The Brunswick Open Mic in Brighton is a Very Good Open Mic

i start on a salty note: this open mic isn’t an open mic in the most important of ways. I don’t mean “anyone who turns up on the night gets a slot” – I understand why even open mics would like to operate some form of quality control – it’s also a good way of outing, and then banning, absolute wrong-uns.

But it sucks this otherwise exemplary night does its bookings via Facebook. Facebook is the Dice of social media sites: it’s a walled garden, and Brighton is unusually behind the curve in tolerating it as a means of putting on small gigs. I’ve been clean of Facebook for 15 years. I had therefore assumed most of the musicians who still use this fading social media site to book their gigs were shrimps made of Jesus, or Jesus made of Shrimps: either way, I was not expecting the quality to be high, or even particularly human.

Part of this is sour grapes. I’m not free on a Monday often, and the “be the first through the door who hasn’t already signed up on Facebook” seemed an unfair way of deciding who got to go on stage.

But I put my instrument back in its bag, found a nice seat, and sat down and watched anyway.

Much of the rest of the criticism here is general – about the sort of people who get up and sing – and not against the night itself. Because, barring the aforementioned weird Facebook fixation, and the inexplicable lack of an interval, this was a damn-near exemplary Open Mic night. The guy that runs it clearly cares, deeply, and the regulars clearly respect the night and the artists.

It’s a nice, cabaret-style venue. The lighting is flattering. The audience shuts up and listens. On stage, it’s easy to plug in and play, and there’s a keyboard, a stool, and a high and low mic – basically, everything you could ever need for this kind of gig.

When I last came to this night, back in the dead days of late December, it was an unusually comedy-and-spoken-word dominated show. There were lots of jokes about vibrators, and sex in your fifties, and poems about equality.

This time, it was entirely music – and serious, earnestly-meant music at that, save from one parody hip-hopper early on, who humblebragged about being on masterchef at the start, and went downhill from there. It was hard to tell whether this was cringe or intentionally cringe, but either way – said act leaving straight after his own songs was the cringest thing of all.

Everyone else was pretty good. This might be an “extremely old person” kind of observation, but one thing I noticed was how so many of these singers were apeing a very distinctive vocal style. There was one guy who copied Chris Martin out of Coldplay’s vocal tics to the letter – and he was one of the more original singers on the lineup. Towards the end, a young man sang a Bob Dylan cover with such sincerety, and certainly with his own accent, that it floored the room into reverential silence.

It also made me wonder about the vowel-swallowing Ed Sheeran copyists we sat through – these people clearly could sing, and work their way through a song. So why sing in a way that’s so clearly false, and been done before?

Ah well. None of this was the nice young chap who ran the night’s fault. I’ll definitely return, when I can – and I recommend any fans of live music in Brighton to do the same.