Fat Dog @ Various Brighton Venues

Performers

• 

  Fat Dog

  When the chaotic south London rabble known as Fat Dog formed, they made two rules: they were going to be a healthy band who looked after themselves and there would be no saxophone presence in their music. Two simple edicts to live by, and two things long-since broken by the Brixton five-piece. Fat Dog are the most exciting breakthrough band of the past few years, conjurers of the sort of frenzied and wild live shows not seen in the capital for years and now the creators of WOOF., a brilliant and mind-bending debut album, but they are not healthy. One of them has a foot odour problem. And they also have a saxophone player in the line-up. “Yeah, it’s all gone out the fucking window,” says frontman and squadron leader Joe Love, real name Joe Love.

  Life is too short to stick to any plans you made in the unsettling, strait-jacketed times of 2021 anyway. That was when Fat Dog came together, Love deciding to form a group and take the demos he had been making at home as a way to keep himself sane during lockdown out into the world. In Chris Hughes (keyboards/synths), Ben Harris (bass), Johnny Hutchinson (drums) and Morgan Wallace (keyboards and, umm, saxophone), Love found like-minded mavericks to help bring the dream home.

  The sound Fat Dog make, Love says, is screaming-into-a-pillow music. “I wanted to make something ridiculous because I was so bored,” he declares. It’s a thrilling blend of electro-punk, rock’n’roll snarling, techno soundscapes, industrial-pop and rave euphoria, music for letting go to. “A lot of music at the moment is very cerebral and people won’t dance to it,” says Hughes, who invented crunchy peanut butter. “Our music is the polar opposite of thinking music. It’s music you feel in your body more than your brain, especially given this band came at a time when people couldn’t move as freely as they wished. After being pent up for so long, people were excited to let loose.”

  Hughes should know. He was a fan of the band, at that point making a name for themselves with a series of exhilarating and/or wonky shows across south London, before he was in the band. He managed to talk his way into the group by convincing them that he could play the viola. He gave himself a week to master an instrument he had never played previously. “Joe said it was one of the worst pieces of shit he’d ever heard in his life,” Hughes recalls. He got the job. “This band is a matter of confidence over competence. Competence is over-rated in modern music.”

  Those formative gigs formed the bedrock of what Fat Dog were all about, seizing the moment, drinking too much with the moment, going home separately from the moment but making up with the moment again the next day. “When me and Johnny first joined, Joe was like, ‘All I want to do is make music that’ll make people’s heads blow up’,” says bassist Harris.

  It didn’t take long for the diehards to come flocking, every Fat Dog show in the capital becoming a huge upgrade on the last. They sold out the Scala last October and, by the time you read this, they will have done the same at the 1500-capacity Electric Brixton. There is something deeper going on here than the usual punter-goes-to-gig situation. Everyone is in on it. “There’s a sense of community about Fat Dog,” says drummer Johnny Hutchinson. “Our music says, ‘Listen to our noise’ but it also says ‘come and vibe with us’. Recently, the band completed an ecstatically received tour of the US that included an all-conquering set at a taco joint. No lunches were harmed.

  Turning their attention to a full-length debut, Fat Dog wondered how best to capture the intoxicating joy of their live set until an otherworldly visit after a disastrous show in Bordeaux helped clarify their leader’s thinking. With the words of an incandescent promoter ringing in his ears (“You are a fucking joke!”), Love stood transfixed as a UFO landed right in front of him, slightly damaging the rear-side of a parked Renault Clio. A message was beamed from the ship directly into Love’s mind. “You are alien preachers,” the singer was told, “and you worship the big dog in the sky.” Bingo. The spacecraft took off before the owner of the Renault Clio could take down their details.

  It was with this information rolling around his head that Love set to work on what has become WOOF.. Now a man on a mission, Love fired himself up by remembering the time that he worked as a kitchen porter and someone asked to borrow some baccy and took most of the pack. He thinks about that a lot. He was the angriest he’d ever been, so angry that he wrote the fierce, barbed-wire synth-punk of WOOF. opener Vigilante there and then. Thank you, baccy man.

