The Great Escape Festival 2025, Brighton review - a feast of music from across the world

Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday. They are Beavertown Neck Oil IPA at 4.3%. The sun is out, glinting off the sea. Feels like the calm before the storm.

Quarter of an hour later, the singer Luna Roja (pictured left) takes to the small indoor stage. She tells the small crowd that she wants her music to “connect South America and spaghetti westerns”. With long straight black hair, she’s clad in a powder blue fringed jacket, pale jeans and a cowboy hat. Her guitar adds the Morricone twang but the songs mostly feel mariachi-esque. Accompanied by a moustachioed, cowboy-hatted bassist in a brown leather fringed jacket, she delivers a set of warm harmonies and Mexican ranchero stylings, a fine aperitif for the day ahead.

It's a short walk from here to TGE Beach, as ever, taken over on Saturday by Sounds Australia. It’s an outdoor area with three stages, two in large marquees, a bar and a host of food stalls. It feels like an actual festival rather than a multi-venue urban thingy. Two Source pale ales (4%) from the local Laine Brewery and it’s time for bizarrely named five-piece Eggy (pictured below right) in the tent entitled The Deep End.

From Melbourne, and with their third album, From Time to Time, recently out, they play a half-hour set (almost all Great Escape sets are half-an-hour). Fronted by Zoe Monk on guitar in a brown robe dress, with Lucy Packham on keys making Moog-y noises, their sound is pure prog, abstract, with stop-start time signatures. It’s not my bag, although, in their favour, it’s tight, not noodly. More like Squid than Gentle Giant.

Again not for me, but more my speed is REDD. [sic] (pictured below left), over in the Soundwaves marquee. Still teenaged, just, and sounding more American than Australian, they’re from Melbourne too, and accompanied by the classic three-piece guitar/bass/drums line-up. With a mini-afro, plait swinging at the back, they bound about the stage, silver necklaced, in a red tee with a bull motif, exuding unbridled energy. The music is an amalgam of punk, hip hop and metal.

“This is a lot of fun,” they keep saying, and it is. It would go down well at Download. They remind of early Linkin Park’s more upbeat numbers. They have a sweary song called “Britney in ‘03” which has a chorus that runs “Baddest motherfucker on the street/Everybody tryin’ to be like me”, and another one called “Fugh Shi”, which is pronounced as you can imagine. We leave the tent as they play a song riding the riff from Blur’s “Song 2”.

Walk up the seafront. Stroll past Jordan Stephens of Rizzle Kicks, signing autographs for two girls. His band are playing later, tonight’s Spotlight Show that you need to book way in advance. Buy chips to soak up the beer but they turn out to be ill-defined, a sludge of potato in a polystyrene tray. They do the job and it’s up West Street to Molly Malone’s, a pub hosting one of the many Alternative Escape events, the equivalent of fringe gigs. They also have Cobra on tap.

We’re here to see Chloe Leigh (pictured right), a singer-songwriter from round these parts. She’s playing a day-long event called The Lanyard Bonfire, a reference to the endless delegates wandering Brighton. She is an elfin figure, clad in a black spotted skirt, Doc Martens and a black top, auburn-red hair cascading from her head. Behind the stage a large stained-glass window provides a scenic backdrop in this 124-year-old venue.

Strumming an acoustic guitar, she has the songs but is let down by a mic that renders her enunciation less crisp than it might be. Nonetheless, numbers such as “House by the Sea” and “Stephanie” have a plaintive folk charm. One, called “Reality”, she says is “nicked off a fandango from Malaga.” She has Andalusian heritage. Downstairs, the cellar bar is showing the FA Cup and she has to complete with occasional raucous male roaring that bleeds upwards. She does so with aplomb, her performance style the opposite of a resting bitch face, eyes closed, blissed smile as she sweetly sings, as if in her own world.

We scoot shortly before she finishes to Horatio’s, the bar up Brighton Pier, where femme-centric media hub Vocal Girls are hosting an afternoon. The band we’ve come to see is Dog Race, a London outfit originally from Bedford. Their single of last year, “It’s the Squeeze” suggests verve and originality. Such is the case.

They have a fine set of songs, grounded in motorik rhythms but with a Manc-ish propulsive element too – think WH Lung and/or the New Fast Automatic Daffodils – and tints of Gothicism. Frontwoman Katie Healy (pictured left) is a mesmeric presence. Wearing a marvellous vintage-looking wide-collared, silver buttoned red jacket and skirt suit combo, her brown hair ironed-style straight, she looks like a Seventies hippy cult member attending a Victorian tea party.

She has an awkwardness that’s captivating, as if she would rather be anywhere else but in front of a crowd, yet feels compelled to do this. She twitches, she hunches her shoulders up and down, but it’s her voices that really sets the band apart. Healy sings in a kind of whooping, word-swallowing gulp. Imagine Siouxsie Sioux doing an exaggerated impression of Bryan Ferry. What’s more it works. By the time they reach their final song, the place is a-buzz. We all feel we’ve discovered somethings special which is, of course, what The Great Escape is all about.

