were given as part of two – a delegate pass to attend the talks happening in the Dome (which I might add, was a good choice of landmark for the press organization); and a ‘Priority’ silver wristband, thus allowing the bearer into the VIP queue. This might have been impressive to the unsuspecting media until they’d eyed the size of those particular lines in comparison to the bog-standard entry ones, or in other words, nada difference.

If this wasn’t frustrating enough, the wristband exchange and the participating venues seemed to have an identity crisis, of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety. They could certainly learn a thing or two from the Crawl where venues are clearly identifiable and don’t just have a tiny black-and-white sign in the window...

Average queuing times were not impressive either, virtually every venue had a never-ending line seeing festivallers standing outside for up to 45 minutes, even during the day. This somewhat eliminated the possibility of nipping in and out of venues to catch certain bands, making it very unlike a festival as experienced spectators wrestled with the prospect of staying in one venue.

Whilst it didn’t rain, it wasn’t exactly sunbathing weather either with only Saturday sunshine being anything near what was hoped for. Such a shame that it didn’t happen a week later where the weather was somewhat more striking.

The NME had picked a top venue for their representation at the new music showcase. Though it took fans most of previous bands – Sound of Guns and Everything Everything’s sets to actually get it in the hall-like venue, it was as one

festival goer put it, like being at your high school prom. An old-fashioned auditorium, right next to the Dome, it features a large area for the performance and the atmosphere was simply hot, sweaty and dirty – just how a gig should be, you might argue.

Delphic’s fanbase was pretty predictable for the young pretenders to New Order’s electro throne – young, young and young again. And after a sizeable wait, there they were, showered in a mesmerizing light ensemble as they belted out opener, ‘Doubt’. The tiny venue seemed to sort the threepiece as they managed to create adrenalin-inducing drumbeats, though lead, James Cook, did struggle at times to overcome the velocity backing the band up.

A nice touch that the band employed was the old-style 80s tricks of beginning one track and merging into another, which they did with both ‘Red Lights’ and ‘Halcyon’, the former of which was a more energetic performance and the kids seemed to appreciate them even more for doing so. The latter of which won’t go down as their greatest performance of, yet it still managed to enchant the appreciative crowd.

If New Order were looking for an heir, they could certainly do a lot worse than the Stockport lads and the melancholic, ‘This Momentary’ certainly proved this fact. Though they do sound awesome on record, there is something quite invigorating about hearing these tunes live and there is an added extra energy about them when you have that privilege.

Pro Evolution Soccer tune, ‘Counterpoint’ certainly proved the popularity of that media in bringing music to the masses, but whatever the real reason, this particular tune was a real highlight. Maybe it’s the awe-inspiring drops in the verses or perhaps they just perform it dead well, whatever it was, this was a moment that really got the crowd into the performance.

In what was quite a short set, we were also treated to strong performances of ‘Clarion Call’ (another number with some absolutely mighty drops) and ‘Submission’ as the band played the best of their debut record, ‘Acolyte’. Just a shame that they didn’t have longer and that the Corn Exchange was shutting up shop for the evening; still the fans came out rubbing their eyes as if they’d just endured a punishing cover-shoot with some serious flash photography.

9/10