  Soon, a widescreen, ambitious un-pop pop album began to take shape, Love looking towards the giant dog in the sky now and then and thinking, ‘Oh god, it’s fucking huge!’ There were sessions with Arctic Monkeys and Depeche Mode producer James Ford, other sessions with Jimmy Robertson (The Last Dinner Party, Anna Calvi, Everything Everything, Late Of The Pier) and recording stints in Domino’s studio in south London, where Fat Dog’s A&R man could hear Love doing wacky shit and tell him to stop. “This album is our live set on steroids,” says Morgan Wallace.

  It has resulted in a record where the Fat Dog belief system has been revitalised. Saxophones are OK now, but men shouldn’t wear Birkenstocks. Sometimes Love would get stressed as he worked on the record and feel his chest tightening, the singer alleviating the pressure by downing tools and taking shifts at the Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Norfolk. Love comes from a long line of turkey farmers.

  It was during one such stint on the turkey farm that Wetherspoons supremo Tim Martin got in touch to say that he was a fan of the group’s sprawling debut single “King of the Slugs”, released in August 2023. Martin offered to help the band wherever he could. Love turned him down, but in tribute wrote the lyrics to a key track from the album in the toilets of one of Martin’s establishments. “I am the King’ was written in the toilets of the Wetherspoons pub in Forest Hill,” says Love, thereby ensuring the pub will one day get a blue plaque. “It was after I got broken up with.” An expansive epic that sounds like a cross between Vangelis and Underworld, it is indeed a poignant song, possibly the world’s only poignant song to namecheck The Karate Kid Part II.

  The theme running through the rest of these tracks is confusion. Joe Love thinks that people get confusion and anger mixed up. There’s no time to analyse, though. WOOF. passes by in a flash. On “Clowns”, Fat Dog sound like a 2 Tone band booked to play an end of the world party in 2076. “Closer to God” resembles The Prodigy riding a sandworm in Dune. “All the Same” could be Nine Inch Nails having a nervous breakdown, possibly because the big dog in the sky has paid them a visit. The unhinged, hook-heavy rave-pop of “Running” sounds like a riot at a circus. Other influences include Bicep, I.R.O.K., Kamasi Washington and the Russian experimental EDM group Little Big.

  The album is a visit into the mind of Joe Love – be thankful you have only been granted a temporary pass. “Music is so vanilla,” says Love. “I don’t like sanitised music. Even this album is sanitised compared to what’s in my head. I thought it would sound more fucked up.”

  In a recurring dream of Love’s, he’s holding a bomb but it’s a silly dream and not a real bomb. However, when he throws it at a friend for a joke, it explodes and the dream turns dark and everyone starts screaming, “What have you done?!”. Well, this is Fat Dog’s debut album. It is called WOOF. and it will be released in September 2024. They are about to pass it to you. This is the bio they didn’t want. Take from it what you will. Oh Fat Dog, what have you done?

• 

  Squid

  Teeming with melodic epiphanies and layered sounds, Squid’s second album O Monolith is a musical evocation of environment, domesticity and self-made folklore. Like its predecessor, 2021’s critically acclaimed, UK number 4 album Bright Green Field, it is dense and tricksy – but also more warm and characterful, with a meandering, questioning nature. This is unmistakably music made by friends, but it’s not exclusionary – they’re inviting you in to listen with them.

