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Brighton Life, Clothes, Fashion, Style

50 Plus… and a chance meeting by David Collyer

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I spent my teenage years in the South West of Surrey, pretty much equidistant between London and Brighton, and it was always one of those two places that called my friends and I when we needed a touch of metropolitan sophistication, or of course to strengthen our wardrobes. In my early twenties, London won and I moved there, the bright lights of the Big Smoke pulling me away from my leafy childhood home.

Brighton, however, always felt like a magical place. I visited often. My younger brother, a musician, moved there, and as many a musician does ended up working a side hustle. In his case, the cook in Hotel Pelirocco. I’d been an early 1980s mod revivalist, and of course with thoughts of Quadrophenia in mind, Brighton always felt like a pilgrimage.

Scroll forward almost 40 years and I’m now living in rural South Wales, dividing my work life between the NHS and as a photographer. Having not visited Brighton in almost twenty years, my partner and I decided to take a city break, staying in an AirBnB off Marine Parade, and catching up with one of my old London friends who has long since made the city his home. After a very pleasant meal my partner and I were strolling through The Lanes as the last light was fading, when I spotted a very dapper man in double-breasted cream linen suit, correspondent shoes, a wide brimmed hat at a rakish angle, and standout silver jewellery. I had a 1959 Leica M3 camera slung around my neck, and two frames left on a roll of black and white film. I had to photograph this man, although with the light quickly diminishing, it was touch and go whether any frame would be useable.

In 2017 when I turned 50, I started shooting a project called 50 Plus… The generation that didn’t have to grow up. It examines my generation of men and explores the freedoms that we have which weren’t available to our fathers’ generation. We are at liberty to cling on to our teenage subcultures and styles well into and beyond middle age. Always obsessed with clothes and music, I still consider myself a modernist. Since my initial re-visit to Brighton I’ve been back a handful of times. In 2023 I photographed the Mod Weekender for Detail Magazine, and as a result came away with a yearning to buy a scooter again, which I did, and it’s been ridden to Brighton a couple of times since. In many ways the photographic project was autobiographical. I have the luxury of holding down professional jobs whilst also indulging my inner teenage rebel. 

50 Plus… grew and grew, and on my 58th birthday in June, it was released by specialist documentary photography publisher Fistful of Books. I start the book with these words:

“As growing old is a privilege, so too is it a privilege of youth to rebel against the elder generation. Unlike when we were young, however, how do you shock the generation who have spent their lives rebelling? I’ve often said to my boys that the only way they could shock me is by playing golf and voting Conservative. Thankfully, as far as I’m aware, neither has experimented with such depravity!…

In the woods behind my house were the rusting remains of a Morris Oxford, and minus its wheels, the monocoque body of a long-trashed Vespa scooter. I used to sit on said scooter, and imagine I was riding to Brighton with my school’s equivalent of Jimmy the Mod’s on/off girlfriend Steph on the pillion. It’s safe to say, I wasn’t the Ace Face!”

50 Plus… is a hardback containing 84 portraits, over 156 pages. There is an essay by myself, a preface by an ex-pat British journalist now living and working in California, who published some of the photos in a magazine in 2022, and although the vast majority of portraits are anonymous, twelve of the men have been kind enough to write a testimony about themselves.

Fortunately the two shots of the dapper gent in The Lanes worked out, and he is one of those who kindly agreed to contribute. If you’re asking yourself why you are reading this in The West Hill Whistler, and you’ve not yet worked it out, that man was Jed Novick, editor of the title, and we’ve since become friends. Last time we met up we enjoyed a good Mexican meal and Margueritas on an early summer evening. Jed and Mike Baller who I photographed on a subsequent visit to Brighton are pictured here.

