Photo: Facebook
Ahead of their set tonight at The Great Escape, we talked to The Big Moon for their first ever filmed interview. They were warm, intelligent and prone to breaking off mid-answer to point out something they found more interesting off camera - a lone tent in the middle of a beach, two people scouring the pebbles with metal detectors ("It's weird because they look like quite a cool couple").
And yet, one listen to their debut single 'Sucker' and you'd assume they were old hats - so rich and cohesive is its sound. (At one point we mistakenly described it as polished, which they quite rightly disagreed with - that doesn't do justice to its scuzzy, DIY aesthetic). All this is to say that it's painfully disappointing, but entirely unsurprising, when we find ourselves, half an hour before their set begins, in an unmoving queue outside The Haunt. Ten minutes after The Big Moon are due on stage, and we've still moved barely a few feet, and are forced to cut our losses and head to Patterns an hour before Ho99o9 are due on.
An amp blew up and then a ponytail got stuck in the drums BUT brighton you nailed it that was amazing can we do it again please?
— The Big Moon (@commoonicate) May 16, 2015
And so the aforementioned frustration that comes with a festival like The Great Escape once again rears its head. If you want to see a band with any hype, don't even think about turning up less than an hour before it starts. Once you manage to battle the queues though and make it into one of the hundreds of venues hosting TGE's line-up, you'll most likely be richly rewarded.
Ho99o9's set, in fact, is an intense, vibrant and disturbing affair, which leans more heavily on the duo's punk influences than their records. theOGM arrives on stage wearing a wedding dress, a Miss Havisham-like madness in his eyes while Yetti999 thrashes, as if possessed, around the stage. Their drummer takes swigs of beer and spits it into their mouths, they throw themselves into the crowd and start a moshpit, they do handstands onstage and strip off most of their clothes.
It's not a raucous, aggressive front for a lack of talent though - their lyrical prowess remains as impressive as it is on record, and their genuine, overwhelming zeal for performing is infectious. So infectious, in fact, that nothing that follows - Kali Uchis (who suffers immeasurably from poor sound quality), Fekki, Bonkaz - makes anywhere near the same impact.
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