Things You Don’t See From A Car: The Bicycle Drummer in Brighton's New Road

Brighton Festival 2015 has come and gone, and a good one it was too. It’s not just at Festival time that you see things like this in Brighton’s New Road - a shared space packed with pedestrians, dawdlers, drinkers, buskers and street artists - not a good place for four wheelers, who, apart from taxis, tend to give it a miss. But for those of us who enjoy putting New Road to its intended use, there’s normally plenty to be seen. 

Including, last week, the group Puncture Kit, featuring The Bicycle Drummer (David Osborne). Love that bike-based drum kit. Why bother with a beat up Transit van when you can put the beats on two wheels?

 

Brighton Festival 2013: A Walkable Feast

Brighton Festival 2013 is over. The main event finished a week ago, and even the Fringe, extended for an additional week, has ended. We’re getting back to what passes for normality in our fair city. Highlights? This year it’s a long list: the home team (120 voices of The Brighton Festival Chorus) singing the Mozart Mass in C Minor at the Dome. Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen at the Spiegeltent. Tiger Lillies with their imaginative take on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at the Dome. Martin Parr at the Corn Exchange: possibly Britain’s most influential living photographer, giving his Desert Island Pics, showing and talking about the eight photos he’d take with him as a castaway. An illustrated master class in the history of photography.

High Street Odyssey in Hove’s George Street, brought fresh eyes and ideas to the performance that is shopping. And It was a great Festival for pop/rock music, with The Flaming Lips at the Dome: big band + mid-sized venue = total sensory overload, with a retina-searing lightshow. Lucinda Williams did blues meets country at the Dome, with the brilliant Doug Pettibone on electric guitar. Also at the Dome, the singular Sinead O’Connor. There was a lorra lorra circus – the witty and colourful ensemble playing of Cirkopolis; the impressive Circa with I Fagiolini singers, including the amazing bit where the guy “fell” from high up in All Saint’s Church. And No Fit State with Bianca on Hove Lawns – innovative, immersive and impressive.
Open Houses, where the quality of the work just keeps on getting better (not sure about House at the Regency Town House and other locations). Plus “The Blue Route” by Kaarina Kaikkonen - whether you like what she did to the Clock Tower or not, it sure got people talking. Plus free events on the streets like Figures Libres and the fiery Faust in Jubilee Square.
Raspberries? “Building On What We Have,” a talk on architecture and the environment, where the potentially impressive speakers seemed not to have put much preparation into their talks. And “The Contents Of A House” at Preston Manor, where Peter Reder seemed unsure whether he was running a guided tour, a piece of promenade theatre or something else.

The best of the Fest is that, whatever is on the bill, Brighton and Hove is a compact city, a city made for walking. And at no time is that more true than during the Festival, when pretty much everything is a walk, or at most, a bus ride away.

Re-purposing the streets: Figures Libres at the Brighton Festival

A spotlight shines on a red haired woman in a white dress perched on a tiny ledge at the top of City College, high above Pelham Street. As she speaks over the PA system, a squad of backpacking projector-jockeys throw supersized faces from the crowd below onto surrounding buildings. Other images appear. A couple of video jockeys on Mad Max post-apocalyptic four wheelers are mixing tracks, booming the bass and shooting out more images.


The woman in white faces the ground and walks down the outside of the building in an inverted abseil. Next, she reappears on a bus festooned with screens, lights, a sound system and electronica. Musicians play. The bus moves off. The crowd follows. The woman sings, chants, declaims. More images appear, some projected onto the brick cliffs of St Bartholomews Church. A giant naked woman runs above the fascia of Sainsbury’s. Locals appear at the windows as houses and apartment buildings become screens. A baby is born on video.


Another baby is suddenly smiling on a huge white balloon. The crowd threads the New England Quarter. The traffic has gone, the streets have become theatre, an installation, an event.  It’s Figures Libres.  It’s a bit edgy. It’s spectacular, it’s impressive. What does it mean? What does it matter?

Seen on a walk: Audible Forces, Hove

On Hove’s Sackville Beach is this Brighton Festival commission. It’s a group of installations on a pebbly beach which convert different kinds of energy - wind or sun - into sound. Well worth a visit, today is the last day.