Finetime now needs to meet a salesperson of edibles, a friend who we have a beer with on the seafront (well, cider in my case). Transactions are completed and Finetime walks off with a bag of chewy candy fried eggs and Coke bottles laced with THC goodness. However, when we go to re-enter TGE Beach the security challenge Finetime’s purchase. No food is allowed in. Off he goes and sticks them down his trousers, where they will coagulate into a glob. But at least he gets in.

We have just missed Aboriginal punk rapper Miss Kaninna who we intended to catch. A friend tells us that 50% of the show was between-song chat, hectoring the audience about imperialism. “It was good,” he said, “if you fancied a sunny afternoon wallowing in colonial guilt.” Given that another friend saw her last night and related how she verbally attacked someone talking at the bar at the other end of the room, she sounds FIERCE. Wish I’d seen her.

Instead, on the small outdoor Jetty stage, we see Tjaka (pictured right), a band led by two brothers descended from Western Australia’s Jabirr Jabirr people. They whip up a festival-friendly hip hop-funk stew that’s exactly right for a sunny festival afternoon. They are lively and draw a crowd, many fascinated by their use of the “didjeribone” a didgeridoo with a trombone-like slide.

“This is my homeland,” they have us singing. They are, of course, singing about their own ancestry but, seeing them with ranks of cream Georgian houses glowing in the sun way above, I feel a surge of affection for Brighton. They end with a didj-off between two of them amidst a heavy rock number; “Raise the motherfuckin’ roof!” We give it a go.

As is traditional, Finetime and I then retreat for a late afternoon Thai meal where Tom Yum soup sorts him out while I go for a prawn curry. All washed down with lashings of Singha Beer and saki (which isn’t Thai but they serve it anyway). After this, a quick imbibement of Snorkmaiden’s groove salad to zing us up a few levels and we hit the upstairs room of nightclub Patterns.

Here Chinese quartet Oh Dirty Fingers are playing. The nearest comparison to this lot would be Gogol Bordello, in that their sound is a stew of punky garage and global folk tropes, Chinese lyrics gutturally shouted over everything from klezmer rhythms to twangin’ surf guitars. In his white shirt and jacket, the guitarist looks like middle management but, as the lead singer blows a whistle frantically into the mic, he and the band don’t come over that way. There’s a controlled mayhem to what they do, as well as a post-modern everything-goes-in-the-pot maverick spirit. They’re certainly a one-off. I’d like to see them again. But they’re from Shanghai so who knows…

Afterwards we chat for a while to man who has the Ribbon Tower from Glastonbury Festival’s Park Field tattooed on his leg. He has been to the festival 13 times and we lose ourselves in a deep dive about the lore and minutiae of Worthy Farm before bidding goodbye and heading to Chalk, the 800-cap venue next to Brighton bus station.

It’s quarter past eight but deBasement quickly render the space 3.30 AM in Berlin. The Los Angeles duo consist of singer Alli Logout (pictured right), of electro-punks Special Interest, and DJ-producer Margo XS. The latter in shades and bra top, stands po-faced behind the decks at the back while Logout hares about the front sloganeering to maximalist techno bangers which roar and thump from the speakers, her afro flying, her eyes wide and demented, pasted in black make-up.

“Drugs don’t work but I do,” she shouts. “Thank God that I’m fucking the DJ,” she boasts. The venue is sleazed in threatening red lighting. JD-&-coked, we dance. A skinny, moody guy with shades wanders around the stage looking at his phone. Logout keeps leering into the crowd, grabbing offered drinks and swigging them down in one. The mood is of impending hedonic explosion. They bring something of L.A.’s DIY queer underground with them.

The guy in shades grabs the mic and says belligerently, as if we might be responsible, “It’s time musicians were paid what they’re fucking worth”. Eventually he starts dancing. They close with an extended rampaging version of their club hit “Front Left Speaker”. It’s an absolute whopper.

The venue was full for deBasement but becomes rammed for hometown heroes CLT DRP. We stay for a couple of numbers of their EBM-flavoured LGBT-centric crunchers and then head to the tiny Pelirocco Hotel, a classic, sexy Brighton counterculture art space, for Alternative Escape action from London anti-folk punkoids David Cronenberg’s Wife (pictured below left). They delivering a punchy Fall-adjacent set and cause much stumbling around at the front.

We revel in it and are then consumed by the crowd and the chatter, bobbling about in a sea of cheery festivalization. Night has fully fallen. I take a moment to tell the band’s drummer that I am a fan of their deeply sinister Don’t Wait to be Hunted to Hide album. It’s not a record that would be made today and is a queasily intriguing curiosity. After that we head into the night. Other things happen. Other venues are visited. Chappell Roan goes on the decks at 3.00 AM. But this narrative stops here.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Below: watch the video for "It's the Squeeze" by Dog Race