The Music Void’s Chris McLellan reports from the 5th year of the UK’s Great Escape music Convention and Showcase (Brighton, UK May 13-15), which bills itself as “Europe’s Leading Festival For New Music”.

Just a short 50 minute train journey from central London is the Victorian spa town of Brighton. With its famous pebble beach hugging the English Channel, this stylish town of 250,000 is home to an extraordinary number of bars, restaurants, specialist shops and music venues. The place has a distinctly alternative vibe about it, and various UK subcultures have embraced its open and creative environment, making it a natural magnet for artists and musicians.

The many charms of Brighton were not lost on Martin Elborne and Jon McIldowie, who had witnessed first-hand how towns such as Austin and Toronto had made the most of their own local conditions to organise highly the successful SXSW and CMW/NXNE showcases. The pair also had a lot of respect for Eurosonic, the pan-European showcase held across The Channel in The Netherlands, and decided it was time the UK did something equally interesting and significant.

“We’re taking the EuroSonic concept to the UK, but it was never going to be in London. If EuroSonic was in Amsterdam it would be disastrous. You need to take people outside their comfort zone, somewhere they’re maybe not accustomed to. It also needs to be somewhere people can get around easily and doesn’t require 20 minute cab rides between venues.” -Martin Elbourne, interviewed in Virtual Festivals

Now running in its 5th year, The Great Escape has gone on to establish itself as arguably the UK’s single biggest music industry gathering, growing beyond the likes of Liverpool’s Soundcity, Manchester’s In The City, and London’s Musexpo. However, unlike these other UK music industry events, The Great Escape clearly has one eye fixed beyond its pebble beaches, and has incorporated a significant international presence.

This year, for example, saw Australia, Japan, France, Canada, Norway and Iceland all with a strong artistic and industry presence. Overall, artists representing over 58 countries played TGE this year.

The format of the Great Escape is mercifully compact in comparison to many industry showcases, and it manages to pack in quite a lot over its 3 days (Thurs-Sat). Musically, there are over 350 shows in 30+ venues, almost all of which are less than a 10-15 minute walk from each other, with many being practically side-by-side in the largely pedestrianised Town Centre.

So, with all of the ingredients in place for the UK to give the music world a special event that accurately reflects the richness, diversity, and importance of this music-mad little country. But in it’s 5th year, has The Great Escape found the right recipe and delivered the goods?

Well, yes and no.

The Great Escape Showcase – Something Special

This is where the co-founder’s expertise in booking music acts really shines through. All the way back in 1982 Martin Elbourne co-promoted the first Womad Festival and subsequently landed with Rough Trade in their agency division. There he worked with The Smiths, New Order, The Fall, Sisters Of Mercy among others. Martin currently books the main stages for Glastonbury, Lovebox, Jersey Live and part-books Guilfest.

TGE’s Martin Elbourne

In our opinion, Martin and the other TGE bookers have struck an almost perfect balance between buzzy new acts, so beloved of the music industry sausage-grinder, and crowd-pleasing established artists which give the event the sort of profile required to capture a an international media footprint.

Manchester’s Everything Everything

While booking in this combination may sound simple enough, it’s actually very challenging to get right. It’s crucial that headliner acts draw the right attention from the press and provide decent photo ops while not stealing the limelight from the core of the festival which are the emerging and/or unsigned acts. The bigger acts playing this year included Groove Armada, The Cribs, The Slits, Broken Social Scene, Delphic, Marina & The Diamonds, Tinie Tempah and Ellie Goulding, with the last four of those arguably ‘up-and-comers’ themselves.

India’s talented Raghu Dixit

It’s also vital that the international acts are accessible to the local industry and audiences, and here the TGE organisers were pretty much on the money with excellent acts such as India’s Raghu Dixit, who makes new fans with every appearance.

Of course, given its own billing, much of the event hinges upon booking the new and unsigned acts that will be tomorrow’s headliners. Some of the TGE acts getting chins wagging this year included Manchester’s Everything Everything and Egyptian Hip Hop, Oregon’s Jaguar Love, Brighton’s Esben & The Witch, New Jersey’s Real Estate, Liverpool’s Sound of Guns, France’s Jamaica, London’s Mount Kimbie, Australia’s Birds of Tokyo, and India’s Raghu Dixit.

To their credit, TGE has been considerate enough to take into consideration many acts from its host city, which is home to one of the UK’s most vibrant local scenes (one local artist told us recently that there are over 5,000 bands in the Brighton area alone. This is unconfirmed, but illustrates the point). Featured local artists of note included Blood Red Shoes and The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster.

All of the showcases that we attended (Raghu Dixit, White Belt/Yellow Tag, Kill It Kid, Still Fylin’, Coming Soon, Jaguar Love, Fortune, Naïve New Beaters…) were well organised and well attended. Brighton is custom-built for this sort of thing, and we’d challenge anyone to find a better town centre for a music showcase. Venues ranged from the intimate (The Hope, Live, Jam), to the slightly magical (Duke of York’s Cinema, Queen’s Hotel) and the relatively grand (Corn Exchange). We even attended a gig on the beach, which was interesting, if perhaps poorly booked (black hair mascara and white foundation in broad sunshine being slightly incongruous).

The event was compact, easy to navigate and the sponsorship (somewhat predictably a Beer company, a Cider company, a Jeanswear brand and a Cultural Export Ministry or three) was subtle enough not to be over-powering. In summary then, the 2010 TGE Showcase for 2010 was brilliant, with Brighton proving as much of a star as any that appeared on its many stages.

Can’t wait till next year.

