Early Ghost – Latest Music Bar, Brighton 15/06/11

Good story, this. You’re a young band, still at sixth-form college in fact – actually, you’ve never played live – and an act you love are booked to play an unusual venue nearby. Do you:

a. buy tickets, listen to the act’s albums on repeat and start getting excited, along with everyone else?

or

b. somehow blag a support slot at the show, hurriedly play your first gigs – essentially public rehearsals – in the interim, and turn up, guns blazing, with a full set and a bunch of smiles?

Voila, wide-eyed Sussex folk-pop prodigies Early Ghost, supporting Beirut at Eastbourne’s Winter Gardens last year, and thereby displaying a chutzpah that’ll get them through a few more doors in their time. And now they’re back at Brighton’s Latest Music Bar, where the Eastbourne/Lewes-based sextet played their first ever gig two years ago. The boys and girl add mandolin, banjo and melodica to the standard strummy drummy set-up, and have a secret weapon in a guitarist who seems resignedly happy to be cajoled into learning any instrument the band may need: piano, trumpet – probably euphonium if asked nicely.

Tonight’s a sweaty but relaxed, unplugged affair, rather than the full-whack electric set we missed when they supported Jesca Hoop up the road at the Brighton Ballroom a couple of months back. But the seven-song selection – which tonight includes two of melodica player Zoe Brownrigg’s solo songs, with backing from her fellow Ghosts – reveals at least three potentially Mumford-bothering slices of hope-stained melancholy.

This evening’s headliners, sweet close-harmonising duo Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou, put in a solid yet unremarkable show, gracefully calling Early Ghost “brilliant” from the stage while excusing two band members for leaving during their set (they’ve got exams in the morning). Not for Early Ghost, the gentle upward trajectory: they’re pointed assuredly skywards.

Setlist
Lagoon
Black Tide
1914
Decided (Zoe)
We’ll Say (Zoe)
Gypsy Song
Bernardo