Seagull Recommends 31/03

Hello and welcome back to Seagull Recommends! This week we've got Garth Marenghi, folk sessions, theatre shows aplenty, The Great Escape updates... it's all go.

You hear so much from us every week, now we want to hear from you: The Brighton Seagull Subscriber Census is now live, and it's your chance to tell us what you think about Seagull and the general state of local news in Brighton. Be brutally honest with us, we can take it!

If you come across anything coming up in the city that you think we should know about, let us know!

🎶Gigs: The Southern Belle in Waterloo Street is running live folk sessions every Wednesday from 7:30pm to 9:30pm, and the lovely people who work there have informed me that people are more than welcome to bring an instrument and join in, or just come and watch; as ever, The Session remains the place to go for Irish music sessions in the city, there's one at The Bugle in St Martin's Street on Sunday from 4pm to 6pm, The Fiddler's Elbow in Boyces Street from 8:30pm to 10pm on Monday, and The Jolly Brewer in Ditchling Road from 8:30pm to 10pm on Wednesday; dynamic, high-energy, Brighton-based band The Go! Team are at Chalk tomorrow—the genre-bending band is known for their infectious mix of indie rock, hip-hop, and funk and they put on an excellent live show (tickets); and finally, Lucy May Walker is at The Folklore Rooms on Wednesday on her biggest headline tour to date, to celebrate her album Nothing Ever Stays The Same, her blend of pop, folk, and country and reflective songwriting makes this an essential gig for your diary (tickets).

🎵The Great Escape: As if we needed any more incentive to go to The Great Escape, 140 more artists have been added to the TGE 2023 line-up including Brighton’s very own Yonaka, Moonchild Sanelly, The Goa Express, and more. They've also revealed their daily highlights, perfectly curated, must-see artists (just in case you wanted the experts to pick out a line-up for you) which you can find here.

🎻London Philharmonic Orchestra: At Brighton Dome tomorrow is Heroes and Heroines, a meaningful concert that shares the message of strength and courage. It will be the second UK performance of Tania León’s Stride, the Pulitzer prize-winning work from the composer who received a Kennedy Center Honor last year. It will be followed by Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, which builds on the theme of courage and ‘heroic’ energy—led by pianist Beatrice Rana and conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, who are both rising stars in the classical world and have been praised by the critics for strong musical partnership they share on stage (tickets).

🎭Theatre: BOAT's 2023 Summer Season has now been announced! There are some very exciting shows coming up including Drag in the Park, Dinosaurs And All That Rubbish, a one-man performance of The Wind in the Willows, and a Poetry Slam. Find out more here!

🤣Comedy: Garth Marenghi, the cult comedy character played by Matthew Holness, is coming to Brighton on Sunday as part of his tour for his first book, TerrorTome:

When horror writer Nick Steen gets sucked into a cursed typewriter by the terrifying Typeface, Dark Lord of the Prolix, the hellish visions inside his head are unleashed for real. Forced to fight his escaping imagination - now leaking out of his own brain - Nick must defend the town of Stalkford from his own fictional horrors, including avascular-necrosis-obsessed serial killer Nelson Strain and Nick's dreaded throppleganger, the Dark Third.

For all fans of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which our technical director loves, but our editor doesn't because she has no taste (tickets).

🚩Demonstration: There's a protest tomorrow to show support and solidarity for Ann and Enji who are facing being deported back to Sudan, which we've been following this closely at Seagull. Ann and Enji’s family came to the UK as asylum seekers in 2019. Ann is a 16-year-old student currently attending Cardinal Newman School where she is studying for her upcoming GCSEs. Enji is completing her degree at Brighton University. They are now facing the threat of deportation to the country they have fled from, where they would likely face persecution. The demonstration is at The Level at 12pm.

🗣Talk: The fourth Sound Affects, a night of talks about music and subcultures, how sound affects us and how music changes the world, is on Wednesday. The speakers are: writer and artist Dorothy Max Prior, whose book 69 Exhibition Road is an honest and engaging account of life as an adventurous, queer young person in late 1970s London discovering themselves as an artist, and an individual; musician, filmmaker, activist, anarchist and singer Dunstan Bruce, who will talk about what you can possibly achieve when you are a political band and you enter the mainstream; and writer, photographer and campaigner Sophie Cook, who focuses on sports, music and street photography and was also Europe's first trans newscaster (tickets).

🛍Market: A Trans Day of Visibility Makers Market is being held at The Ledward Centre in Jubilee Street, tomorrow from 11am to 5pm.

🚋 Volk's Electric Railway: It returns tomorrow for its 140th year! Our editor can barely contain her excitement. The first train leaves Aquarium Station at 12pm and service will continue until 6:30pm.

🍱Food and drink: We love Oui Crêperie, the little van that's been showing up in a variety of locations around Brighton for a long time. So when we found out they're opening a physical location TODAY, at 30 Grand Parade (extremely close to our HQ), we were beyond delighted! Serving sweet and savoury crêpes, with good vegan and gluten free options too, we absolutely recommend checking them out. Here's what our editor had to say when she had a lemon and sugar crêpe:

Très bon. Good. So good it'll make you remember your A-Level French.

That's all for this week's Seagull Recommends! We hope you enjoy the weekend and the week ahead.