>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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The Freebutt today.

This news broke last Wednesday but I’ve been busy recently and so I’m only writing about it now! One of Brighton’s longest-running venues, the Freebutt, is under threat of closure as a result of a noise complaint and subsequent Environmental Health Office investigation. As I put it on Facebook:

Many of you will have seen this already, but so what, it’s important. The Freebutt is facing closure due to ONE noise complaint. They are doing everything they can to solve the noise problem, but the EHO and the neighbour are preventing them from doing so. For a venue with decades of history to be shut down for such a bullshit reason would be a travesty.

This summary is a bit unfair on the EHO – they’re helping, just somewhat slowly – and the neighbour – who presumably has a legitimate complaint, but they’re not helping get it resolved except in the sense of “if the venue closes, the problem goes away”.

The Freebutt is presently owned by a small group of local music fans and entrepreneurs. They’re put a lot of work into ensuring the venue is shipshape and this is the only noise complaint since they took ownership. Although since the redesign the giant pillar in the middle of the room is still a source of constant complaint, Brighton’s live music scene wouldn’t be the same without the ‘butt.

The Freebutt circa 1968.

You can read the full story from the Freebutt here. The Argus has an article covering Brighton Council’s statements and some tedious, reactionary reader comments. There’s a petition you can sign here and a Facebook group here. The MP for the area is Caroline Lucas (Green) and the city councillors can be contacted from here.

The venue’s owners sent out an update 24 hours after the news and campaign broke which you can read below the cut. » Read the rest of this entry «

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A barely-tangential preamble: I’ve been prodding Uncle Google and Auntie Wikipedia today in an effort to figure out exactly where Boy Mandeville got their name. Thus far my favourite guesses involve the absurd London 2012 mascots and Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch/English philosopher famous for ‘The Fable of the Bees’, a tweely-titled book containing a poem that was highly controversial in 1714 for elucidating economic concepts Adam Smith would  reintroduce 75 years later. I have to hope that if one of these two guesses is correct it’s the iconoclastic and ahead-of-his-time philosopher rather than the tacky figurehead of an expensive and mostly unwanted public extravagance.

And so, on to Boy Mandeville themselves! This four-piece plays pleasant and upbeat indie-pop from the worldbeat school, i.e. they’re summery with twinkly guitars and unusual rhythms married to a traditional song structure. Popular purveyors of this form are Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot – both American bands, a fact which continues to surprise me as they, particularly Vampire Weekend, feel fundamentally English to me – as well as more experimental outfits like Yeasayer.

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In late 2009, one of my favourite hardcore punk outfits in Brighton called it a day: the Offcuts. In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that I’ve been friends with the band for years and have lived with most of them at various addresses!

Essentially, the band ended when Alex (bass) decided to leave. The others opted to continue as a band but to make some changes. These included one of the band’s two guitarists adopting bass duties (at the moment Chris and Pinder share, swapping over on stage for different songs), Alec adding keys and synth to his distinctive vocal slurs and screams, ditching all of the old tunes and writing entirely new ones, and changing the band’s name to WW2 vs Dinosaurs.

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