‘We wanted to put a mark on the world’: the sweaty, singular indie music scene of early-00s Brighton

From Bat for Lashes to Brakes and the Pipettes, misfits on the south coast made fearless music amid cheap rents and salty air. Could this ever happen again?

It’s any given night in 2002. We’re at the Free Butt in Brighton, a small pub with a stage and an anything-goes spirit that serves as an extended living room and rite-of-passage workplace for aspiring musicians. Natasha Khan – not yet Bat for Lashes, still a Brighton University art student – is dancing on top of the bar while Yeah Yeah Yeahs are tearing through their first UK tour. Guy McKnight, the lead singer of the brutally underrated Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, has just finished pulling pints, his day job when he’s not the city’s greatest frontman. Steve Ansell of Cat on Form, soon to form Blood Red Shoes, is the in-house sound engineer. Joe Mount from Metronomy is watching this week’s buzziest local support band. The atmosphere is charged with the feeling that anyone in the room might be about to become someone known beyond our city’s limits. Often, they did.

In the early 2000s, music scenes tended to have stories that bands and media could rally around: a shared silhouette, a signature sound, a shaped mythology. New York City gave us the Strokes and Interpol with their tight black denim and wiry riffs; Libertines-era London had its own sticky churn of style, press and parties. Yet Brighton was rarely described as a scene, despite being home to Nick Cave and Paul McCartney and hothousing a surge of remarkable young talent that’s still thriving more than 20 years later. In this seaside enclave, rock bands sounded and looked so unlike each other, they never needed to jostle for a single narrow lane.