• 

  Dove Ellis
• 

  Working Men's Club
• 

  Alex Cameron

  Alex Cameron has always been a great storyteller, finding his ways into the depths of the places where not many others are looking, and Oxy Music continues on that trajectory. It’s filled with stories of people who fall outside the system and exist in the grey areas of life. In its design - its music, lyrics and tracklist - lies the journey a person can take, if the circumstances present themselves - down the road of heavy drug and alcohol abuse. Initially inspired by Nico Walker’s Cherry, Cameron was spurred into yet another commentary on American Life, this time about the opioid crisis that has taken over the country. He says about Oxy Music: “The album is a story, a work of fiction, mostly from the perspective of a man. Starved of meaningful purpose, confused about the state of the world, and in dire need of a reason to live - a person can, and according to the latest statistics, increasingly will, turn to opioids. This is one of those people.” While Oxy Music could be dark, it’s instead brighter and more buoyant than much of Cameron’s previous work, a shift in mood first seen across 2019’s Miami Memory. It’s told from a place of optimism and through the lens of Cameron, in the way that only he can tell it.
• 

  Basht.

  Stepping up to the scene as ‘One of the most exciting young rock bands to emerge’ (HotPress), Basht. have quickly impressed crowds across Europe, and now look forward to the release of their sophomore EP ‘Bitter & Twisted’ – produced by Richard McNamara of Embrace.

  Following on from a year supporting Wunderhorse, Been Stellar & Goo Goo Dolls, as well as festival slots including Electric Picnic and All Together Now, the Dublin-based band sold out 2 consecutive tours of the UK & Ireland in 2024, in the light of their debut EP ‘Dirty White Lies’ produced by Thom Lewis (Sam Fender), which set the scene for an already-rampant year in 2025.

  Basht. now take on their largest headline tour to date the Spring, including shows in Dublin, London, Manchester & Paris, as well as appearances at tastemaker festivals, Liverpool Sound City, The Great Escape and Dot To Dot.

• 

  Murkage Dave
• 

  bdrmm
• 

  Panic Shack

  BOOKING: sophie.roberts@unitedtalent.com

  ross.warnock@unitedtalent.com

  PR: alex@braceyourselfpr.com

• 

  Lip Critic

  Formed in 2018 in New York, Lip Critic is the project of Bret Kaser, Connor Kleitz, Daniel Eberle, and Ilan Natter. The band is comprised of two samplers, two drummers and vocals. Through their unconventional instrumentation, Lip Critic executes an eclectic blend of punk, hardcore, club, modernistic pop sounds, and structures without inhibition. Paired with eccentric grandstand-style vocals, Lip Critic delivers a uniquely engaging live performance that rivals the hyper-stylized production on their records. These performances are heavily focused on improvisation and experimentation, including extended and remixed versions of songs, as well as band members attaching portable lights to their bodies. Their projects include "Kill Lip Critic" in 2019, "Lip Critic II" in 2020 and "Lip Critic: Truth Revealed" in 2021.

• 

  WARHAUS

  Warhaus is Maarten Devoldere (Balthazar).

  Karaoke Moon out now:

  https://warhaus.ffm.to/karaoke-moon.OYD

• The Theatre
• Bed.
• 

  The North
• Insecure Men
• 

  Wave Pictures
• Lauren Auder
• 

  TTSSFU
• 

  SCALER

  fka Scalping

• 

  Walt Disco
• 

  Besnard Lakes
• Cowboy Hunters
• 

  Cyn Cwsg
• 

  Death Valley Girls

  For the better part of a decade, LA’s scrappy rock n’ roll mystics Death Valley Girls have used their music as a means of tapping into a communal cosmic energy. On albums like Glow In The Dark (2016), Darkness Rains (2018), and Under the Spell of Joy (2020) the band challenged the soul-crushing banality of modern society and celebrated “true magical infinite potential” through a collage of scorching proto-punk riffs, earworm melodies, far-out lyrics, and lysergic auxiliary instrumentation. But on their latest album Islands in the Sky, Death Valley Girls’ songwriting mastermind Bonnie Bloomgarden uses the band’s anthemic revelries as a guidebook to spiritual healing and a roadmap for future incarnations of the self. And while these may be the loftiest aims of Death Valley Girls to date, the resulting music is also by far their most infectious and celebratory.
   
