Brighton Festival + Flaming Lips = win

We love Brighton, here at Somethingyousaid.com. It’s a vibrant, exciting city with an exhilarating music and arts scene, so when the Brighton Festival comes around, we’re always mad keen to check it out. This year, three weeks of unrivalled arts celebration sees Guest Director Michael Rosen – a celebrated poet, writer and broadcaster – at the helm.

In 2011 Brighton Festival took the art world by surprise, appointing Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi as Guest Director. Other previous Guest Directors have included Vanessa Redgrave; actress and human rights campaigner, renowned visual artist Anish Kapoor and the celebrated musician/mad-as-a-bag-of-spoons-producer Brian Eno.

This year’s Brighton Festival holds in store over 370 performances and 154 events in 30 venues across the city. Things to look out for on the music front are the brilliant, kaleidoscopic Flaming Lips, the high priestess of independent-minded pop Sinéad O’Connor, folkster Sam Lee, beatboxing mentalist Beardyman, and Adam Buxton’s really interesting BUG (which we saw in Sydney and was awesome). To give it a B-town flavour he’s presenting a Fatboy Slim special.

There’s also heaps of Art, Film, Theatre, Comedy and Dance on offer at the festival, which takes place from 4th to 26th May. It really is an eclectic mix, so there’s likely something for everyone. If you can’t find anything you like on the bill, then you really need to cheer the hell up.

A bunch of the stuff is free too. Like, really good shit as well. So visit the official website for ticket/line-up info and follow the festival on Facebook to keep bang up to date.

Flaming Lips photographs by Sophie Metcalfe.