Image taken from The Go Bang Brighton Festival Closing Party in 2009 at The Thomas Kemp before the venue was unable to hold any more outdoor events
The Go Bang Brighton Festival ran for three continuous years every May between 2008 and 2010 at numerous outdoor and indoor destinations in and around the city of Brighton plus the adjacent Kemptown district
The ethos behind the festival was to support groove based dance music culture on a local level within Brighton in order to join a previously fragmented and overlooked scene that had lost it’s place within the cities musical landscape post the changes in the UK licensing act in 2003
Additionally, The Go Bang Brighton Festival was a non profit orientated series of events that focused on joining people with underground groove based dance music in the cities more "off piste" dancing destinations
The majority of the thirty plus Go Bang Brighton Festival events featured predominantly locally sourced dj’s and club nights alongside established names making their first or initial series of Brighton appearances.
These included between 2008-2010
Severino (Horsemeat Disco)
Mark E (UK)
DJ Rahaan (USA)
Alkalino (Germany)
Greg Wilson (UK)
2008-The first year of the festival
In 2008 the Go Bang Brighton Festival began it’s three year run by kicking off at a venue on Preston Street in Brighton called Esca (now named Oxygen Red)
DJ’s Affy Wajid, Gustav Lawton, 'Senor’ Mick Hosie, Neal Lewis and Ali Back kicked the whole thing off under their collective alias’s of Heavy Disco, Schtumm and Broadcast Loft Party
Only Schtumm as a monthly electro/house event at Audio in Brighton remains as Heavy Disco and Broadcast Loft Party became Go Bang Brighton concentrating fully on disco and groove based dance music through their blog site and monthly basement parties at The Globe on Middle Street from the end of May 2009 onwards
The musical play list that all the participants brought to the initial festival event at Esca was heavily influenced by disco which at the time became the main musical reference point for what was more commonly know as "The Scene With No Name" in the UK
Disco music was to go on and form the backbone of the festivals audio approach over the following years in Brighton, beginning around 12 months prior to the renewed interest in the genre which eventually gained ground in the cities club spaces from the late summer of 2009 onwards through the work of Brighton promoters Disco Deviant and Maxxi Sound System
Disco Deviant working with The Loft in early 2009 with Greg Wilson and Audio whilst Maxxi Sound System secured residencies at The Funky Buddha (2010) and LIFE (2009) on Brighton Seafront with the first weekly outdoor Sunday sessions on the beachfront dedicated to disco music
Later in that first festival month of May 2008 Go Bang Brighton visited the following venues with the following djs
The Sidewinder in Kemptown
The Three and Ten
The Fishbowl
The Globe and The Ocean Rooms
Steve (KIW) Ellis
Matt and Jason (The Nearest Far Away Place)
Rich Recess and Johnny Recess
Charlie Brown
Matt Seeney
Alex Webb
Dan Rogers
Jon Gray
Paul Budd,
Affy Wajid
Gustav Lawton
Senor Mick Hosie
Neal Lewis and Ali Back
At The Ocean Rooms gig on Saturday 24th May 2008 the venue had requested a promotional tie in with The Go Bang Brighton Festival to coincide with UK DJ legend Greg Wilson's third visit to Brighton since his comeback period which began in 2003
Greg had already been booked in 2007 jointly by Broadcast Loft Party (now Go Bang Brighton) and The Ocean Rooms as part of Greg’s first visit back to Brighton in 24 years (video link) after being spotted at Bestival in 2006.
