Sweaty rooms, crowdsurfing and questionable hostels: ELLiS-D’s summer 2025 highlights
Brat summer, Pulp summer, Oasis summer – I see them all, and I raise you, ELLiS-D summer.
Over the past couple of months, Brighton’s beloved guitar slinger has been seemingly everywhere, zig-zagging across Europe as his crowds have swelled and swelled.
‘Guitar slinger’ is minimising, so I’ll take that back. Sure, as the man at the mic for his ELLiS-D project, Ellis himself is ripping through riffs that split his crowds. Half of them are moving frantically, and half are standing, jaws dropped open. But his abilities go far beyond that as he also pays his way in the world by slapping skins for Fat Dog, touring as their drummer, providing the frantic beats that power their music, as well as generally adding to a hectic schedule.
In summer 2025, it seemed that each and every day, a new event was added to their calendar. The stamps in their passports must have been multiplying fast as they hit France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and beyond. Racing around the UK too, they were in London, Bristol, Ipswich and then seemingly back to Brighton constantly for sell-out hometown shows that were getting crazier and crazier each time.
I’ve caught them a good few times. Back in May, I was left genuinely concerned as the band seemed to rock so hard that they almost started an electrical fire during Great Escape. Then back in London, the walls of Shacklewell Arms shook on a random Tuesday night when no amount of weekday fatigue could hold the crowd down.
ELLiS-D is one of those acts you simply have to see live. The set is so high-octane, the presence is so hypnotic, the songs are so gripping and then sometimes toy with you as the band laughs as the crowd falls for the false ends. It’s everything you want out of a good band, so it’s no surprise to anyone that as the busy summer has gone on, they have drawn in bigger crowds, wrapping things up with some truly incredible footage of Ellis crowd surfing, which is still playing.
How must that have felt? We decided to ask the man himself, as Ellis shared some insights from the stage, letting us into their summer diary for their own personal highlights of a season on the road.
ELLiS-D’s summer 2025 highlights:
Schon Schoen Klub – Mainz, Germany – 11th April
Starting the warmer months off early, ELLiS-D was doing double duty. Supporting with his own band before taking up his post behind the drum kit, it was a long shift, but a good one.
“Our first tour of the year was supporting Fat Dog around Europe in April, and this show was the absolute highlight,” he said. “I had played at Schon Schoen Klub seven years before with my previous band Strange Cages, and it was one of the wildest shows we ever played, so I was itching to play this one for ages.”
A perfect storm of chaos, he recalled, “The evening started with our sweatiest show of the tour and ended with a 3am tequila-inspired karaoke session in the smoking area with a busker who had wandered over. An absolute gem of a venue.”
Rossi Bar – Great Escape Festival, UK – 18th May
Each year, the best of the new music crowd head to the seaside at Brighton for Great Escape, a huge showcase festival. For the city’s homegrown talent, though, it can sometimes be a strange one.
“Great Escape was on fire this year. Sometimes over the past few years it has felt a little as though Brighton acts have been shut out of the official festival (with their takeover of The Alternative Escape in particular a sore one), but this year the line-up was stacked with hometown artists,” he said.
This time around, he was booked and busy with several sets across the weekend. One stood out, though, as he added, “It was our first time playing the official festival, and our show at the Prince Albert was amazing. But it was our midnight set at our second home, the Rossi Bar, on the closing Saturday night, 70 people crammed into a tiny basement where the walls were dripping, which was one of our highlights of the year.”
Supersonic – Paris, France – 30th May
Another incredible new music line-up this year was to be found at Supersonic Block Party in Paris, where a bunch of venues around the Bastille district put on line-ups of some names to note from across Europe.
One night, ELLiS-D topped the bill. “We were as surprised as anyone to find out we were headlining the Friday night of Supersonic’s Block Party festival, so we were pretty nervous for this one,” Ellis admitted, adding, “Our first show in Paris three years ago we played to eight people in a 40 cap basement so to go from there to a full 300 cap room as a festival headliner was a pretty special feeling,”
Despite the nerves, though, it wound up being a highlight as he recalled, “Jumping into the mosh pit for the guitar solo at the end of ‘Drifting’ was possibly my favourite moment of the year.”
Brighten The Corners/Best Kept Secret Festivals – Ipswich/Tilburg, UK/Netherlands – 14th + 15th June
Sometimes it’s not really about the gigs, but the memories around them. “Both of these shows were great, and Brighten The Corners had a particularly good moment – where I attempted to get in the crowd but inadvertently ended up in the DJ Booth,” Ellis said, “But it was our experience in a particular hostel in Dover that made this trip so memorable.”
This is the sort of story that makes me feel like there should be reality shows following bands on tour. I’ll let Ellis tell it: “We had a 5am ferry to catch after Ipswich, so I booked us into what turned out to be the very appropriately named ‘First & Last Hostel’, right next to the port of Dover. On arrival, the owners asked us if we knew anywhere they could get ketamine,” he said, so they were off to a great start.
“Our name was the only one on their check-in sheet for the night (written in biro on one sheet of A4, right in the centre of the desk), which I had to repeat several times as they scoured their list to try and find our booking. We then had to climb through a window to get to our room – myself and Blue decided an all-nighter might be preferable to the state of the beds. Asking the owners if they could sell us any drinks, they kindly suggested ‘if you can find anything on the bar you can drink it’”, Ellis recalled.
A lucky discovery was made. “One bottle of vodka and one clean(!) glass left on the shelf, we head to the pool table to play the longest, most inept game of doubles ever as one owner berates the other that he’s ‘fucking sick to fucking death of The Doors’ before belting out the first verse of Light My Fire’. The vibes were strange but memorable as Ellis described it as, ‘Think Withnail & I if they gave up on acting (but not their drinking), moved to Dover and ran a hostel.”
SMG Festival – Sart-Messuire, Belgium – 12th September
It seems like they saved the best till last. Or, not last, as there are still some dates in the schedule to be ticked off. But it seems like this is a new highlight to beat as they said, “Hands down our favourite ELLiS·D show of all time.”
“First time crowd surfing during the set. Everyone going mad from the first note of our first song to the last note of our last,” Ellis recalled in what sounds like every musician’s dream. “Got roundly booed for a minute and a half for announcing ‘this is our last song’. Disappointed a table of men outside by not re-performing our entire set a cappella. Got plied with a local liqueur that tasted like mint choc chip mixed with Listerine and caused me to manically air-drum then pass out to ‘Song For The Dead’ in the van ride to the hotel,” he recalled, which seems like a job well done.