The book is available from the publisher Fistful of Books, or I have some copies for sale at £30 plus postage. Contact me through my website 

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Fatboy Slim, It Ain’t Over...  ‘Til The Fat Boy Sings, Norman Cook

It Ain’t Over…  ‘Til The Fat Boy Sings

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You know how sometimes you look at someone and think “You look kinda familiar” but you can’t place the face and move on, think nothing more of it. But sometimes you think “You, I know”. Well… 

I was in the Helm Gallery to meet The Whistler’s food editor who was there to discuss a show she was recording and I was having a look around and… “You look kinda familiar. What’s going on here?”  

“What’s going on is I’m taking over the Helm Gallery for six weeks” Norman Cook tells me. “It’s half art exhibition and it’s half art sale. There’s lots of prints by artists that are associated with me or who I’ve collaborated with, and it’s all based around the book “It Ain’t Over…  ‘Til The Fat Boy Sings”.

“I realised at the beginning of this year that I am entering my 40th year since I quit my day job at Rounder Records and ran off to join the circus, and I was thinking about how to mark or celebrate that anniversary.  

“I’ve always shied away from doing an autobiography. I’ve been asked a few times and I just, I can’t remember the really good bits. And the bits I can remember I can’t tell while my children and my parents are still alive, so when this idea of a visual documentary came about it seemed a good idea. It’s a coffee table book, so mainly pictures. There’s no warts and all stories, nothing about celebrity drug taking, I’m afraid…”

Could we do an after hours version? 

“Yeah, talk to me about that later”. 

Are you one of these characters who’ve always squirreled stuff away? “Yes, I’ve got every single backstage pass I’ve ever have. The first year, I tried to keep tickets every gig I played, that was just untenable, but I’ve kept the backstage passes from every single one, and I’ve kept photos of all sorts, the boxer shorts that inspired the album title “You Come A Long Way, Baby”. I’ve also got the dubious honor of having a dildo named after me and we’ve got a photo of that in the book…

Moving swiftly past the inevitable line about it being a pop-up book… When you were a kid and you went to gigs when you’re 13 or whatever, have you still still got the stubs? 

“Yeah, the stubs are in the book, there’s the fanzine I used to write for…”

It’s a fantastic memorabilia collection, and while it’s obviously Norman’s book, a little bit This is Your Life, it’s also a lovely ride through the pop cultural landscape of the last 40 years.   

40 years. That’s a long time. Are you going to continue doing it?

“Doing what?”

You know the thing you do, where you stand there and play records. 

“Oh, that thing. Yeah, that’s what I do. I’ve done that thing twice this week already. I’ve got this weekend up the next weekend. I mean, Amsterdam, Stockholm and somewhere else, and then do some British dates in December. This year, I’ll do 109 shows, which is my personal all time record for shows in a year”.

That’s extraordinary. 109 shows. That’s… almost every other day. It’s not far off. 

“It’s two a week or one every three days. I mean, it has been quite relentless, but I love my job. It never feels like work. I just love it”.

l Helm Gallery 15 North Rd, Brighton and Hove, BN1 1YA    https://helm-gallery.com/

l It Ain’t Over… ’Til the Fatboy Sings (Rocket 88 Books) 

Microdosing

The Secret Diary of A Microdoser #8

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I ripped open my shirt and bared my chest. My body immersed fully in dance. No holds barred. Loose. Wild. Free. Without any care as to what I looked like to the rest of the crowd who stopped and stared at this bearded old freak. Somehow, I knew in my heart that my father was dying at that very moment. His masculine energy rode the sound waves of a psychedelic guitar riff and penetrated my body. This was his parting gift to me, filling my mind and lifting my soul, as he journeyed through the ether on his final adventure. 

Psychedelics have been used throughout history to honour, remember and indeed communicate directly with our ancestors. Here I found myself vaping DMT in the moment of my father’s passing. Interacting with his spirit, perhaps by chance, perhaps by destiny, as he travelled through a psychedelic maelstrom, gifting me the energy that he no longer needed. One last selfless act, so characteristic of the man, or maybe his worldly energy was simply superfluous to his needs as a new type of wind now filled his sails. 

