The joy of temporary worlds

This article is a meandering musing on the way I feel about my local environment from a surface-level cultural perspective. I will wax lyrical about life, hedonism and commerce, then touch upon the plight of buskers, and then attempt to explain how all of these things converge in my thoughts today. If you are a high powered business person looking for marketing wisdom, this article is definitely not for you. If you've had a couple of glasses of wine and you're feeling a bit noodly, it might be.

1. Brighton

I moved to Brighton more or less twenty years ago after meeting my wife and reaching the point where we wanted to settle down and be grown-ups. Brighton is an easy choice to make when considering moving on from London, where I had previously lived slap-bang in the centre, treating SoHo as my nightly playground for many years.

The thing about Brighton is, if you know it from regular Saturday day trips, weekend breaks or evening trips for gigs, then Brighton seems like a glorious knick-knacky souk that meanders forever in many exotic directions. You never seem to have it all mapped.

Make the leap to living here however, and the boundaries of that maze-like world reveal themselves in the first month. That visitor's surface layer experience of Brighton is actually tiny and it loses its allure swiftly. But there are the other layers below, which only reveal themselves if you commit to the place and have a degree of patience about finding them. It's a bit like fishing, you just have to be there on the river bank dangling your bait, and trusting in the idea that your little fishing stool will steadily sink into the soft mud enough that eventually you see new angles in a different light.

But it's also true to say that a lot of us move here to have children and become families. For that, you shuffle westwards into the leafiness of Hove's burbs where you craft a more passive boho kind of experience that plays up parks and kid friendly cafés, art walks, book clubs and bijou gatherings, and plays down drunken bacchanalia in 4am basement bars with entrancing strangers.

As part of that maturation process, it also becomes apparent that Winter Brighton is a very different animal to Summer Brighton. It is very easy to fall in love with what the visitor never sees... desolate, empty, abandoned Winter Brighton, like a song by The Smiths stretched out across the chalk and pebbles. Once you're too old and too obligated by your adult responsibilities to fully indulge in the mayhem of Summer Brighton, Winter Brighton steps in, somewhat maudlin, and takes hold.

I personally hung up my dancing trousers in around 2010. Partly a result of having a toddler and a baby to care for, and partly a result of the global economic crisis that sunk everybody low for a time. I used to cut a mean line on the dance floors of SoHo in the 90's, but I have a theory I sometimes like to share: For men, the traumatic experience of giving birth to a child is one that leaves us physically intact, but our dance glands are permanently crushed beyond rescue during the procedure. Dad-dancing is not just a joke, it's a physiological change that happens to the male during childbirth.

My partying days were over, and with that I became estranged from Summer Brighton and only knew Winter Brighton for its blustery, blasting winter seafront strolls and the chance to drop in to a cosy pub once in a while for a catch up with friends.

2. Busking

Busking has been for a VERY long time a thread in the fabric of street level daily culture. Buskers are/were everywhere, and whether you like them or not (as individual performers or as a genre), there they are, or at least were, contributing to the local cultural landscape with a broad range of creative offerings from the sublime to the ridiculous, the heart-melting to the nerve grating.

Irrespective of your thoughts about busking though, it is/was an art (yes, it's an art, get off your high horse) and it was all predicated on the notion that people had change in their pockets and may want to offload it to preserve the integrity of their pocket bags, or to show appreciation, or to show sympathy.

But we are careening fast into a cashless society now. Change is a quaint idea (the money, not the concept). I personally haven't handled any change for years now. I stopped having a wallet ages ago because I just need two cards and my phone for everything these days.

So the business of busking becomes unviable as we go cashless. It's true that many buskers have made the leap to contactless payments, but that's a different thing and I don't see a future for it. That requires a decision to dig in to your abstract financial reserves and give somebody an abstract numerical payment from those reserves, which is very different to clawing out and tossing a bunch of 2p pieces that you know will otherwise go home and sit in a giant jar for many years until you have a day free and you take the now impossibly heavy jar to the bank to convert all that useless change into a banker's draft totalling ￡4.95.

It means you have to trust the busker's contactless payment thing when the sticker on it says "tap to donate ￡3". How do you know it will only take ￡3? What if you get home and find the bloke with the kazoo, murdering Yellow Submarine in the underpass has liberated ￡40 from your life savings? It's a different psychological mechanism, and based on my observations, people don't do it with the frequency at which they once dropped coins into hats.

So for better or for worse, busking is dying. It is also assailed by rules and regulations and a licensing system that attempts to control the spread of buskers in popular locations.

But busking has been part of the street level cultural experience for generations. It's just one tiny thread, it's not holding the fabric together, no, but every thread removed makes the fabric more sparse, a bit weaker, a bit less thoroughly woven. When buskers have finally gone, it will be a different street level experience we are left with. With all the other high street changes going on as well, this adds up to a lot of change in our lives.