Things You Are Unlikely To See from A Car: Brighton Clock Tower Gets Shirty

The Clock Tower is becoming a giant art installation for the Brighton Festival – here’s a photo of the work in progress. More follows.

Waterlitz At Brighton Festival

Not a lot to do with being car free, except we went there by bus - along with about 10,000 other people (who may or may not have gone by bus). 

Waterlitz, staged on a set of upended shipping containers at Black Rock, next to Brighton Marina, on Saturday night, should probably have marked the end of this year’s Brighton Festival.  Spectacular, weird and puzzling.

Seen on a walk: The Skip That Isn’t….Or Is It?

Brighton is a place where things are frequently not what they seem. Especially during the Festival. Here’s an example: a skip, placed in the pedestrian square next to Brighton Town Hall. It’s definitely a skip, but it’s also an installation: just check out that neon. It’s by an artist called David Batchelor.  Not everyone likes it!

Brighton Festival Hits the Streets

Lamp-posts stitched into corsets or sporting woolly sleeves, Vanessa Redgrave emblazoned on street utility boxes, children parading through the streets and New Road taken over by even more of the weird and wonderful – it can only mean one thing: Brighton Festival is here.
The UK’s second biggest arts festival after Edinburgh got under way on a wet and windy weekend on what should have been the sunny south coast.  Here’s a peep.

Novel Approach to the Parking Problem?

Seen on The Level in Brighton. Actually, it’s part of Brighton Festival, the culmination of the UK premiere of a performance/installation by Generik Vapeur, called Droles d’Oiseaux. The cars started out white, processed through Brighton, and ended up multi-coloured, hung out to dry. Probably not recommended for the family runabout.

Brighton Festival and Hove Bike Lanes: From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

Last week’s sublime news was that human rights advocate, leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been announced as Guest Director of Brighton Festival 2011. It’s this kind of thing that makes you proud to live in Brighton & Hove – it underlines the city’s status as left-field, open, cutting edge, tolerant, innovative, inclusive, creative, progressive and global: truly, a bold move by the Festival. So much for the sublime. What about the ridiculous? Bring on another of last week’s announcements, this time from Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC).

Buried in BHCC’s proposed budget (what the Brighton Politics Blogger describes as the Mears Master Plan), is a decision to spend £1.1 million to rip out the cycle lanes in Grand Avenue. These cycle lanes have been controversial from the start, criticised for being installed where it was easy to do so, rather than where there was a clear need. But the work was done, the bike lanes are there, and they seem not to be a problem, except for some of our Conservative councillors, for whom a proper segregated bike lane appears to be an assault on the rights of the motorist. The relevant paragraph, buried in section 3.11 on page 210 of the budget document refers to the need to “improve the visual impact and traffic flow along this important north – south corridor including access to the A27 / A23 from the A259/210 Shoreham Harbour it is proposed to remove the cycle lane along both sides of Grand Avenue and The Drive. An indicative cost of removing the lanes including changes to the signalling is £1.1m to be funded by a further topslice from LTP grant…..(although) detailed costings have yet to be undertaken and any residual funds would be given back to the LTP. There is a low risk that up to £0.3m grant funding may need to be repaid.”
Talk about spurious justification! Whilst the cycle lane is under-used, I have never noticed any problems with traffic flow in Grand Avenue. As Green Transport spokesperson Cllr Ian Davey said,  “It is only 3 years since this same Conservative administration spent over half a million pounds of public money on installing the cycle lanes. Now they plan to spend more than twice as much taking it out. To make matters worse, they may well have to give back the £0.3million that they were given by the government to pay for the lane in the first place. How mad is that?” Mad indeed. As if that wasn’t mad enough, the council also plans to spend £4.5 million on doing up car parks. So thumbs up to Brighton Festival. And thumbs down to Brighton and Hove’s Conservative politicians for proposing something that looks set to achieve a rare combination of outcomes: expensive, money-wasting, pettifogging, and doctrinaire. In other words, the opposite of the Brighton Festival - perhaps it’s time to put the Festival team in charge of the city’s transport policy?

Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanis-car-tsi?

