Music: At the edge of the sea

The Wedding Present’s two-day summer festival creates a splash

An indoor mini-festival curated by David Gedge of indie icons the Wedding Present, this two-day event always takes place on the August Bank Holiday weekend, and always features both The Wedding Present and their alter-ego Cinerama.
Devised while siting in a roadside cafe whilst on tour, the inaugural At The Edge of the Sea festival took place in 2009, a one-day event that eventually morphed into a two-day event in 2013. As well as featuring many band members, past and present, Gedge invites acts from here in Brighton, as well as from around the globe. Over the years acts such as The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, The Pipettes, Badly Drawn Boy, Martin Rossiter, The Twilight Sad and The Membranes have graced the event, along with a plethora of lesser known artists.
As is the custom nowadays, The Wedding Present dig out one of their past albums, and play it in its entirety. This year, it’s the turn of Saturnalia, their fifth album, released in 1996, and the last one before the band decided to ‘retire’ and become Cinerama, essentially the same band but with a different sound and style. Although Cinerama became The Wedding present again in the early noughties, Cinerama continues as a side project, albeit usually a very part-time one, often just performing their only gig of year at The Edge of the Sea, the band switching instruments around. However Cinerama recently released a re-vamped version of the Wedding Present’s Valentina album, so expect to hear that this year.

This year’s event also features a recently reformed My Life Story (led by Brighton based Jake Shillingford, and who enjoyed a number of minor hits in the mid-late 90s); Birmingham’s The Nightingales, who formed in 1979 out of the ashes of punk legends The Prefects; Tom and Alex White’s new band The Fiction Aisle; the all-male tribute to The Donnas in the form of The Donalds, who feature Art Brut’s Eddie Argos and the Wedding Present’s Charlie Layton; ex-Wedding Present bassist Terry de Castro, Haiku Salut, Witching Waves and many others.
Also on the agenda will be David Gedge digging out some 78s for a DJ set, a DJ set from Edie Argos and Charlie Layton’s Wedding Present Bingo!
Concorde 2, Sat 29-Sun 30 August, 3-10pm (both days).£22/£40. Day and weekend tickets are available.