Taking a week off from my Brighton Listings, but from 2025 I’ll have a website set up to compliment the newsletter. If you’re in or vaguely near Brighton and are interested in what’s occurring round those parts, you can subscribe to Indie Brighton here.

There isn’t much on this week. This shouldn’t surprise you – it’s Christmas, after all. The listings will be back next week with NYE events and beyond.

Thanks to everyone reading, and also generally to the people out there supporting grassroots arts, music, and culture. It’s been a tough year for independent venues, promoters, writers and performers.

People aren’t coming out as much as they used to, and this is understandable: we’re in a period of ongoing austerity, everyone is skint, and one of the functions of late capitalism is to keep people isolated, atomised, and alone. 

The internet, and social media in particular, profits off division, hatred, and loneliness. The streets are dominated by cars, the public squares increasingly privatised and patrolled by yellow-vested security goons. The city centres and fading malls are welcoming only to those with the money to buy the stuff they don’t need.

This is why we need the arts more than ever. Our pubs, cafes, theatres, community halls, and weird backroom spaces is where we meet to process, mock, and subvert what’s being done to us, and to imagine the world anew. 

Not everyone can afford to go out, or has the physical or mental capacity to do so. There’s been an encouraging trend to make spaces more inclusive and accessible, especially in terms of tickets being made available to those who can’t afford to pay, and with more thought going in to what an audience looks like, and how to reach them if they can’t come to you. 

Brighton is an unusually young city, without as many convenient ex-warehouse and industrial space as a London or Manchester. Rickety stairs to a room above or below a pub is still the reality for a lot of our shows, a situation immediately excluding for those with mobility issues.

I’ll keep highlighting the shows that are accessible, both physically and financially, and will think more deeply about how to reach the people who aren’t – for assorted generational, cultural, and promotional reasons – coming out.

Meanwhile I’ll be putting on shows, singing songs, supporting local venues, and wandering about, talking to whoever, wearing unflattering hats, amid this great city of ours in 2025.

See you out there.

J x