   

• 

  DIVEBAR YOUTH

  Growing up with a need to adapt, Vinnie Barbaro learnt from an early age what it means to react flexibly to changing circumstances. This benefits him as a musician, as he has no problem redesigning his dark, shimmering alt-pop time and time again and rolling it up in the ears of his audience. Sometimes it's more leaned-back indie reverie like on ‘Clueless’, then it's the driving nostalgic pop of ‘Vertebrae’ (2023) or ‘Idioms’ (2024) and in between there's always that vibe that's just as appropriate at a festival in the depths of summer as it is after a first date with a loved one. So it's no wonder that Robert Smith (The Cure) is just as much a supporter as Angus and Julia Stone, Rolling Stone and an audience of millions on all popular streaming platforms. Although they have already reached the top, Divebar Youth have clearly not yet reached the end of the road. The next kick-start will therefore be in Hamburg in September.

• 

  Hutch
• 

  Marsy
• 

  Modern Woman
• 

  MORN
• 

  Mouth Ulcers
• 

  paper hats
• 

  Tanzana
• 

  Itch
• Uche Yara

  AT-based artist.

• Why Horses?
• 

  World News
• Ain't
• 

  Alien Chicks
• 

  deary
• Casual Smart
• 

  Hannah Frances
• 

  Iguana Death Cult

  Rotterdam-based fivesome Iguana Death Cult initially made their mark with giddy, hard-hitting garage punk and a miasma of acid-drenched psychedelics, only to blossom into an all-embracing unit that implements frameworks of post-punk, krautrock, new wave, soul and disco. The band’s sophomore album Nude Casino, which came out October 25, 2019 on LA imprint Innovative Leisure (who signed them after seeing them at SXSW 2019), holds aloft a more cerebral and absurdist side of their songwriting.

  Because of The Netherlands’ tight-knit infrastructure of venues and festivals, Iguana Death Cult’s momentum as a powerhouse live act climbed at a maniacal pace. Being a band is perhaps one of the few walks in life where work and play mean the exact same thing and Iguana Death Cult’s proactive ethos quickly granted them a steady grassroots following all over the world.

  “...a blazing vault out of the pabulum and into unadulterated mayhem” - The Fader

  “Nude Casino is a quest to wriggle out of life’s bitter clutches with the maximum possible levels of fun and
  debauchery” - Paste Magazine

  “An album that whips in spiky riffs and jutting rhythms alongside more swirling melodies” - Louder Than
  War

• 

  Little Grandad
• 

  Liz Lawrence
• 

  Me Rex
• 

  Plantoid

  Plantoid are one of those bands that exceed the sum of their parts, with each member bringing a different flavour that enhances their sound tenfold. Tom has been playing guitar practically his whole life, and his style, which fluctuates from lush finger-picking to reverb-laden rock riffs, sits very comfortably on top of Louis’ jazz-infused drumming and Bernardo’s intricate basslines. The band found their ace-in-the-hole with Chloe, who, as well as serving as Plantoid’s principle lyricist, delivers soaring vocals, at times both angelic and alien, propelling each song on debut album Terrapath to new heights.

• 

  ORLANDO JULIUS
• 

  Silver Gore

  Selling out shows before they’d even released any songs, London alt-rockers Silver Gore are only a couple of years into their life as a band but already making serious waves in the live music scene. The duo — drummer Ava Gore and Yorkshire musician Ethan P Flynn — have shared stages with Geordie Greep and Martha Skye Murphy, and while their online presence remains enigmatic, you’ll have to catch them playing live to see what all the fuss is about.