3. Covid, Lockdown and the joy of temporary worlds

When Covid hit and Lockdown came along, I found myself in a dilemma. I was in the early stages of a classic car restoration that would require significant investment, and yet there was nowhere to go in the car as the car scene had been shut down. The future was not certain enough for me to feel confident about continuing with the work on the car. The online car community was humming nervously with speculation about the possibility that the market value for old cars could plunge. I didn't want to be left with an expensive chunk of American muscle car that needed investment if work dried up and the value of it dropped dramatically. So I made a smart decision and I sold it very quickly for a smaller profit before any pricing landslide began.

Work did go offline for a few months too, and I needed something else to enjoy. So I dug my old collection of rare and interesting pedal bikes out of the loft, rebuilt them, serviced them, and began riding them.

This act re-introduced me to Summer Brighton, something I had no seen nor sensed for at least a decade.

Summer Brighton in lockdown was like Winter Brighton, but sunnier and less of an environmental endurance exercise. In the early weeks of Lockdown, Brighton was pretty much a dead place with locals simply walking, sitting, and enjoying the fresh air and the beach. All the 'stuff' of Brighton was shuttered and the usual millions-strong crowd of summer visitors was conspicuous by its absence. It felt dead and abandoned, with locals picking over the carcass for meaning or direction, but finding almost nothing to pick at.

But Brighton is a place with a strange perpetual energy. It wasn't just going to sit there being Winter Brighton in Summer. It was going to formulate something, organically, bubbling up independent things to create a new sum total experience.

A new Brighton experience did emerge. I watched it grow day by day. It was just for the locals because nobody had any reason to travel. Everything else was closed. As I cycled almost daily the two miles of beach front from far Hove to Black rock on the other side of the pier, I saw the same faces every day, and I watched a new cultural phenomenon emerge specifically for the area. For all I know this has happened everywhere. But we currently live in a strange pre-industrial paradigm again as though there are no internal combustion engines and the idea of going to another city purely for leisure purposes once more seems fanciful and fat-fetched. If anybody ever watched Larkrise to Candleford, you may recall the epic adventure of endurance that was implied if anyone from Larkrise needed to make the arduous journey to Candleford for a packet of buttons, even though it was only 100 yards down the lane. The town next door feels as though it's 1000 miles away again.

So I can only speak of this from my Brighton perspective, and given that I have read or heard nothing about this phenomenon happening elsewhere, I am going to assume for now, it is a unique Brighton experience.

Gatherings began to happen regularly and predictably along the seafront at chosen locations. Buskers of a high calibre began to find pitches which they regularly set themselves up, creating a kind of cultural zone around themselves. My daily evening cycle became something that could be mapped, geographically, by the smooth segue of sounds and visions of different 50 yard stretches on my route. People were coming to these different cultural experiences, and spending time there, enjoying them. Brighton seafront became in lots of ways a kind of summer long creative exhibition space for musicians and performers.

At my quiet, subdued end of the seafront stretch, the new Rockwater development - a massive investment to build a retail, dining, bar, nightclub and events centre with a James Bond retractable roof for open-sky dining in the summer, had to be put on hold. The new building has remained incomplete and drizzled in scaffold ever since. But Rockwater itself, the idea, the offer, the experience, refused to be placed on hold. The idea of Rockwater spilled out onto the seafront promenade instead. It took its cue from the miles of beach huts between which the building's fascia sits, and it built its own set of ten beach huts, each kitted out to provide, variously; alcohol, coffee, bar snacks, hot dogs (meat and vegan) cocktails, sea food and exotic foodstuffs, ice cream, pastries and other sweet delicacies. Rockwater, despite being placed in cryogenic suspension, was alive and kicking and suddenly a place for people to hang out and enjoy an evening, drinking on the beach or sitting in the purpose built elevated beach veranda, a Covid safe seating area where you can enjoy table service.

It was born of necessity. A kind of desperate survival tactic. if you're the kind of entrepreneur who designs and builds a vast, sophisticated entertainment complex in Hove, the idea of serving hot dogs and beer out of wooden sheds is probably far from what you envisaged for your swanky new nightlife brand. But needs must and all that, and out of the strict limitations of this pandemic emerged this amazingly free, open, inclusive, fun and highly desirable experience of simply enjoying a drink on the beach in a way that safely and responsibly worked through all the rules imposed by the pandemic.

Pubs have been hell. The imposed pandemic bureaucracy imposed on pubs and the strict 10pm limit have made it a miserable, high-effort, oddly isolating experience. But The Rockwater 'booze shed' experience was the absolute opposite. It's a temporary world. It will be gone once we've got the better of this virus and returned to something more like normal. But Rockwater has been - and still is despite the cold and dark evenings - something completely different that has, in its own unique ways, been immeasurably more enjoyable and rewarding than anything comparable that pre-Covid culture could offer. It is a product of the times.

