Mumfest: Brighton’s charitable antidote to music industry impropriety
It feels like live music is becoming more and more commercialised. Having a particular network provider can get you tickets before other fans, huge corporations are buying up venues while independent ones shut down, and any given festival is propped up by a gaggle of sponsors who may also be funding genocides, as well as your summer outing.
In the UK, on average, two independent venues close each month, with access to the arts becoming incrementally classist, and working-class musicians struggling to fund the cost of even getting started. Increasingly, live music has been relying on sponsorship, leading to controversial businesses getting involved, boycotts taking place, and artists sacrificing exciting opportunities not to cross picket lines.
That barely even scratches the surface, for then there are dodgy promoters, rife misogyny, industry corruption across every scale, and if you allow yourself to fall into the doom and gloom, it feels completely and utterly cursed. Thankfully, one thing that can never be beat is the local, community-driven spirit.
We rightfully focus a lot on the closing down of local venues, but while that is a genuine crisis in need of concern, it doesn’t speak to the endurance of the local spirit. Realistically, no matter what state the music world is in, people will still form new bands, those bands will link up, friendships will be built, and a scene will develop. It’s human nature, our innate desire to construct community, and if you need an example to restore hope, look towards Brighton.
The Brighton music scene feels like a beacon. It’s not just that the city is currently delivering a string of incredible bands, as there is undoubtedly something in that salty water that’s giving us the likes of Ellis-D, Hutch, Big Long Sun, Trip Westerns, Flip Top Head, Maximilian, and so many more, but if you go to any of their gigs, you will also see familiar faces. Band members swap and change, subbing in for people or simply playing in several groups as the city’s groups seem to all exist in this circular economy of members.
“We’re all friends, really, it’s as simple as that,” Miles Goodall, one of the many staple faces, tells me. As well as playing in his own band, Soft Top, the keyboard player regularly drops in elsewhere or offers to drive people to gigs around the country as their tour manager. “Everyone ends up playing across multiple projects, or working in the venues that we play at, so you get to know people pretty quickly,” he said.
Any time I attend a gig in the city, that air of friendship seems to make every show even better, as you see other musicians dancing in the crowd at their peers’ shows. It’s a reminder of how the music world should be and what it’s all about, and Goodall’s festival, Mumfest, is a microcosmic example that deserves celebration.
Rarely do I ever get to put a disclaimer that something in the world of music is about to get wholesome, so often we’re reporting on closures, abuses and other sad things or disheartening things, but this is a story of exactly the opposite.
In December, the Brighton scene, its bands, and its beloved local venues host one last festival. It’s a gem that the regulars of the crowd adore, and that’s because it was launched by a regular for someone dear to him.
“It originated in a conversation between a few friends of mine back in 2023, my mum (Lesley) had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was going through chemotherapy at the time,” Goodall told me, adding the good news, “Very happy to report that she recovered and is now into her third year of being cancer-free.”
The origin of the festival was a simple idea: Goodall wanted his mother to see his friends’ shows, as he explained, “My mum is a huge fan and supporter of the Brighton music scene, but hadn’t been able to attend shows due to her treatment, and had struggled to get down south at all since Covid [they live in the north west]. So the idea to curate and run a day festival for her, while also raising money for the vital services that had helped her and countless others throughout their cancer journey, came about.”
As a perfect display of the city’s community spirit and the fact that friendship seems to fuel it all, the immediate response to Goodall’s idea was incredible as he said, “I was overwhelmed by the response from the local scene, and am hugely lucky to have so many compassionate and talented people around me that make this festival so special each year,” and it keeps getting more overwhelming.
“Initially, it was going to be a one-off event; we had just one venue (Green Door Store), ten bands and one day, and that seemed like a mountain to climb at the time. We raised over £1,500 for our charities, which is fantastic,” he recounted, but it was seeing the crowd connecting that motivated him to push it further.
“There seemed to be such an amazing community of people brought together for the festival, in a safe environment where they shared their own experiences with what is such a brutal and indiscriminate illness,” he explained, adding, “That was my main motivation for making Mumfest a recurring event. In year two, we moved into a multi-venue setting, adding Rossi Bar and Under The Bridge studios as stages.”
That year, the money raised doubled. In 2025, for its third year, another venue has been added, and the event has been extended to a two-day affair to level up again. All of this growth can happen for one reason and one reason only: the people of the city want to help each other out, and in Goodall’s eyes, Mumfest could really only happen in Brighton.
“All ships rise with the tide”.
“Brighton is unique, there is a huge, huge glut of creatives and musicians down here all trying to make their voices heard and a massive creative outlet that rarely disappoints,” he added. “However, that’s not the unique part. For me, the unique part is that instead of trying to outshine one another or use each other as stepping stones, everyone is seemingly each other’s biggest cheerleaders,” he said, noting that competitiveness has no place there.
While others paint the music world out to be a cut-throat, dog-eat-dog world, that’s simply not the ethos of the town. Instead, Goodall speaks of a different one: “I heard a band say at a show recently, ‘All ships rise with the tide’, and that’s largely the attitude here”.
As aptly as the name and the origin suggest, Goodall said, “Knowing each band personally through shows, friend groups, or just meeting people at the bar makes the whole festival feel like a family gathering of sorts.”
Built by the community but being for a cause so much bigger than them, it’s tough to think of a more idyllic example of exactly how the music world should be; seeing art as a community thing and then using it as a tool to help people and make change.
“It’s all about the community. We’re a not-for-profit festival, so people buying tickets know that every penny they spend is going to the causes we support; there is no middle man company taking a cut, no sponsors that have nefarious interests elsewhere,” Goodall said as the succinct reminder about why local-run events are so essential. But really, at the core for Goodall, there is one simple point of it all, which is “Just seeing my mum out and about again post treatment was an incredible thing for me”.
