A Bit of Brighton Electric History, In a Small Nutshell.
An attempt to tell the Brighton Electric story in (about) 500 words.
Brighton Electric was founded in 1999 with £700, some mates & a quick carpentry lesson by floodlight in a disused warehouse at 1 in the morning.
Working a full time job & trying to find somewhere in Brighton to rehearse. Waiting for my soon-to-be famous band, Furbricks, to move down from Leicester & join me, which never happened. We did however build what would become one of the most loved & award winning studios in Europe & amongst the top 50 facilities in the world. Not bad.
We knew nothing, like studio babies. We built walls out of 2x2 stud work & pulled the (free) dirty old carpet out of the skips at carpetright (think grannies bathroom.. really) This we rolled up & piled in the gaps between the stud. 3 practice rooms, a hip hop label office & a tiny recording studio. Over time it sank, the walls bulged & cracked & small insects started crawling out. Pretty gross & also dog shit as soundproofing. Bloody cheap though! Alongside this I worked a full time job to fund the construction & worked 100 hours a week for a few years. I went through several relationships with partners who had no idea what they had let themselves in for.
Speaking to Skint records & the band Orbital on my mobile phone outside my flat in Shoreham thinking I’d made it. Truth was the hard work was only just beginning (neither of them used the studio, though Orbital lent me some money to buy my first set of monitors — thanks Phil!)
Anyway there it was — some dodgy carpet filled walls & a small studio complex in Hove that stood for… 18 months. The Big Yellow Storage people also didn’t know what they’d let themselves in for & decided that storage was a far more profitable use of 2000ft2 so kicked me out (no lease, just a storage agreement). I begged the bands who were using it to come down & destroy it all. Provided 10 crow bars & crates of beer. They loved it.
So, then I was homeless for 6 months. Tramway house came up & I pulled my hair out dealing with a meticulous corporate lawyer but finally secured a 5 yr lease. Moved in & started building… Initially the recording studio was upstairs & I would record bands with a bottle of whiskey uner the console, talking a slug every 1/2 hr to calm my nerves, learning on the job. It was risking everything, no money, no savings whatsoever & winging it, the bills came in thick & fast but the Brighton Music scene grew fast. FOALs rehearsed their first album right next to my (poorly) soundproofed tiny office. I hated them after 3 months but they were friendly enough & the management paid up, which was welcome. Bands around the place started hanging out, it was cheap & there were no rules. Eighties Matchbox, The Maccabees, The Mutts, Charlottefield, The Customers (later became Metronomy) to name just a few. The parties were a lot of fun, all night, heavily dosed & with at least 10 bands knocking themselves out with anything they could grab. Fancy dress, idols, sponsors, whatever we could get our hands on. One time a friend filled a supermarket trolley at ASDA with bottles of vodka on new years eve & walked out with the lot — we were sorted for booze that year.
So ten years of growth, building, spending, partying hard, it was a lot of fun & totally stressful too. I think I lived on adrenalin for those 10 yrs. Finally in 2010 we were nominated for studio of the year by Music Week. The Cure started using us as Robert Smith loved the place. Florence Welch dropped by. I guess it had something to do with the vibes.
In 2016 Brighton Electric won the Pro Sound Studio of The Year award & last year we opened our bar. Though it’s not quite as mad as it used to be for me - I now have 2 kids —it’s still the hub & beating heart of the Brighton Music Scene. Though many have copied our style & ideas over the years, no one can quite capture what we do here, because we love it & well, just don’t give a f*ck either. Roll on, BE.
