Groove Armada at Brighton Corn Exchange
Image by Ginger DJ via FlickrWe had a nightmare getting into the venue. The gig was just one of dozens across Brighton for the Great Escape Festival which turned the town into one huge music festival. The concept is that you could buy a wristband for the whole weekend or just one day. However, Kerry and I bought priority tickets separate to this. When these tickets sold out the only option for our mate Mark to join us was to buy a day's wristband. This resulted in all of us queuing for over an hour to guarantee our entry with security guards discouraging those with wristbands that they would not get in.
The support band, Art vs. Science, an Australian band were awful though their dicking about on stage was slightly amusing climbing on each other to play guitar. Groove Armada came out with a sort of intro non-song then straight into the high energy Song 4 Mutya with the best laser lightshow I've seen in awhile. The new female vocalist, SaintSaviour was impressive with her energy and stage presence and wore a Gary Glitter/Pharoah gold amour waistcoat. Most of the songs featured her in some way apart from the old style reggae tracks with their regular MC like Superstylin' which went down really well. Otherwise only 'At the River' was the only highlight as the trombone grabbed the limelight. Somehow I think we've missed their peak performance.
To make up for the night, we went down to the Funky Buddha for Maxxi Soundsystem's disco night then an after-hours party at Paul and Sarah's. Looking back, we should have really made the effort to see Carl Craig at Jam but our wallets were feeling stingy at the £7 entry fee at 2am.
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