The Great Escape Festival 2012 – Review

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With civilization comes first-world problems. Unlike those whose festival of choice is, say, Glastonbury or Leeds, attendees of Brighton’s Great Escape don’t have to worry about waking up to find their tent doing its best Huckleberry Finn impression on a newly formed estuary, or smouldering on what is unlikely to be a properly licensed bonfire. But, being in a city, it seems the new music showcase/industry conference can’t shake the problems of the rat-race – meaning the possibility of lengthy commuting distances, staying glued to your smartphone for service updates and having to set-off early to avoid the rush. Yes, it’s an event at which the most carefully planned itinerary (assisted by the intuitive Great Escape app, the main function of which occasionally seemed to be to cruelly point out all the bands you didn’t stand a chance of seeing, but surely a mainstay of this kind of thing in the future) can quickly fall victim to the harsh realities of distance between venues, unannounced schedule changes and, of course, mammoth queues.

Initially setting-off with a relatively blasé approach, we quickly adjusted tactics after leaving a few songs into Shabazz Palaces set (ft. the most intense maraca playing I’ve ever seen) to catch the second half of Friends, only to be greeted by a soon-to-be-familiar re-buff of ‘one-in-one-out’. The following night, jaded from having to arrive an hour and a half early for Grimes (totally worth it, but still), our desire to be able to just walk in somewhere perhaps led us to play it overly safe, with Lianne La Havas and Rolo Tomassi enjoyable but not perhaps the most exciting options available. With no chance of seeing everyone, and a willingness to get there early a must for the more hotly-tipped acts, letting-go and surrendering to serendipity is the order of the day.

The over-riding atmosphere of the weekend is one of barely-shepherded chaos, but it undeniably creates a great buzz: Twitter is a hive of rumours, tips and a certain amount of misinformation about secret gigs and the chances of getting in somewhere at any one time. It also leads to a feeling of intrepidly making new discoveries, which, as the organisers would be quick to point out, is the whole idea. One of the performances of the festival for me came after having wandered into a pub expecting to see Fossil Collective and instead catching a spellbinding set from the apparently brand-new Lowpines: a male-female duo whose lo-fi Americana demands your full attention. Performing with sparse instrumentation – finger picked electric guitar, occasional bass, no drums – they delivered delicate, hushed harmonies and instantly memorable melodies. Artists at the head of growing momentum such as Cloud Nothings and Spoek Mathambo also delivered, the former frazzling a packed out crowd with their yelpy post-hardcore (an experience marred only by a patience-stretching monoto-jam that took over half their set), the latter giving a high-energy performance as he rapped and crooned over math-rock guitars, climaxing with a radical reworking of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’.

That’s not to say that the more ‘established’ acts disappointed, however. Grimes proved she is a star: hopping around in white-face paint in between a couple of zombie dancers, endearing even when realising the reason she couldn’t hear her keyboard was because she hadn’t turned it on (“Oh geez that was my fault”); Beth Jeans Houghton and The Hooves of Destiny again mystified as to why they aren’t bigger, combining playful operatic vocals with proper tunes; and EMA translated her atmospheric debut album into a commanding live-show, strutting and throwing angular poses to her band’s intoxicating drones as she felt every word of her emotional, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Perhaps most surprisingly, Mystery Jets gave a rousing set that improbably – given their ever-dwindling original line-up and status as one of the last bands standing of the early 2000s’ glut of indie-guitar acts – felt like a greatest hits victory-lap. They laced in several new songs, stand-outs of which were ‘The Hale Bop’, which saw them transform into Bee-Gees nodding disco stallions, and ‘Take Me Where the Roses Grow, where excellently-fringed Sophie Rose lent her impressive vocals to a sweet duet with guitarist William Rees.

Elsewhere the character of the respective venues shaped the performances as much as the bands themselves. Heading back into town en-route from watching Perfume Genius holding court in a reverb-drenched church with his short confessional audio sketches, we discovered a punk band bouncing off the walls of a laundrette, their singer gamely (but not particularly successfully, it must be said) trying to overcome a dead microphone with plain-old fashioned screaming. The Eagulls’ ferociously loud set on Friday evening was given an unruly, incongruous charm by its placement in what for all intents and purposes was a conference room – ‘The Sandringham Suite’ – of a faded glamour seafront hotel. The mix of their immensely watchable singer – whose all American looks and fevered stage persona (eyes clenched, head tilted up, stumbling back and forth) made me think of a skinny punk Dean Moriaty – with Hüsker Dü/Fucked Up style rolling distortion made them one of the acts of the weekend.

With everyone’s personal programme being marshalled by so many impossible to predict forces, it’s harder to pinpoint ‘bands of the festival’ than it is at more traditionally-situated events. Perhaps, then, it’s better to marvel at the quality on display in general: while a few bands passed by relatively anonymously, there was no one who actively stood out as bad. Given that it seemed to represent most genres in one form or the other (or even invent entirely new ones if the pictures of Trippple Nippples are anything to go by), that’s got to be something to celebrate.