Walked to Brighton Dome last night for a very special event: a Brighton Festival showing of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi - with a live soundtrack provided by the Philip Glass Ensemble onstage. In the Hopi Indian language , the word Koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance…a state of life that calls for another way of living", and a lot of the imbalance shown is about the relationship between nature, humans, and technology: cars were central, whether jammed in cities, steaming along multi lane highways, or smearing the night with their head and tail lights. If you’ve seen it (and you must), you’ll know that Koyaanisqatsi hops between elegiac slo-mo and crazy fast-forward time lapse photography. Starting with Eden-esque scenes, it all starts to go wrong when the humans turn up: wreaking destruction and spreading chaos, depicted in searing images of mineral extraction and despoilation, the mad rhythms of the factory, and our legacy of pollution. The film has no dialogue: the interplay of images and music provides the narrative.Watching it in a cinema, or on a DVD, it’s a powerful experience. Seeing it with a sparkling print of the film projected onto a huge screen, with the Philip Glass Ensemble on stage underneath, was breathtaking.

Apollo at Brighton Dome

There’s a stock market adage “Sell in May and Go Away.” We never Go Away in May. Instead, we stay at home for the Brighton Festival - a Maycation Staycation. The Festival often kicks off with a film + live soundtrack – recent years have included The Battle of Algiers with the Asian Dub Foundation, Run Lola Run with The Bays, and Henry V and Alexander Nevsky with full orchestras. This year’s offering at the Dome was Al Reinhart’s documentary of the US moon missions, accompanied by a live version of Brian Eno’s ambient studio album Apollo. Icebreaker and BJ Cole were onstage to play the re-scored music. BJ Cole? The famed pedal steel guitarist? How come? There is a twangy bit in the middle of Apollo, and Eno revealed in a pre-performance talk that each astronaut was allowed to take one music cassette on mission: all chose country music (except for one, who chose Berlioz). As Eno pointed out, Apollo fittingly includes chord sequences and inspiration taken from country music. Hence BJ Cole. And the event? Al Reinart is the only man to have watched every inch of the NASA film, and it took him two years. Eno described the moon shots as a vanity project - like Concorde, or even the Dome. A peak in technology but lacking a real purpose (other than beating the Soviet Union). Looking back, it was hard to believe that such hokey-looking technology could have put those guys on the surface of the moon – we are now so accustomed to the sleek materials and form factors of electronic gadgetry that the Apollo kit looked more like cast-offs from Dr Who.

As the Lunar Roving Vehicle apparently did hand-brake turns on the surface of the moon, I was struck that this wasn’t just the ultimate off-road trip, but an off-planet trip. An inter-planetary 500,000 miles to go off-road. Jeremy Clarkson eat your heart out.

Mayday 2010 at the Dome was also a bit historic – after the film, Eno joined the band on stage to perform, for the first time live, four of his songs. He ironically described this as his Heavy Metal Set, but it would be more accurate to say it was an Ambient Song Cycle. One of which, appropriately, was Another Day on Earth.

Baby Jane’s in Acapulco, Eno’s Coming Down to Brighton*

Spring must be coming: the Brighton Festival has launched. Most years, we pick up the programme and think “hmmn. Full of unlikely stuff we’ve never heard of. Not much in this year’s Festival.” Then we buy a bunch of tickets, take some chances, end up having a great time and remember that the Festival is one of the reasons for living here. Last year, the Festival’s new Chief Executive Andrew Comben scored a coup with Anish Kapoor as Artistic Director. Thousands of us followed the Kapoor trail, taking in Sky Mirror in the Pavilion Gardens, the Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc in the old municipal market, and a stomp over the windy Downs to the C Curve. This year’s Artistic Director is everyone’s favourite polymath, Brian Eno.   The Festival programme includes live shows by Philip Glass and many other delights. Buying a tranche of tickets at the box office last night, the Helpful Box Office Man (HBOM) asked me, “Do you need any discounted parking vouchers?” Me, taken aback, replying to HBOM, “Oh. Right. Er, I don’t think we should be encouraging people to drive into the centre of town during the Festival.” Which prompted the punter standing next to me, also buying a shedload of tickets, to affirm “too right.” Another reason to warm the cockles, on a cold and rainy night.

*unsubtle adaptation of a line from Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain.” During the launch, Eno said that because there was so much happening, and because he liked it here, he’d be staying in Brighton for the duration of the Festival.