Viva Brighton Issue #65 July 2018

PRIDE
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Guilty Pleasures
‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus’
There’s a thing, apparently
a growing thing,
called Slow Listening,
where people sit quietly
in a pub and listen
attentively to a whole
classic album, usually in
vinyl form. Some nod
at particular nuances.
Others tut at their
nodding. Others bristle
at their tutting. There
are parallels with John Peel in his pre-punk DJ
days, when he’d play an entire LP, usually by a
prog combo not averse to jazz cigarettes, without
interruption.
Guilty Pleasures isn’t Slow Listening. It’s a
peripatetic club night, a regular at the Spiegeltent,
and now coming to Pride (or, more precisely the
LoveBN1Fest on the Sunday) with its non-stop
celebratory pop assault. 90s Swedish pop duo
Roxette inadvertently provided what could be its
tagline with the title of their Greatest Hits album:
‘Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus!’
“Yeah, it’s pure sugar rush” says GP creator and
host Sean Rowley. “It all started 14 years ago
when I had a show on BBC London Radio, a show
with real credibility, and within the show we started
a slot for reclaiming songs you loved but that it
was deemed slightly shameful to love. There was
very much one foot in the 70s then: songs like Oh
Lori by the Alessi Brothers, Bee Gees songs, Lido
Shuffle by Boz Scaggs. It all took off from there.
Over the years we’ve evolved, by nature of being
a massive Saturday night club brand, so that now
we’re very much rooted in pop from the 90s, the
noughties and even contemporary stuff. It’s all
very much verse-chorus, out, and on to the next.
Someone described it
brilliantly, saying that
what we do is like throwing
raw meat to the
lions. More! Not that I
ever had a masterplan.”
Sean’s on the cover
of Oasis’s 1995 album
(What’s The Story) Morning
Glory? walking down
Soho’s Berwick Street.
Before then he was
Bananarama’s plugger, getting them slots on telly.
He was a hardcore triathlete and he once swam
the channel. These days, Eckhart Tolle’s Power
Of Now is “my bible”, he meditates daily, uses the
Headspace app, and has a radio show on BBC
Radio Kent, that does indeed play obscure album
tracks that sometimes don’t have an obvious
chorus. On Saturdays, though, at London’s Koko,
and at festivals from Glastonbury to Latitude, his
Guilty Pleasures persona is foregrounded.
“We have performers, too – at Pride we’ve a drag
queen dance group, Glitter Heat, who perform
to Bonnie Tyler songs. At festivals we’ll throw in
John Paul Young’s Love Is In The Air, which was
always obligatory in the early days. If there’s one
song that’s been a constant, it’s probably Don’t
Stop Me Now by Queen. In 1978 when it came out,
Queen were naff. I remember back then, thinking
‘I don’t like Queen. But I love this!’ We could dissect
the concept, but it simply works. I remember
looking out on the dancefloor years ago and there
were various members of the band The Strokes
dancing with Vanessa Feltz. I thought ‘f*** me,
I’m onto a winner here!’”
Andy Darling
LoveBN1 Fest, Sunday 5th August
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