Ahoy there. For seven years, Portsmouth’s new music festival Soutshea Fest has been rather secretively premiering some of the country’s biggest guitar acts – from Django Django and Dry The River to Bastille and Pulled Apart By Horses – the festival seems to have taken great pride in placing explosive new acts in tiny sweatbox venues and allowing them to detonate.
Taking place along one road this Saturday, the ten or so venues included in your £18 ticket all have a dusty, nautical feel, with pubs and music venues hosting a solid 12 hours of boot-salting live music each, some reaching into the wee small hours with late night DJ sets.
Headliners include Future Of The Left and Veronica Falls. You can now view the event’s full clashfinder here, but below is some of our highlights to help you navigate through the stormy 100+ live acts set to perform. Now, avast ye matey.
Rex Domino – 12pm, Xtra Mile Recordings @ The Atrium
This is quite an early set for Rex Domino, already something of a scene ringleader in Portsmouth and local, championed troubadour at the age of 18, Huw Olesker’s bitter, cynical, sometimes comical, and always cutting lyrics will be a heck of an interesting first act of the day. You might wind up in a conga down the street wearing your shoes on your hands, or you could be sat on the floor laughing uncontrollably… both have happened during their shows before at Soutshea Fest. This is truly intelligent and mind-blowing stuff.
MT – 4:20pm, DIY Presents @ The Wedgewood Rooms
Occasionally a band comes along that’s so otherworldly, that they fit this gap in your record collection you had no idea existed. With a 90’s REM take on modern surf-pop and slanty-eyed salute to 80’s pop, the long hair, baggy t-shirts and inconceivable indie of London’s MT is a joy live, and fits just that bill. They’re not ones to be missed and already gaining a following around The Smoke.
MMX – 5:30pm, Notion @ The Kings Theatre
This is bright, layered pop in the style of Woodkid, only programmed more for the Summer than Autumn. It’s more pop in fact than the history of Southsea Fest would allude to, but the kind that connects so comfortably right now. Performing in the luxurious Kings Theatre at the heart of the festival – this could very well define the last Saturday of the summer.
Thumpers – 7:40pm, DIY Presents @ The Wedgewood Rooms
Thumpers are already pretty known in exhales of new bands to watch, their dreamy and bold, euphoric sound up there with Sound Of Arrows and Yeasayer could just be the big one of the festival with an early-ish, 7:40pm stage time. Keep an eye on this one.
The Computers – 9:15pm, Alcopop! @ The Edge of The Wedge
This is the smallest, and arguably most combustive, venue of the festival. This tiny space leading from a doorway inside the Wedgewood Rooms is where last year Tellison played a similar late night set last year, and where Pulled Apart By Horses crowd surfed through an entire performance in 2011. The Computers are known to bring the noise, so if anywhere is primed to be mosh ground zero, it’s this set… if you can get in.
Drenge – 10:20pm, The Fat Fox
Pretty much everything you want or need in a two-piece band. When two guys get up on stage and throw as much at you as this, you do wonder what all those other bands are wasting their money on. Part Black Keys, a little bit Subways, and very White Stripes-gone-punk, this is angry, sweaty and full-on. Fun as well.
–Michael Hall