For the colder evenings Rockwater have also built an igloo city of temporary structures. Simple polythene Buckyball tents laid out in a grid, where you can order and have your drinks and food delivered... still take out, still isolation, all strictly managed, meaning you can have your cake and eat it.

Past Rockwater and heading into Brighton's main drag, there are the peripheral buskers established. Freefrom jazz musicians and classical flautists, steel guitar players and folk singers. Spoken word artists and street dancing assemblies. All semi-permanent fixtures in fixed locations. All drawing their own kind of crowds and creating their own temporary worlds. Closer in to Brighton centre and you get to the indie guitar bands. Set up with amp stacks and miles of cable, belting out unlimited sets underneath the now closed and derelict looking upside-down house attraction. Belting out hour after hour of original material and covers alike to a regular crowd who dance and cheer and have a great time.

You get the disco rollerboot gang with their lines of cones and soundsystem, doing their stuff and attracting a healthy crowd of admirers and dancers. A bit further down a string of solo performers pepper the run, and then some alternative gatherings. Traditional township drumming groups who attract wild and flamboyant performance dancers, moving unpredictably and almost dangerously, as though separated from reality by a trance-like state complete with wild, hungry staring eyes and voracious appetites for some kind of carnal confrontation. It feels feral, wild, the stuff of possession, steeped in Hoodoo, and once more unlike anything you would ever have found in a bar or nightclub pre-Covid, no matter how hedonistic the offer of the establishment.

My entertainment of choice is a kind of "acid-folk meets trip-hop in John Martyn's basement" collective known as Fukushima Dolphin. They use echoplex and numerous electrickery modules to warp and deconstruct acoustic sounds made on improvised instruments and traditional guitars and drums. They set up mid afternoon, plug in and begin, and what they produce is a more or less endless sonic landscape that sometimes feels improvised but also frequently drifts into a strange and unfamiliar cover versions of familiar songs. It is - aside from sometimes feeling like a John Martyn jam or a Gorillaz live experimental performance - their own unique aesthetic, and any number of musicians from one to five might comprise the group on any given evening. The crowd that gathers as the hours pass and the sun goes down is large and there to contribute to the temporary world being created as much as to absorb it.

What is interesting about the crowd is the cultural mix. There are young teenagers, old post-punk drunks, pensioners, posh people, broken people, beautiful people, crazy looking people, goth-looking people, hippy looking people, towny looking people... all ethnicities, all types, all bases more than adequately covered. All there together, chatting, dancing, sharing in the moment. Just like the music, the crowd that gathers to listen is a fluid and constantly shape shifting blend of just about everyone you can imagine. It is a robust rejection of the idea of categories or segmentations. It is far more basic and human than that.

The dancing is totally freeform. Everyone is seduced eventually by the joy of it all. The stoned teens will lure and entice the 80 year olds to join them and they do, unable to resist, creating this carnivalesque, freeparty style, post-consumerist temporary world.

Each of these stops along the seafront, and the entire seafront experience itself, are temporary worlds. Created, promoted and sustained by a virus that killed everything else off, this new joyful temporary world has emerged and thrives on almost nothing at all. It feels unlike anything else. It feels free, optimistic, unrestrained, hedonistic, without rules or restrictions. It is not policed, not governed, not organised, not for profit. It is there for people to enjoy culture as fully as they ever did. I would argue people are enjoying culture far more than the organised commodified world that we used to inhabit ever allowed.

This is like a barter town. It is nomadic and unfixed. It reminds me a little of traveller culture where you take what you can and do what you will and get the most possibe out of it knowing that tomorrow it will all be gone and you'll be on the road to a new location.

None of this Brighton 2020 scene is tethered to anything other than a basic need to be out there, connecting, living and experiencing without the usual walls that herd us into like-minded groups. It is post-bubble, post-silo, pandemic born.

It is also a new role for buskers, for now. Not as opportunist sonic doodlers brightening up or vandalising locations with their output (depending on the quality and your opinion of them), but as focal points for communal enjoyment. These buskers are not just amusing passers by, they are now the nightlife, the lure, the attraction, the meeting point, the mechanism of enjoyment in a shut-down world.

It feels like a magical thing that has manifested randomly and organically, and as we draw closer to a possible vaccine, and as the nights grow much colder, wetter and impossibly windy, I know that this amazing Lockdown experience is probably coming to an end.

Brighton seafront in 2020 has persuaded me that whilst culture as we knew it might have suffered some near-fatal blows, culture itself is not dependent on the established infrastructure to survive. It is like the proverbial rat. It survives, and it utilises its environment to do so.

Interestingly, 2020 is the year of the rat. The rat seems to be fine. It's the house that has suffered.

^ This picture, used without permission for now, is Fukushima Dolphin, November 2020, by @ray_burnimage