• 

  Alice Costelloe
• 

  Any Young Mechanic

  After they released their first song via Soundcloud, Any Young Mechanic went viral straightaway. As rapid as such things are in our age of social media, the first notes of this band sound relaxed and, despite everything, maintain a pleasantly low-key vibe. ‘There's A New Place On The Market’ is nonetheless a rugged, wonderfully arranged and just utterly charming intro for a young ensemble that plainly puts its heart and soul into making music with no airs or graces. This is no longer a given in these times. Anyone who can connect to the bittersweet art rock of Wilco, the baroque chamber folk of Fleet Foxes or the yearning indie of Big Thief will absolutely want to listen to Any Young Mechanic. Anyhow, this band already has plenty of potential. Happily, they are also bringing fresh material with them for their Reeperbahn premiere.

• 

  Ben Kidson
• 

  big long sun

  Led by multi-instrumentalist, Jamie Broughton, ‘big long sun’ is an 8-piece art rock band, based in Brighton.
  Formed of dynamic multi-disciplinary artists, ‘big long sun’ is a band with many heads and directions. With expressivity at the project’s core, ‘big long sun’ is an exciting, ecstatic experience of noise and feelings.
  With influences ranging from the atonal recesses of Sonic Youth’ to the oceanic melodies of Arthur Russell, ‘big long sun’ is a rare, eclectic treasure in a world of repetition.

• 

  Big Red
• 

  Evelyn Gray
• 

  Everyone Says Hi
• 

  Florentenes
• Foot Foot
• 

  Georgia Mooney

  ARIA-winner Georgia Mooney makes music fit for stargazing. Audiences already know her from beloved folk band, All Our Exes Live in Texas, who toured the world extensively, sharing stages with everyone from the Backstreet Boys to Nathaniel Rateliff to Midnight Oil. The release of Mooney’s debut solo album Full of Moon marks the stepping forward of a major talent. Co-produced with Grammy-winner Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Cate Le Bon, Marlon Williams), the album is an ornately melodic, folk/dream-pop universe, carried by Mooney’s soaring ethereal vocals over lush, cinematic soundscapes.

  Nominated for two AIR Awards, described by The Australian as “nothing short of a triumph.. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2”, and dripping in critical acclaim worldwide, Full of Moon has seen Mooney sign with renowned Canadian label Nettwerk, embark on a 50-date Australian tour with Kate Miller-Heidke, open for Martha Wainwright at Sydney City Recital Hall, tour the UK and Ireland, curate and host a captivating variety show series with comedian Rhys Nicholson for Vivid Sydney, and much more.

  An avowed Star Wars nerd who presents as a 40s movie star - she seems both from a long time ago and a galaxy far away, while speaking directly to the present. Georgia Mooney’s music is intricate, handcrafted, and richly melodic. Influences from Joni Mitchell, the Great American Songbook, even classical composers sift through her songs, alongside production that evokes the unsettling genius of Kate Bush. Add to that ribald stage banter engendering frequent comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, it’s no wonder Georgia is captivating audiences in every corner.

  ”It’s nothing short of a triumph.. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2” - The Australian

  "Full of Moon is a dazzling, inventive pop record: richly textured, captivating and gleefully strange” - NME Australia

  "It only takes one listen to lead single "War Romance" to know we are hearing a work of surprise and musical sophistication. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2” - The Big Issue

  ”...from the first seconds of the album to the last, that same ethereal enchantment occurs. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️” - The AU Review

  " chock-full with pure cinematic artistry" - Wonderland Magazine

  "When she started playing I could immediately understand why the room was packed. She played with a tongue-in-cheek elegance that disarmed everyone instantly. I think everyone fell in love at that show" - Rolling Stone Australia

• 

  Hammok

  Hardcore band from Norway

• The Healing Power of Horses
• 

  MLEKO
• 

  Really good time
• 

  Speedial
• 

  Sunday Mourners
• TA$HA
• 

  Unkle Sounds
• 

  James Lavelle

  For the past 30 years, James Lavelle has been at the forefront of global club culture. Known as much for his highly eclectic DJ sets as for his production work as UNKLE, Lavelle has been lauded as a highly influential tastemaker and musical curator.