The Great Escape Convention – Room For Improvement

Unfortunately, and like so many similar events and showcases, it was the Convention side where The Great Escape disappointed to some degree.

It certainly wasn’t the facilities or the staff that were at issue, as both the Pavilion Theatre, Brighton Dome and numerous and helpful volunteers provided a perfectly adequate environment for both panels and schmoozing. No, the issue we had was with the programming, which we felt was lacking across the four areas where any such event really needs to work, namely:

• Innovative formats
• Engaging topics
• Compelling presenters
• Audience engagement/participation

Having been to more than our fair share of symposiums, workshops, forums, Q&As, presentations and Keynote events, we at The Music Void feel we have earned the right to have an opinion about such things, and in our view the TGE 2010 Convention fell short on most of the above points more times than not.

While the topics seemed to cover most of the industry hot topics (Live, Discovery, File Sharing. Cloud Music, Marketing etc) there were some notable omissions; e.g. mobile. Listening to panels of “experts” discussing generic issues where they have little direct experience can grow tiring very quickly. We won’t name names here, but the guilty were obvious by either their silence or the quality of their input.

Oh to Hell with it, we’re a blog, so we’ll highlight a typical offender:

The Friday panel on “Music & Brands” covered nothing new (alcohol and mobile phone festivals sponsorships) and both the moderator and panelists were either unaware or forgot to mention the truly interesting things being done in this increasingly vital space (e.g. Red Bull’s Bedroom Jam, Bacardi/Groove Armada, Sony/Umbro/Kasabian). They simply did not have their finger on the pulse of what is happening in this area, in our view, or for whatever reason the real issues failed to emerge over the 45 minutes they were onstage.

Similarly, on Thursday, we found ourselves sitting with 75 people and Simon Fox, the CEO of HMV UK. This is a company that has been making an astonishing number of moves in the UK music space over the past 2 years, including expansion into live music, ticketing and artist management (not to mention getting their faces on a lot of dart boards from ex-Mama employees).

Unfortunately, rather than getting under the skin of all those recent moves, the 45 minutes we experienced can perhaps best be described as rather dull and lacking in anything new, informative or genuinely interesting. I’d rather have just been handed a copy of the HMV website About Us page – it would probably have been more insightful.

Of course, there were also glimmers of light during Convention as well, with a few sessions really standing out. Unsurprisingly, these all included Q&As with experienced and articulate music industry observers who were allowed to share their experiences with the audience more or less directly. This group included people such as Nick Littlemore (Empire of the Sun), Martin Elborne (The Great Escape, Glastonbury, etc), Phil Patterson (UKTI etc), John Harris (The Guardian/Q) and John Niven (Author, ‘Kill Your Friends’).

Despite these insightful speakers and a few decent networking events, however, we’d have to conclude that the TGE Convention leaves a fair bit of room for improvement if it is to become a genuine complement to the Showcase.

The Great Escape – A Few Thoughts For Improvement

Not that anybody asked us, but below are a few suggestions that we’d like to see adopted at TGE 2011 Convention:

Involve artists – We find it difficult to believe that in the emerging era of self-managed careers that none of the 350+ acts or their managers is interested in getting more involved in discussing the topics affecting them most.

Vet Your Guests – People who have not walked the walk simply cannot talk the talk. While there were unquestionably some great people speaking at the TGE Conference, they were diluted by the army of the mundane. If booking quality people is too tough or expensive, cover fewer topics. Enough said.

More Case Studies – Even better than talking-head panels, Case Studies are one of the best formats to share with an audience something that worked, or didn’t work, in real life with real artists with real data to back it all up. Obvious, no? Maybe even include the artist to get their side? Crazy to suggest?

Ban Powerpoint – Apparently, the Gulf War was planned by Powerpoint . Does music really want to be as crap and un-original as the Pentagon? Or, if there needs to be accompanying media, let it be a single image, with the presenter’s experience and insight filling in the rest. Worst case scenario: try the Pecha Kucha method: 7 slides. 7 minutes. 7 questions. Bye Bye.

Insist On Exclusivity – Every speaker should be contractually bound to share some piece of news, insight, statistic or deal that is exclusive to their appearance. Give delegates who talked their bosses into dipping into their travel budgets something to tweet about, and the bloggers at the back a little fodder for their posts.

Hold Alternative Awards – Ok, an awards show at a music gathering is nothing new and apparently there were some afternoon awards held this year. But forget the Brits or those ridiculous French things they give out during Midem and let’s see an evening where new and emerging artists and the industry come together at the Corn Exchange to vote on artists and/or companies that they’d like to recognise…together (gasp). Keep it short and sweet and wrap it all around two headline awards:

The Escape Award 1 – For the artist who did the most to defy odds, break free from the pack by doing something interesting online, on-stage or in partnership.

The Escape Award 2 – For the company, person, or technology that did the most to help new artists be seen by the most people in a way that retained their souls and enabled the world to share in their talent.

Until Next Year

The Music Void would like to thank Martin Elbourne and everyone at The Great Escape for another year of brilliant bands and to wish them all the success in the future. There’s certainly room to grow the Showcase side even more, and if the organisers decide to make some improvements to their Convention, which they have more than enough talent to do, then the music industry will really have something special on its hands for years to come.

Note: The Great Escape is part of the larger, month-long Brighton Festival. Worth looking into when booking for next year.

Other readers also read:
A Great Escape from Reality?
Event Report: Liverpool Sound City 2010
Event Report: Eurosonic 2010
Why Doesn’t the Music Industry Have Answers to the Big Questions?
Event Report – Unconvention: Music and Pies
The Art of Discovery
The Human Recommendation Engine
US Music Biz Hits All Time Low – Future is Bright