Brighton gigs in close collaboration with the record labels

SussexWorld

David Martin, contemporary music producer at Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival, is evolving a new approach to music programming, working closely with record labels.

Transcript

00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sausage Newspaper. It's really

00:07lovely this afternoon to speak to David Martin, who is the Contemporary Music Producer at

00:11Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival. And you've come up with a really interesting and much

00:16more curated approach to putting on music, especially in the two venues that have just

00:21come back on stream in Brighton. What's it all about? How's it work? What's the thinking?

00:27Yeah, well, exactly as you say, a lot of people know in Brighton that the

00:31Brighton Dome has been undergoing a lot of refurbishment and over the last year we've

00:37been bringing the little Studio Theatre and the Corn Exchange venues back online. Studio Theatre

00:44is quite small, 300 capacity sort of size, and the Corn Exchange is a sort of middle-sized venue,

00:50round about 900,000 people. And having those two spaces has sort of allowed us to not just

00:58focus on necessarily big name acts that would normally get into the Brighton Dome concert hall,

01:05but to kind of go for perhaps a little bit more experimental kind of nights and sort of more

01:10bespoke curated programmes. And one of the things I thought was really a really good opportunity was

01:16as Brighton Dome is an independent music venue, and you know, music venues are struggling all

01:21across the country, and I think that as people's sort of music habits as well are kind of shifting

01:27and evolving, and the role of I think the record label is evolving with that as well. I was

01:33interested in the idea of record labels curating nights at the Brighton Dome, and record labels are

01:40the arbiters of taste and kind of talent spotting, and when you're a new band you're often looking

01:47for a label to kind of take you on and take you into their kind of family. And so I was interested

01:52in labels, some of which are local to Brighton, like Bella Union and True Thoughts, to kind of

01:57curate nights, bringing talent that they're excited about all together to create a programme for

02:03audiences to kind of explore. And one of the things that's really exciting about that is

02:09it's that element of discovery, so often people will come maybe to see one band that they've heard

02:15of, but they'll discover, you know, two other or three other bands on the lineup that maybe they

02:20hadn't come across yet, and it's a way of just expanding your kind of music horizons

02:25through something that's kind of well curated and well thought through. And it sounds brilliant in

02:30terms of the fact that it's clearly working three ways, isn't it? Great for the venues, great for

02:34the bands, great for the labels. Yeah, I think so, and I think that, you know, audiences, you know,

02:43they have, like, the labels are a way of kind of targeting the tastes of audiences as well, you

02:49know, you want, when you go and see, you know, bands, sometimes a support band can feel a little

02:55bit of an add-on, a sort of afterthought, almost, in the show. I'm really interested in the whole

03:00show feeling like a whole experience, so it's not just like you're just waiting for the support band

03:05to finish before you can see the main event. The whole thing is sort of creative in some of

03:10its parts, that's the dream for a well-curated night. That sounds perfect. Well, good luck

03:15with the series, lovely to speak to you. Thank you.

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