Brighton’s well-nurtured diamonds: Homegrown Festival 2024
“Finally!” Ele said as we went down the stairs and out into Brighton, cowboy boots on, tins in hand, “I’m so excited to show you my world.” Having recently owned up to being that annoying friend who never wants to leave the 20-minute radius around my East London home and proudly bragging about living in what I see as the epicentre for hot new bands, the warmth of the weekend hitting my face, and the sea air clearing the smog of the city, I was truly ready for Homegrown festival to change my mind.
When you go to a gig in London, there is always something in the atmosphere. As a city with such a huge cultural backstory, each venue and each area feels heavy with a history that breeds expectations. In The Big City, where people come to Make It, gig rooms buzz with excitement, yes, but also a kind of pressure. On any given night, hundreds of shows go on. Walking down the streets, you can’t swing a tote bag without hitting ten frontmen.
Speaking to Peckham’s Play Dead, the drawbacks they’re, admittedly, part of were clear: “There are so many fucking bands in London. You’re playing to a room of people stood with their arms crossed, or people that fuck off after seeing their mates as the support act,” they painted the picture perfectly. With so many acts, so little money to go around, and so many options for audiences, no one can win. Despite being seen as the cultural centre point and a point that so many, including me, end up being fixed to, it’s perhaps a beast too big and too buzzy for its own good.
But then it’s 3pm in Brighton on a beautifully mild April day. Hope and Ruin pub is packed and in the crowd for SoftTop, and even on the stage, the cast of the afternoon are all there. With a cello, clarinet and trumpet in tow, Miles Goodall’s songs blow up from beautiful ballads into something captivating. Looking around at the audience for the first set of the day, you’d think it was late evening. The room was full of mouths lipsyncing along in the dark, knowing unreleased songs simply because they’d seen the band before.
Brighton’s music fans were out in their droves, and the beauty of the scene quickly hit me hard; Brighton music fans love Brighton’s music makers, Brighton’s music makers love Brighton’s music makers, and Brighton, as a city, feels custom built to love them all back.
After giving the band the applause they deserve, Ele grabs our arms and sweeps us along for the next stop on the city tour she’s planned. We have 15 minutes to get down the hill to Pipeline, and as we walk, we’re in a crowd of people doing the same eager exodus to the next set. Amongst them, is SoftTop’s own trumpet player pacing it, wondering how he got out of packing down and why he made such a swift escape. When we get into the venue and Maximillian walks on stage, it suddenly makes sense when that same guy, without his trumpet, sits down behind the drums.
“Welcome back, Jeff Buckley,” is whispered in my ear by a friend. In look and sound, Maximilian could be the man himself. It’s uncanny. But what really makes it is the total untouched potential. This doesn’t feel like a man who’s been told a few times that he looks like an artist and has been forcibly pushed toward it by an eager marketing team. Instead, he’s been allowed to just have the talent. His voice is hypnotic, his lyricism is poetic and beautiful, and the set is flawless. His album Surrender is now on constant rotation. It is perhaps the ultimate outcome of a live set: an audience was caught, captured, intrigued and then locked in as listeners.
Then we’re on the road again. “Green Door Store is my spiritual home,” Ele says as she walks us back up the hill in the same crowd as before. We see the same well-dressed figures time and time again. Moon Idle deliver a stunning, shoegaze set, led with captivating vocals and impressive guitar effects. By now, it’s only 6pm, early doors for the scale of crowds that are out, and as we reenter the venue after a brief 10 minutes of air and a lager, we’re met by a packed to the rafter room and a queue outside, all trying to get in to see Hutch. Clearly a hometown hero act, their vintage-dripped psychedelic rock is the ultimate festival sound: fun, easy to dance to, and soul-warming. As the crowd outside crane their neck to get a look in, Hutch’s local celebrity status would be enough to give anyone an ego. Instead, their friendliness radiates off the stage and is shown a million times over by the crowd of musicians who joined us in the race up the hill to be there.
Drawing a chart or a Venn diagram of the characters of the day would be a mess. The bassist from Moon Idle popped up again in our next act, Duskhouse. SoftTop’s trumpet player, singer and guitarist all make repeat appearances in Ideal Living’s bustling set at Rossi Bar. Maximilian’s bass player was right there behind ELLiS-D, who put on one of the most exhilarating live sets I’ve seen in months.
All day, the numbers on my pedometer increased as we dipped around town, but those musicians must have had running shoes in their instrument cases or invented teleportation as they appeared over and over, either on stage or in the crowd, cheering and singing along louder than anymore. At each show, the supportive energy was palpable. Brighton’s residential audience sang unreleased tracks like they were globally beloved anthems.
Every set felt like the beautiful antithesis of those in the highly pressurised London live scene—where there tension usually prevailed, a clear creative freedom and joy took charge. Where there is often competition, there is support and community. Whereas London feels so dog-eat-dog, Brighton feels like a playpen where the toys and food are shared, and all the tails are wagging.
Brighton isn’t the only city with such an energy. Sheffield is another city where you see the same musicians playing over for the same artists. Or Manchester, or Leeds, or really any smaller music scene that doesn’t feel so overcrowded so it can still feel like a community. Ele seems to know everyone and all the music fans have clearly forged friendships simply through being at these same shows. The musicians keep commenting on stage about how great the day is. “This is so wholesome. It’s so nice seeing all our friends play today,” Hutch said during their set before they, too, joined the crowds afterwards. For everyone involved, it feels like a perfect day.
On the train home the next day, through the hangover fog, all I managed to say was, “I can’t get over how good everyone was.” There wasn’t a single dud set. As the festival celebrated the city’s scene, each and every act could rival any of the names being held up as the UK’s ‘next big thing’, and as half of the sets featured the same core of musicians, Brighton is hoarding gold. They say that pressure makes diamonds, but with so much coal in London town and the resources spread too thin to make them pop, maybe the philosophy has flopped. Maybe Brighton has it right. Between the pebbles of that fabled beach are ginormous glistening gems.