However in 2008 due to a double booking in the same room by the Ocean Rooms things initially didn’t go at all well
The first half of Greg’s set was met with a degree of resistance by a disgruntled crowd who had booked the room for an evening of unrelated music to what Greg was offering up
Eventually the room slowly cleared out to male room for Greg’s fans to settle in to a sublime two hour set of disco, acid house, funk and boogie with the odd disgruntled person hanging around the dj booth pending the end of Greg’s set
Unfortunately, when Greg’s set ended with the classic "Pacific" by 808 State, the proceeding dj from the double booked party decided to cut Greg’s last record out by scratching something completely unrelated over the top
It was at that point that Go Bang Brighton as a festival made the decision to leave Brighton clubland behind for a while as well as leaving the booking of Greg Wilson to arguably Greg's biggest Brighton fans (Paul and Gina Budd)
Paul and Gina would later elevate Greg Wilson out of The Ocean Rooms to a wider and more venue savvy crowd from February 2009 onwards across the whole of Brighton through Paul‘s Disco Deviant imprint and Gina's facebook group aptly named "Greg Wilson, Probably The Best DJ In The World"
The following day after The Ocean Rooms incident Go Bang Brighton ended it’s first round of monthly festival events with an all dayer at The Sidewinder in Kemptown on the bank holiday Sunday
The bar take record was smashed to pieces (in excess of £5000) as well as the pub exceeding record numbers through the door between 3pm and 2am
This further cemented the festivals belief that at this early stage Brighton's club infrastructure was not the right place to develop a scene based around combining music and social settings to suit those looking for a different experience to what was generally on offer at that time
Breaking records behind the bar would become a feature of The Go Bang Brighton Festival during it's three year run
Over the next two years leading up to 2010 this all day approach listening and dancing to disco focused music down the local boozer went from being a novelty to something that was expected if you went to Go Bang Brighton at least once or twice each year
The combined approach of using "off piste" venues and groove based dance music worked well for a while once picked up on and sampled, unlike handing proceedings over to the club venues who were beginning to show signs of panic in light of reduced crowd numbers now becoming a reality in Brighton with a major UK recession just around the corner to contend with
2009-Blogging, social networking sites, club nights and all dayers
2009 was definitely The Go Bang Brighton Festival's finest year and one that heralded the beginning of the increased interest in groove based dance music (or disco as it was becoming widely excepted as) within Brighton
However, the musical approach that the Go Bang Brighton festival supported was still in the later stages of it's embryonic phase with the majority of Brighton clubs and music enthusiasts still unaware of what was happening at grass roots level
To aid this relatively underground state of affairs, small pockets of people who had either met at the festival parties or played as dj's in 2008 were now beginning to hook up online through the increased use of social networking sites (facebook) whilst also sharing and assisting in spreading the news locally regarding groove based dance music through on line blogging
In a very short space of time anyone playing music, collecting music or promoting musical events soon had a blog and a facebook event group all set up as people began to catch on to what was happening as interest spread across Brighton.
By 2010 though the novelty of finding out about a party or someones musical endeavors through facebook was beginning to wear off slightly as the medium of on line promoting became quickly saturated within such a small local musical demographic
One good thing however was that Brighton's groove based dance music community really did promote within itself to great effect especially around early 2009 when everything was still very much new
This was probably due to the scene being pushed forward solely by dj's with their musical presentations as apposed to anything connected to the commercials or branding of club culture which had helped keep popular dance music grasping for air in Brighton since the economic recession began in 2008, possibly many years before that as well
The outcome being, everyone connected to those early years (2008-2009) more or less helped each other out through on line shout outs and links to each others information or posts regardless if the subject material was of promotional or musical content
During 2009 the task of spreading the word on line was definitely an easy one and one that worked well as eyes and ears began turning towards groove based dance music in Brighton at long last
In regards to the festival now in it's second year, new venues and dj's came on board as well as Go Bang Brighton lending itself to co-promotion activities with local nights just starting out or already pushing groove based dance music in the city for the first time
Venues used by The Go Bang Brighton Festival in 2009
Al Duomos RestaurantAudio
The Fishbowl
The Thomas Kemp
The Sidewinder
The Jazz Place
The Full Moon
Club nights and DJs appearing at The Go Bang Brighton Festival in 2009
Disco Libero (now Maxxi Sound System)
Inside Out
Affy Wajid
Gustav Lawton
Paul Budd (Inside Out)
Matt Seeney
Alex Webb
Steve Ellis
Jeff Daniels
Will Marshall
Matt Neal
Stu Clark
Karl Davison
Tim Rivers
Carl Faure
Rich Recess
Johnny Recess
Johnny Hartshorn
Senor Mick Hosie
Severino (Horsemeat Disco)
Sam Watts and Neal Lewis (Disco Libero)
Charlie Brown