It was the last night of Shambala music festival 2024 and I was watching the mighty Ozric Tentacles, a band that I hadn’t seen since the Manchester Megadog in 1998. But I never could have predicted, never could have imagined that this would have been my experience of my father’s death. That I would meet my father’s spirit in a realm that I happened to be visiting at the same moment in time, unlocked by the DMT key. 

As I walked away from the gig, I received the call that confirmed what I already knew. I went with the flow of friends but hung back from the crowd. Let it land. I processed the power of the experience that he had been through and I had witnessed and acknowledged the gratitude, love and peace that formed my memory of him. 

A short while later, we arrived at our destination, an art installation called The Dancing Fountain, where it took me a few minutes to fathom that this rhythmic flow of water was the personification of my father’s spirit after he had survived inter-dimensional travel. The realisation dawned on me that he was using this medium to announce his arrival in a state of pure freedom. 

With the DMT pen never far from my lips, I stood amazed, stunned with wonder. I witnessed his joy in the explosion of droplets, pulsing and springing from the Fountain as he span, jumped and danced one last time. 

But how was all this possible? The answer is quite logical. Our consciousness is the fruit of the universe in the same way as a mushroom is the fruiting body of a mycelium. Our modern western culture tends to view the universe as brutal and unthinking, a product of chaos and the random interaction of forces, elements and energy. As religious structures lose credence, undermined as much by their own institutional fallibility as by our increasing intelligence and captured knowledge base, we’ve fallen into a habit of viewing our species as separate from the universe, an accident of evolution. Freud has a lot to answer for in that respect. But it is not the case. Life is the flower. Education is the pollination. Conscious thought is the fruit. If we follow the same pattern we see in nature and delve deeper, we see that the neurological pathways of the brain form the fibre of that fruiting body. Compounds such as tryptamines (which include neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and melatonin alongside related agents such as dimethyltryptamine, psilocin and bufotenin) are the fructose, the sugars, the energy of our consciousness. 

By increasing those levels for brief moments in time, I’ve learned many lessons from psychedelics over the years. But Dimethyltryptamine has been the greatest teacher of them all. Through using it in meditational practice, I’ve realised what is the thing behind all the different thoughts we have on a daily basis. The answer? A Thought. I, like you, am a Thought. And, if you follow the same logic, it is those Thoughts, themselves from a Thought, that danced together in the spirit realm on the night when my father passed from this world to the next. 

Harnessing the medicinal power of DMT has allowed me to remotely view “Ray”, discuss with other Thoughts his attributes, his faults, his reasoning and his motivations. Those drivers have been distilled over the years, purified by psychedelics. I have aimed ridiculously high in the past and fallen way short as a result. Painfully short. In younger years, I was never happy to have reached the moon when aiming for the stars. And yet when it came to my spiritual goal, I could feel myself making the same mistake all over again, the writing was on the wall. But, for the record, here it is: I aspire to be an angel. I don’t mean this in the Christian sense of the word. Nor the financial. My definition of an angel is an “Agent of Positive Change”. I thought, once again, my name was on the dressing room to the stage of disappointment. However, what continually surprises me is that, strangely, I achieve this most days, and perhaps there’s a chance that I’ve just achieved this with you. 

Thanks for reading. 

With Love,

Ray, Brighton, 2025

For back issues visit Instagram.com/SDOAM.TheRayman or substack.com/@sdoamtherayman 

Brighton Festival, Brighton Life, Theatre

Nadine Shah and The Brighton Festival by Jed Novick and Gilly Smith

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“I’m a little breathless”, whispered Ganavya to a packed audience as she joined her harpist and double bass combo on stage. “It’s probably because I’m a little heart-broken. I may need your help tonight. Would you sing with me?”  

