Slashed by a Jellyfish.

Brighton is by the sea. Seaside towns always have a slightly different feel to places that are not beside the sea. They’re more relaxed and move at a bit of a slower pace. I think this is because the residents are in constant fear of being eaten by a sea mammal so act very relaxed so they don’t anger any creatures of the aquatic. Can you blame them? If there’s anything I learned from Jaws it’s that badly animated fake sharks can eat a man whole. And they don’t seem to need a reason for doing it either - they just like it. If I was a badly animated fake shark I would probably be a bit angry that I wasn’t around nowadays with the advances in CG animation, but I wouldn’t alleviate this bitterness by eating a fully grown man. That’s just greedy and unnecessary. So yeah, imagine being in your house in Brighton one night and a whale kicks your door in holding a knife!? It would be absolutely terrifying.

For this reason alone, i’m glad I don’t live in Brighton. But it is where we were playing next! Vintage opening paragraph, it’s set this whole piece up gloriously. In the words of me, “Give me a Pulitzer”. We’ve only played Brighton once before, for reasons that are vague and non-existent. It just played out that way. When we did it was September 2008, it was our very first headline tour and we played a venue called the Engine Rooms which is now closed down. That engine finally gave out it seems. On that night there was approximately 30 people in the room which we saw as a massive achievement as people had to leave their houses at night to get to the venue, most likely in constant fear of being lynched be a crab or sea urchin hiding down an alley. Also, a few nights before that show we played to zero people in Northampton so this felt like our Wembley. I can’t remember much about the show, only that two members of the audience were attacked on their way home by a guy with 8 tentacled arms. They couldn’t see his face though, he had a balaclava on and didn’t seem to have any human features? The case goes unsolved to this very day, the only lead the police have was a trail of slime leading back to the sea...

This time we were playing a venue called The Haunt which had a silhouette of an angular ghost on the front door. Do you see the connection!? I could tell this place was going to have much more luck than Engine Rooms, they had their whole name and front door artwork nailed down. Exquisite work. Didn’t see any ghosts inside though, very disappointing. I was hoping that Casper was going to be a stagehand or at least see Patrick Swayze working behind the bar.... For the record, that is in reference to the fact he was in the movie Ghost where he played a ghost and not the fact that he is now a real ghost because he is dead. I would never diss the Swayze in that way. Anyway, there were no ghosts - GET OVER IT. The weather in Brighton could be described with one word: WIND. Crazy winds, the kind that they use in movies when a ship is going through a storm. Except we weren’t on a ship and there was no rain, just wind. It was so strong that I actually got blown all the way back to London during load in and had to get a taxi from there to get me back to the venue. It was pure expensive and the taxi driver didn’t believe me when I told him what happened, he just kept calling me an ‘Irish Cockney Liar’. This made no sense but I didn’t correct him because he was from London and probably knew how to cut my face off in one swift movement using his cab keys.

This time there were 10 times as many people as the last time we played in Brighton, which was mental as we hadn’t been there in over three years. Obviously news of how legendary that Engine Rooms show was must have spread along the pier, or perhaps the police have started a crackdown on all the sea creature attacks that have plagued the coast for centuries. I did sea a pamphlet issued by Brighton & Hove Police that showed all their most wanted criminals - not a human face among them, just weird looking creatures with tiny eyes. Oh wait, those were humans - someone has reliably informed me that this is what happens to your face when you turn to crime and substitute food for drugs. The show went well, the crowd were a little reserved at first, possibly because that fear of being attacked by a shark never fully goes away. By the end of our set I think we’d won them over though, and maybe, just maybe, we’d given them the courage to stand up to that shark next time it approaches them as they walk home. This would be false courage of course, a human is no match for a shark unless you’re Richard Dreyfuss or Roy Schneider and you have a pressurized oxogen tank at hand. Oh, and you also have to be in a Hollywood movie for this to happen too. Sorry.

And that was the story of Brighton and the gig. Thank you.

Noooo photos again. Here's a picture of what comes up in Google if you type in 'Ghost' and Brighton'...