Things we wish we knew before going to our first Great Escape: Everything’s a venue. The queues start early. Brighton’s bigger than you think. Those seagulls mean business.  More importantly though, we wish we’d had someone curate the line-up for us – since trying to see over 500 artists in more than 30 different pop-up stages around the city is obviously impossible. Follow the music into whatever pub, club, church, theatre, bandstand and hole in the wall you find and you’ll have an amazing weekend, but pick a few directions to head in and you’ll probably have a better one.  We ..read more

“And now, ladies and gentlemen… Here’s Grace!” the Jamaican-born, New York-raised vocalist, actor, model and muse Grace Jones tells us seven minutes into ‘Slave To The Rhythm – (Hot) Blooded Version’, as if she ever needed the introduction. Her discography, acting credits, 80s posse – which included Naomi Campbell, Fela Kuti, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol – and status as a bastion of boundary-pushing androgynous fashion have carved an avant-garde lane that only Grace could inhabit. Unabashed in discussing themes of poverty, sexuality, love and vulnerability – all set again ..read more

Last night Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band kicked off the UK leg of their 2024 World Tour at the Cardiff Principality Stadium. A whopping 30 song set spanned The Boss’ greatest hits, tour debuts and covers of Patti Smith, Commodores and more. Take a closer look at the action below. All photos by Marie Ladisch. Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band head next to Belfast and Ireland before dates in Sunderland and London – limited tickets are available here Bruce Springsteen, Cardiff Principality Stadium in photos is from Ticketmaster UK. Read more by Ticketmaster on Ticketmaster UK - D ..read more

One Million Love Songs, the second album by Chicago’s Bnny (the project of singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius), is a lot about inevitability. Loss, heartbreak, change – these things are all inevitable. But so is finding new love after loss, even if you don’t want it. So is the sound of the birds outside, even if you shut yourself in your room. The first thing we hear on the album’s opening track, ’Missing’, is the sound of those birds. Viscius wrote her first album, the raw and grief-soaked Everything, after the death of her boyfriend, Chicago musician Trey Gruber. One Milli ..read more

There was absolutely no way Gary Numan ever envisaged he’d be celebrating the 45th anniversaries of his 1979 albums Replicas – his final album with Tubeway Army – and The Pleasure Principle, his debut solo album. Mainly because he believed his career would have been over soon after. It very nearly was.  “It was pretty difficult to begin with, the press being quite hostile,” Gary tells us from Brighton, through a fog of jet-lag, having touched down from his home in Los Angeles only the night before. “I never really thought much beyond it. You just find life has its own momen ..read more

At the centre of the mind map that connects artists and performers such as Britney Spears, Usher, Tinashe, Ciara, Teyana Taylor, Troye Sivan, Normani, Kendrick Lamar, Camp Lo, KAYTRANADA, Blade Brown, Big Pun – even Shaquille O’Neal – is Janet “Damita Jo” Jackson. A singer-songwriter, dancer, actor and born performer, Janet Jackson’s decade-spanning career has been ripe with culture-defining moments, from appearing on The Cher Show at just eight years old to her 1993 Rolling Stone cover photo to being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. Though her career initially began as th ..read more

School friends Mollie McGinn and Orláith Forsythe have just released a debut album together. From songwriting at the back of school classrooms to Reading and Leeds slots, the duo have had quite the rise over the last few years, gathering a wide fanbase across the UK and Ireland and patenting a sound that manages to be both nostalgic and entirely self-identified. For McGinn and Forsythe, putting out this record together was an inevitability. “It’s definitely been a very long journey,” says McGinn. “We’ve been writing this album really for about three years. We thought about how we wanted our de ..read more

Formed over a decade ago after meeting during a co-writing workshop in California, The Midnight are a musical duo fuelled by curiosity.  Proof that opposites truly do attract, the project merges the talents of Southern-born singer-songwriter Tyler Lyle and Danish-bred drummer and producer Tim McEwan. The former’s all-American storytelling charm intertwining with the latter’s penchant for cinematic soundscapes and infectious pop hooks, what’s formed at the intersection can only be described as magic. A marriage of synthwave, dance, and pop that invokes the neon imagery of the 80s, the duo ..read more

After all the TGE Presents teasers in London, The Great Escape festival is finally just around the corner. Hitting Brighton’s venues, bars, theatres and wherever else can squeeze in a few amps and a drum kit, the festival features hundreds of acts on the rise. All the choice can be overwhelming, but our Ticketmaster New Music stages are a great place to start. This year we’ll be taking over Horatio’s on the Pier on Thursday evening, before having The Deep End on the beach all to ourselves on Friday afternoon. Get to know who’s playing below. Horatio’s, Thursday 16 May freekind. Blending fami ..read more

If you look back on what you achieved in your late teens and early twenties with a grimace, it’s probably best to avoid learning anything about Billie Eilish. The first artist born in the 2000s to have a No.1 hit, Eilish was just seventeen when she won all four main Grammy categories with her debut album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? Praised for her creative production and her introspective, thoughtful songwriting, Eilish has rivalled artists twice her age ever since she entered the industry – although admittedly, at that time, said artists would have been only twenty-eight… Billie ..read more