Music

Mardi-Gras, Carnevale, Pancake-Day… wherever you are or whatever you call it… in the Christian tradition it’s a day to consume all your treats and celebrate before midnight, because from tomorrow (Ash Wednesday) you’ve got to be on your best behaviour until Easter Sunday

Glenn Veness and his wife, Kathy, are a couple on a mission. A mission to create peace, love and happiness amidst a suburban council estate in Hollington.  I was buzzing earlier this year when I popped my Glennstonbury Festival cherry.

If you’re local to the Hastings area and you haven’t heard of Brook Tate yet, do you even have ears? Whether he is painting, writing, teaching maths, singing or dancing, Brook Tate is a force to be reckoned with: an insanely talented creative and proud human being with the courage to be vulnerable in front of audiences, as well as being unapologetically himself

It’s the Wednesday morning following Jack in the Green and everyone is exhausted due to five days without water – and what does any sensible Hastinger drink when there’s no water? Beer!

No doubt it seemed like a great idea at the time. But the best-laid acid house plans and all that… On May 6, Marky Souter left his home in Cornwall at 5am to catch an early morning flight out of Newquay to Gatwick. From there, he took the train to Hastings

Meet the new wave of Young Music Promotors on the South Coast. After some turbulent and stormy years for hospitality everywhere, Hastings is fortunate that a new wave of young promoter blood is washing onto the south coast shores

What do you get if you cross ‘90s Britpoppers, an indie rock/post-punk heritage, and an electronica queen with a St Leonards sensibility? You get Aircooled. If that sounds like a joke, it most definitely isn’t.

Poly Styrene is a Punk Icon.Poly Styrene’s image, words and music willLive Forever.Poly Styrene will continue to inspire, educate and excite generations to come. Poly’s daughter, Celeste Bell summed her mother up beautifully in her introduction to the book ‘Dayglo – The Poly Styrene Story’ (Omnibus Press, 2019).

Is he a mint with a hole? (No, but he does carry them around in his pocket). Is he a German hatchback or a game for posh people on horseback? No! He’s actually a genius Argentinian composer and pianist living in Hastings and he’s one of the loveliest people I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing.

When I first began looking into my family ancestry I had no idea of the impact it would have on my life. In January 2022 I was feeling creatively stuck. The post-covid landscape for musicians such as myself was looking pretty bleak and my Dad had just been diagnosed with mixed Dementia and Alzheimer’s. 

When I got into the car the other morning to take my kid to school, the radio defaulted to BBC 6 Music and I immediately heard something I recognised. It was ‘Treasure’ by HotWax and once the song finished, Lauren Laverne was gushing about them being the ones to watch out for in 2023. At this point, I had already interviewed the band for Get Hastings but even in that short period, their potential had grown so much.

Vinyl records are cumbersome. They’re delicate and are susceptible to warping in the heat. They can be annoying to flip over. But they’re also perhaps the only piece of media technology that has remained unchanged in 75 years, when the first mass-produced 33rpm disc was manufactured for Columbia Records in 1948.

“Why!? What’s he done?” Louisa, the landlady of the Tower pub asks when I mention that we’d like to take some photos to go with my interview of James Endeacott, the subject I had left sitting on a sofa in front of a pictorial shrine to the Arsenal football team.