Thursday 17/05/07 Day 1 @ The Great Escape, Brighton

If Gigwise were to take just three things away from The Great Escape 2007 they would be: the realisation that it is impossible to build a sandcastle on a stony beach, Lovefoxxx from CSS is easily the sexiest thing on the planet and Harry Ramsden will quickly lose his market share if he expects people eat baked beans with a chip fork for much longer (why the consumer forum on www.harryramsden.com isn’t going mental over this I don’t know). These nuggets of insight are obviously supplemented by a delicious trio of hangovers, paranoid early morning episodes, oh and a pier’s worth of ****ing awesome new bands to sweat, drink and gurn to. Welcome to the seaside.

After rudely stomping out of a surreal Canadian beer ‘n’ cheese shindig at the Sea life Centre (saved only by the sensitive howling set of acoustic strummer Dan Mangan – think Ray Lamontagne but less like a serial killer) Gigwise shot over to Zap bar for the first big draw of the sprawling festival – Kubichek! with the queue for this one seemingly stretching into the sea, the Geordie foursome take the responsibility of firing the weekend’s starting pistol very seriously indeed. The fact that they substitute it for a starting A-bomb shouldn't have been that unexpected given the self-imposed exclamation mark at the end of their name. Unapologetically tearing through their high octane, guitar-raping set, punctuated by bassist Frog’s humorous interjections, the ‘chek! sound like a roughed-up Maximo Park if they’d had more sex at school. Kubichek!’s explosive, inhibition-losing show leaves the crowd hungry for more acts to ingest and spits them out onto the promenade with a severe case of ‘gig eyes’. It is only 7pm after all.

Bouncing onward to take in the contrasting sounds of Sam Isaacs and The Kissaway Trail, sees Gigwise dart across a roundabout, trip, fall and graze a knee. Not only painful and embarrassing but a stark reminder that strong Canadian lager is not a game. Anyway, music: Sam Isaacs’ “Get Cape” tinged shift upstairs in bar Audio looks to be mistimed. Nice enough and certainly inoffensive but his acoustic, conversational style fails to really hold the room. This specially applies to those who’ve just had their tits blasted off at Zap or have migrated from The Kissaway’s barnstormer downstairs…these five Danes craft a handful of epic, brooding songs that build in front of (and win over) a crowd primarily in attendance to see youcodenameis… a few hours down the line.