Lessons in resilience: Day three at The Great Escape 2025
A festival is hard. Especially at a multi-venue festival, there’s a lot of walking, planning, and coordinating in group chats, trying to locate your friends to figure out where on earth they got to. It takes reliance, and on day three of The Great Escape, bands provided incredible inspiration for embodying that.
Sunday (1994)’s Lee Newell did it with humour and the sort of charm that should be envied first and then studied after so more people can be that smooth. In a heaving Komedia Basement, technology was out to get the band at every single turn, curtailing their deeply cinematic songs with loud feedback and a rattle on stage each time Newell seemed to approach the mic. “Kill me,” he said to the sound tech, “kill me and throw me into the sea”, making the whole room laugh as his own silly melodrama smoothed over the bumps of trying to figure this stuff out, realising that it was his backing vocals that needed to be killed.
“We are actually really good,” he said later when they stopped mid-track, not wanting to sacrifice a good song in their set to issues. After they finally got things working properly and performed the track flawlessly, living up to Newell’s promise, he approached the mic again: “I told you.” It was a mic drop moment – but being so careless with the gear definitely wouldn’t have helped the stress there, though it would have been cool. It was a lesson to us all; if things go wrong, you can always joke your way through until it’s fine.
On the flip side, Pem’s set was jokeless and beautiful. It was one of those perfect moments where the perfect music was put into the perfect location: a church with Pem, solo, under the stained glass. No one uttered a word. They barely even wanted to clap after each song, cautious not to break the spell. But as she played tracks from her EP Cloud Work, a breath-takingly gorgeous project that deals vividly with the grief of her father’s passing, there was resilience there too but in the form of art – a lesson that catharsis and processing can be poetry and that turning pain into something beautiful and creative is one of the most resilient things humans can do.
Some bands needed no resilience at all, though. It’s all too easy. Luvcat needs no help at all – she’s a star, a bona fide star and proves that fact each and every time she gets up on stage. Every time a new single is released, that fact only gets firmer as it only takes a matter of days it seems for the crowd to know the words and, for the first time during this industry-heavy festival where people are more likely to stand still with arms crossed than every move their body, people sang along.
Goldheart should have needed help. It would have been medically advisable to have some help, given that only a day before their 1am set at the alt-escape, the band’s frontman injured his foot and was on crutches. There’s resilience there, given that in the earliest hours of Saturday morning, he was there, down by the beach at Daltons, ready to perform.
But the lesson here is that adrenaline is one hell of a painkiller. Despite literally limping onto stage, within a song or two, the crutch is being used as a prop, brandished at the crowd like a gun, while he dances in the old cliche that music is a healer and no bad foot could hold a good time back, or stop a frontman keen to put on a proper show.
It was inspiring. Halfway through the day, I hurt my own foot, but with these lessons learned, I will endure. Maybe I will perform a rock show. Who knows.
