The Great Escape | |
---|---|
Genre | Rock, alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, hard rock, dance, techno, electronic, acoustic, hip hop |
Location(s) | Brighton and Hove, England |
Years active | 18 years |
Most recent | 2023 |
Next event | 15–18 May 2024 |
Website | greatescapefestival |
The Great Escape Festival is a four-day music festival held in Brighton and Hove, England every year in May. It is operated by MAMA Festivals and showcases new music [1] [2] from a variety of genres. The festival was founded in 2006 and roughly hosts 500 bands across 30 venues throughout the city. [3] It has been likened to South by Southwest. [2] [3] [4]
There is also a music industry convention section to the event, [2] which is attended by over 4000 delegates. The 2011 to 2022 conferences have been programmed by the team from music industry publication CMU.
In addition to the main festival, there is also The Alternative Escape, a further strand of 'unofficial' shows.
There was no event in 2020, and the festival was held in 2021 but was entirely online, both due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [5]
In 2024, over half of the lineup signed an open letter to the festival to drop Barclaycard as a sponsor [6] [7] due to its involvement in the supply of arms to Israeli military forces. [8] [9] Over 163 bands pulled out of the festival in protest, resulting in the opening showcase being cancelled. [10] [11]
Nicholas Edward Cave is an Australian musician, writer and actor. Known for his baritone voice and for fronting the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave's music is characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love, and violence.
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C86 is a cassette compilation released by the British music magazine NME in 1986, featuring new bands licensed from British independent record labels of the time. As a term, C86 quickly evolved into shorthand for a guitar-based music genre characterized by jangling guitars and melodic power pop song structures, although other musical styles were represented on the tape. In its time, it became a pejorative term for its associations with so-called "shambling" and underachievement. The C86 scene is now recognized as a pivotal moment for independent music in the UK, as was recognized in the subtitle of the compilation's 2006 CD issue: CD86: 48 Tracks from the Birth of Indie Pop. 2014 saw the original compilation reissued in a 3CD expanded edition from Cherry Red Records; the 2014 box-set came with an 11,500-word book of sleevenotes by one of the tape's original curators, former NME journalist Neil Taylor.
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