tue 26/08/2025

Brighton

Micky Flanagan, touring

Micky Flanagan: Observational comic who slips in social comment among surreal invention

Micky Flanagan was a jobbing club comic for a few years before he shot to stardom with his first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show in 2007, for which he was nominated for a newcomer award at the grand age of 42. The show, What Chance Change?,...

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Plan B, Brighton Centre, Brighton

After his spectacular performance at the Brit Awards, the stage running amok with a dancing jury, shimmying riot police and balletic convicts, I wasn't sure what to expect from a Plan B show. Perhaps a theatrical experience somewhere between Rick...

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Esben and the Witch, Pavilion Theatre, Brighton

Esben and the Witch, far from the average indie band

It seems to me that Esben and the Witch would like to perform in absolute darkness. Or perhaps in silhouette behind a screen like an oriental shadowplay. Such a theatrical device might even suit their dark, menacing music. Instead, two of the three...

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Brighton Rock

Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you,...

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CD: The Go! Team - Rolling Blackouts

The last album from Brighton’s The Go! Team, 2007’s Proof of Youth, followed the template set by Thunder, Lightning, Strike, their 2004 debut. AD-HD sample-driven songs met Northern soul and hip hop with call-response vocals and melodies that could...

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The new funk: Belleruche exclusive

Belleruche: Taking some very interesting ideas into the mainstream

Here, we present the exclusive first showing of a new video by the Brighton/London band Belleruche. This clip for “Fuzz Face” is highly arresting, an ingenious and slightly disturbing collision of hi and low-tech, made using thousands of photocopies...

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The Jim Jones Revue, The Komedia, Brighton

The great music writer Nick Tosches put me onto James Luther Dickinson. In Where Dead Voices Gather, his self-indulgent but fascinating book about the obscure early-20th-century minstrel performer Emmett Miller, Tosches kept touching on Dickinson, a...

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Down Terrace

Tired of the slick, pastiche world of the post-Lock, Stock... British crime movie? Then Down Terrace may be the address for you. Director Ben Wheatley’s micro-budget, naturalistic debut details the paranoid decline of a drug-dealing family in the...

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Brighton Photo Biennial gets an above-Parr treatment

American GI home from 120-day stay in Afghanistan, 2004

The fourth Brighton Photography Festival (BPB) has been launched amid dramatic economic hardships, but my money is on it being a roaring success. It will put Brighton on the map as somewhere other than a gay clubbers’ delight and a hen-party hub....

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The Miserable Rich, St Giles in the Fields

If you thought Chamber Pop was dead, think again. The Divine Comedy are back with a new album, Rufus Wainwright is playing Meltdown, and The Leisure Society are gradually building up a cabinet of awards. The genre may sometimes come over as the...

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The Lion's Face, Opera Group

'A frighteningly convincing portrait': Dave Hill as Alzheimers sufferer Mr D, with Rachel Hynes

An opera about Alzheimer’s disease might seem an idea calculated to send the most community-minded audience rapidly to the nearest exit. Yet there's a longish history of theatre – musical and otherwise – about loss of memory and the failure of...

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theartsdesk in Brighton: Festival Beside the Seaside

Site-specific theatre spread from artists’ studios to police cells with the realisation that all the city (and a wee chunk of neighbouring Newhaven) is a stage. Dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep (pictured below), a promenade Festival commission based...

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