BONUS POST : AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA 2024 (DAY 1)

Myself and Rachel headed down to Brighton last weekend to take in the annual At The Edge of The Sea festival (aka Gedgefest) at the Concorde 2 venue down on the eastern side of the beachfront. 

Three acts on the Friday night and ten on Saturday afternoon/evening.  We didn’t catch everyone on the Saturday – a mixture of having to take the occasional rest or getting ourselves into a prime spot inside the main indoor space (Le Bikini Stage) for the next scheduled act meant we didn’t always venture to the smaller outside space (the Swim stage).

While I could easily write 20,000 words on everything, I’ll do my best to keep things brief, but it still means splitting things into two pieces. 

Friday night’s show had two support acts I knew nothing about beforehand. I could have sought out their music before going down south, but I felt that hearing things fresh on the night was a better way to go about it.

Taffy turn out to be a four-piece band from Japan.  Much like Butcher Boy did last week at the Glasgow Weekender, they prove to be the perfect opening act for the festival, evoking memories of the very best of that decade between 1986 and 1996 when indie-music was very much in vogue.  Three blokes fronted by a female singer who was also very adept on guitar. My mind was wandering off to the Britpop era, and recalling that while there may well have been too much indie landfill associated with the ‘movement’, there were loads of radio-friendly poptastic tunes that have more than stood the test of time. 

mp3: Taffy – Tumbling

A mental note was made to seek out Taffy’s back catalogue (turns out there’s been six albums going back to 2012).

Projector are from Brighton, and are another four-piece band made up of three blokes and a female, but they prove to be quite different from Taffy, making more of a boisterous and noisy post-punk sound, with the set drawn from their debut album Now When We Talk It’s Violence that was released earlier this year.  It was an okay show, which I don’t want to sound as if I’m damning it with faint praise because I did enjoy them, but Taffy were a tough act to follow.

Friday night at The Edge of The Sea always closes with a set by The Wedding Present, with the audience knowing that Saturday night closes with a totally separate set by the band.  Friday was billed as them performing Watusi in full plus other songs across a 90-minute show.

I’ll cut to the chase – this turned out to be a show that, overall, felt a bit deflating for a few reasons.  By bit deflating, I meant it only merited a 7/10 rating in my book.

The line-up of the band has changed almost beyond recognition from this time last year, with Jonathan Stewart (guitar), Melanie Howard (bass) and Nicholas Wellauer (drums) all departing rather suddenly without explanation, which I found really sad as I felt this particular unit was as good as TWP had sounded at any time since they had come back into being almost 20 years.  

David Gedge now has, again, a completely new set of musicians comprising Rachael Wood (guitar), Paul Blackburn (bass) and Vince Lammi (drums).  The band have been out on the road a fair bit since last November, with many of the shows being centred around the 30th anniversary of Watusi, which was given the deluxe re-issue treatment on vinyl earlier this year across 2x LPs with b-sides from the era and a few alternative mixes being made available.  As such, they were more than ready to take things up a notch.

They opened with Brassneck. It was loud, boisterous and quite manic, but it certainly got the audience going.  We Interrupt This Programme, one of the highlights of the 24 Songs project from a couple of years back was next, followed by what can only be described as a blistering take on Dare, the closing moments of felt very much like an unsaid tribute to the late Steve Albini with the guitars cranked up to full volume and the drums pounded to the point where the skins must have been close to breaking.  

And then Watusi was played in full, from Track 1 to Track 12 in the same order as the album.  The problem here is that Watusi is, and I’m being generous, a tad on the patchy side.  Maybe inconsistent is a better description.  Fair play to the band, the songs I’m not so keen on came across well in the live setting – with a special mention to Catwoman which was stretched out to its full seven-minute length at an ear-splitting volume that My Bloody Valentine would have given their approval to. 

mp3: The Wedding Present – Catwoman

But there’s no doubt that the show lost all sorts of momentum, exemplified by what felt like a limp run-through of Hot Pants, the instrumental which closes the album.  I suspect David Gedge was fully aware as he put the show together that he ran the risk of annoying a fair bit of the audience as there proved to be barely a half-second gap between the final note of Hot Pants and the opening and unmistakable riff of Kennedy, long-regarded by most TWP fans as their finest song.

The rest of the evening passed in a flurry of excitement and much moving of limbs in a moshpit of folk who really should be old enough to better, while the rest of us just swayed and moved a bit less energetically to Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft, Once More, Take Me! and Bewitched.    Five closing songs that were just about all anyone could have asked for, although I still had a regret that this line-up didn’t quite do them justice in a way that Stewart, Howard and Wellauer would have. 

Outside into the still warm but breezy August evening for the 30-minute walk back through the city centre to our hotel close to the railway station and discovering that our ears were ringing, such was the sonic assault of the evening. 

Yes, it had been The Wedding Present, and while Rachel had thought it was a magnificent show (she has a penchant for loud music belying her years!!) , I couldn’t help but think I missed the old line-up.   I suppose, like Mark E Smith once famously said “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s the Fall”, it’ll always be The Wedding Present when David Gedge is on stage with three other musicians on guitar, bass and drums. 

I was also already thinking ahead to the Saturday and wondering what sort of set would close the festival given what had been played on the Friday.  OK, there would be nothing from Watusi which was a good thing, but four of the best from Bizzaro had been aired while just one song from the 21st century catalogue had been played.    It was going to be intriguing.

Part 2 of the review will appear tomorrow, again as a bonus post later in the day.

JC