Ganavya, a New York born, Tamil Nadu-raised sonic shapeshifting multi-instrumentalist and guilt tripper and star of Indian music, supporting reigning queen Aruna Sairam was probably the show of the Festival. Hard-bitten cynics in that audience have since confessed that they did sing with her. My friend and I sang with her. Everyone sang. And as we did, so her breath returned, filling her lungs with a soaring song of heartache that rocked the Theatre Royal, a transcendent mix of spiritual jazz and South Asian devotional music that many of us may never have heard before. Yes, it was in Tamil and in Hindi. Yes, we understood every word.  

The Brighton Festival. It’s one of the highlights of the calendar, but it’s difficult. How do you know what to go to? A reworking of Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar’s “Passages” aside, there were no big “must see that” shows, and if you didn’t know your South Asian arts scene, Anoushka Shankar’s Festival was a bit of guesswork. There’s absolutely no doubt there was some marvellous stuff – as evidenced by the Sairam and Ganavya gig, but if you’re not an aficionado of Indian music, would you have known that was going to be such a hot show?  

There’s something else– let’s call it May Fatigue. There’s so much going on in Brighton in May. The Festival, the Great Escape, the Fringe… the Open Houses. Yes, the Open Houses. A lovely thing to do, seeing some art, nosing round other people’s homes. And it might be free, but you’re out and being out, maybe you’ll stop for a drink. Or a bite.   So yes, lots going on and all demand your attention and your time and your energy and, maybe more importantly, all demand your wallet. Nothing’s cheap. We went to the Spiegel Gardens last night and bought a bottle of wine to share. £39.50.  

For a whole month, the streets are alive with the sound of, well, everything. Not just music but everything, and if the Weather Gods smile, there’s no finer place to be. Just maybe… it could all be spread out a bit more? The Great Escape in June maybe?  

Anyway, back to the Festival. The best non-music thing I saw was Emma Rice’s Wise Children production of North by Northwest, also at the Theatre Royal. A triumph of parody and comic timing and, well, you can read all about it here in The Mighty Whistler.  https://westhillwhistler.com/2025/05/17/north-by-northwest-at-the-theatre-royal/

Saturday night’s showstopping gig was Nadine Shah at The Dome. Again, Mercury nominated she might well be, but she’s not “Bloody hell, cancel everything, this we have to see”. As it turned out, she was great and, while we didn’t have to cancel anything, it was very cool. And this is the glory of the creative directorship of the Brighton Festival; if Anoushkar’s already shown you her record collection and opened a door into a whole new world of music and arts, how could Nadine Shah be anything other than an exciting new find?  

Like a cross between Shirley Bassey, PJ Harvey and Patti Smith, South Shields-born Shah is as loud and opinionated as any girl from the Geordie Shores. But her mash up of her own singular influences from Afrobeat to Eastern scales – apparently her father sang Urdu ghazals, a form of Arabic poetry, around the house as she grew up – became a roar of pain as she took us with her on her personal journey of grief, rehab and recovery as she pranced like a dressage pony across the stage. The music was hard, her voice sharp, the roar raw.  

The spiritual delicacy of Sairam and Gavanya, the joy and verve of North by Northwest, the raw noise of Nadine Shah. All in one Festival. And how cool is that?

Cat Fletcher, Freecycle, Freegle, recycling

Climate Cafe: Cat Fletcher

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Continuing our virtual Climate Café where we look at people making a positive contribution to the planet, Gilly Smith talks to Brighton’s queen of reuse Cat Fletcher

Cat Fletcher has always been a trailblazer when it comes to environmental consciousness. She moved to England from Sydney in 1992 for love, but quickly became passionate about waste. 

Recycling had been a part of Cat’s everyday life back in Sydney; it was easy and efficient. “People simply set out their recyclables by their doors, and they were collected weekly without much hassle,” she says. The absence of a similar system in Brighton had Cat initially just sorting the leftovers at her friends’ houses after parties, collecting their bottles, cans and cardboard to recycle. “They just thought I was a bit bonkers,” she laughs.   

