Reviewed by Oliver Boyle
Previously known as ‘Access All Areas’, the Outside/Inside festival is a definite must-see for anyone engaged with the Leicester music scene, spanning across firebug’s two stages as well as Duffy’s – the food, the drink, the music and the people mashed together make events like these the best days out you can get in Leicester.
And for a good cause too. The Bridge is a homelessness community outreach charity doing invaluable work in the city, Luke Broughton the creative lead for The Bridge and organiser for Outside/Inside festival invited us down to take a look.
Here’s some of what we managed to catch…
Saturday
With the arranged opener Stanley Iyanu being caught up with a delayed train on the way from London, it fell to the Bellatones to open up this promising weekend.
Making their Firebug debut for today, this Leicester native six-piece band had all the bells and whistles you could want, real mood setters. they set the tone of the weekend, with original songs like dreams new day and we don’t know what it’s like, it was incredible. With the room starting to fill up, the band was both literally and figuratively singing from the same song sheet.
Kicking off the first of many trips to and from the Firebug to Duffy’s Bar, I am confident that the chilli me and my friend had later in the night was worked off.
Next up at Duffy’s was Becky, a local performer who in the space of 30 minutes took a room of a few dozen people and told them a story, with her acoustic guitar and a discography featuring songs exploring her struggles with her sexuality, past relationships, parenthood and her battle with an eating disorder which was especially moving.
With the sun going down on Millstone Lane, Duffy’s filled up for The Miskicks, a band comprising of members from other bands from the weekend – familiar faces with new sounds…
with a festival full of acts with original songs, one of my favourite songs had to be porcelain baby with the lyric which has stuck with me “she’s not Lycra, you can’t stretch her, She’s not Lycra, she won’t let ya” a fashionably Sarcee’ performance and exactly what was needed after a dinner at Firebug with my friend Scarlet.
18:45 comes round and barrelling onto stage comes The Wonky Portraits. These trombones-tooting art-rock, and unglamorous music collective members describing themselves as “too pop to be considered punk, but too punk to be considered pop” really brought the energy to the upstairs of Firebug.
Tucked into a nook on the front left wing served great for a viewing of these performers, with intermediating misadventures, with the introduction of bubbles and several beach balls between tunes, this mad bunch were a laugh.
While writing this article, a fair while later, (for which I apologise profusely) I’m still wrapping my head around this set. Roo Stafford and the Inits are a hardcore collective that no one I know who’s seen them live could put any words to, nor draw any comparison from anything they had seen before.
Although there is plenty of subject matter for these lot I feel the best way to put you, the reader, into the bar floor through this article is to say that Roo Stafford kicked off the set by dedicating it to Alan Partridge while presenting a framed portrait of the comedian, with songs entitled Rock And Roll And Murder that stage was absolute chaos.
Spellgaze is a band which for anyone who’s present in the Leicester music scene, is in no need of an introduction for. And As usual for these lot, Duffy’s Bar was packed out for them.
Ben, Sam and Pedro together form a gritty shoegaze group who’s setlist is strategically curated and ordered. All the pieces played were original, yet the set was nostalgic with clear influences from bands like Deftones and Slowdive.
Between chatting to Spellgaze’s impeccable vocalist Ben and getting a drink at Firebug, we ventured upstairs to see The Societys, a band who brand themselves as ‘Leicester’s Gary Lineker’ and to be honest I can’t think of a better description.
Sunday
After a busy Saturday I was back at Firebug for the second day, now joined by my friend Paulina, we found a spot at the bar next to Firebug’s ground floor stage which had now been set up. The first person to preform that morning was L’ku.
L’ku utilizes synths, various bells, kalimbas and other instruments to create a strange sort of lucid atmosphere in the bar, one which captured the attendance from the bar staff and festival attendees in turn- he ventured from the stage down to the bar floor and proceeded to hand out multi coloured bells to the audience.
Aswell as the introduction of a third stage to the festival, there were also two spoken word poets in the form of Cathi Rae and James Scott Howes.
Cathi Rae is a great story teller who gave a very personable performance of her poems exploring her job as a cleaner for a wealthy family and her disdain for them in an incredibly emotive poem entitled your cleaner hates you, she then went into a piece which explored her relationship with her late father through the perspective of his hands – going from being “shaped like spears” to “resembling that of an untrained artists depiction”. A very moving hour.
The second poet of the evening was James Scott Howes who took on a more visceral and confrontational style to the poetry in his set which explored themes of “violent affirmation” and how it takes “guts to be passionate”. At one point he even told the audience “you are all going to die”. A quite peculiar way to get an audience on side.
Now for one of my favourite sets of the weekend, Honest Dave, a beautiful performance from Dave and the rest of the band, with their saxophone, guitar and ‘wooden knock’ played a varied discography; featured songs that tackled a Rwandan witch who was able to convince a militia of Hutu to lay down their arms and saved over 100 Tutsis, a song which spoke out against sex crimes in the K-pop industry, a song dedicated to social workers and a call to arms for people to watch other people’s drinks. Firebug was all there for it.
The organiser of the event, Luke Broughton, also performed a set the evening- it wasn’t the first time I had seen them perform live and it most definitely won’t be the last, picking up from the great JJ Lovegrove, it was the most packed I’d ever seen Firebug’s bar floor. And on a Sunday at that.
After Shaking ourselves loose from the grip of Luke’s set we managed to catch Ranger and Serina Jasmine’s set at Duffy’s Bar , capitalizing on the intimate nature of the stage room they both delivered a varied set consisting of well polished guitar solos, angelic singing, rapping, and even a political commentary on ongoing conflicts in the middle east, a theme that was on running throughout most performances during the weekend.
One of the last performances I was able to catch during the event was “your weird cousins favourite rapper”, Comprehend, and Jay Dagley, both local Leicester rappers and mental health advocates who preformed some songs from an unreleased project tackling themes of mental health and addiction, in a very mature and blunt way which left much to contemplate once in my uber home.
All round, a weekend well spent in Leicester, gigs like these are time spent well with the plethora of new talent popping up consistently at Venues like Duffy’s Bar and Firebug coupled with artists like Luke Broughton fostering these new breakout bands, poets and solo acts alike – if you’ve never been to one before, make sure you do.
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