Her passion for reducing waste was rooted in her Sydney upbringing. Her father, a professional yachtsman, instilled in her an appreciation for materials and the work that goes into making things. “I had a good understanding of materials and the work that goes into making something. I look at things and have this X-ray vision of how have they made that? What’s that made of?” 

This hands-on approach was particularly useful when she had three young children and a tight budget.  “I just had to get a bit creative,” she says. “I used to pick things up off the street, you know, chest of drawers, a bag of stuff, and I’d take it back and see if I couldn’t paint it or fix it.” 

With an eye for an upcycling bargain, she took on a stall for years at Brighton Station’s legendary Sunday car boot. “ It was a place full of old school duck and dive guys. There were the Victorian antique boys who used to get there at three in the morning with their mining lamps, and they’d be gone by 7am.” With the kids asleep in the back of her van, she was perfecting her craft while making a name for herself and enough cash to pay the bills. It was this vibrant reuse scene that inspired Cat to take her passion to the next level. 

In 2007, when she had to downsize her home, she discovered Freecycle – an online platform for giving away unwanted items. Impressed by the concept, Cat decided to launch her own local group, Brighton Freecycle which quickly gained a loyal following. But frustrated by the rigid rules imposed by the US-based company,  she began to think about upcycling the group itself.  “I just thought, you know, I don’t need their Yahoo group. The group doesn’t even have to be called Freecycle. I can just make another Yahoo group. And so I did, at three o’clock in the morning, I just made up a name called a Greencycle Sussex, and I just transferred all the members of Brighton Freecycle onto that new group.” 

This bold move caught the attention of a Guardian journalist, who wrote a story about Cat’s independent venture. The article sparked a domino effect, with Freecycle groups across the UK abandoning the US organisation to join Cat’s new network. “By Friday night, I think 60 Freecycle groups had gone.”

A

nd so Freegle was born – a decentralised, volunteer-led network of reuse groups across the country. Over the next 15 years, Freegle would grow into a well-organized, legally recognised cooperative, with a team of dedicated volunteers supporting local groups, winning Cat a Sussex Eco Volunteer Award. 

It also won the attention of the head of sustainability at Brighton and Hove Council who was one of the judges. He invited her to join its sustainability partnership along with the main players in the city’s infrastructure. “So I turn up there and there’d be a skip outside full of furniture. I was like, ‘Guys, there’s a pile of reusable stuff being smashed to pieces outside. What’s wrong with you? Either give it to someone to use, or you can get money for metal that could be income for the council. Why are you paying a waste management company for a skip?’” 

Using Freegle to shift everything from desks to filing cabinets, windows to heaters to NHS surgeries, schools and individuals, she was soon emptying Council buildings, 16.9 tons of furniture from Bartholomews House alone. “I even gave away the carpet tiles on the floor”, she laughs. 

The clearance of the old Council HQ at Kings House won her a Naticnal Recycling Award, but also an introduction to the CEO of the UK’s largest waste management company bidding for a contract in Greater Manchester, valued at £50 million annually. As the contract demanded an element of social value, Cat spotted the opportunity to recycle the work that she was doing for the Council in Brighton and Hove and adapt it for Manchester’s specific needs. 

“They deconstructed this huge anaerobic digester, a great big industrial building, hollowed it out, brought in 20 shipping containers, turned them into art galleries and makers’ units. They brought in all the people that I’d found around Manchester that could fix, reupholster, upcycle, repair, jewellery and they all came in and got a hub, a place to work. And then they retrained 650 staff all around the tips, so now, when anyone in Manchester goes to the tip with anything that’s upcyclable, it goes back to all the different makers in that one hub and back out shops at the tips where they sell it. It makes over a quarter of a million in profit every year which goes back into the community.”

Cat can be found at the Freegle Free Shop in the Open Market on Thursdays to Saturdays