Black Honey, Doe, Eat Fast and more fly the new musical flag at Southsea 2016

Black Honey undoubtedly sit in the upper echelons of the new music realm. Month on month, they’ve been building something colossal - as they take to the Wedgewood Rooms they’re kings and queen of the castle. In Izzy B. Phillips they’ve a bonafide star, and with their name quite literally up in lights behind them, they’re truly dazzling. Latest single ‘Hello Today’ is a masterstroke, a chorus befitting a festival main stage greeted by mosh-pits and singalongs long before the sun has set outside.

With Southsea itself plagued by on-and-off rain all afternoon, it’s little surprise things start to get a little slippery. With stage times increasingly fluid as evening approaches, Doe’s arrival is a little later than planned, but no less packed with wonder, debut album ‘Some Things Last Longer Than You’ finally making good on the promise they’ve hinted at for years.

At the opposite end of that new music spectrum, mind, are Tellison. Road hardened after years on the scene, their headline slot at Edge Of The Wedge is a celebration of the hard graft they’ve packed into the near-decade since the release of debut album ‘Contact! Contact!’. Last year’s ‘Hope Fading Nightly’ gets its fair airing, ‘Tact Is Dead’’s acid-tongued take on modern routine feeling as tense as ever, but they’re not averse to dipping into the back catalogue either. ‘Say Silence’ prompts air-punches and yelped-back refrains galore, but it’s ‘Henry Went To Paris’ that really erupts. A marker both of how far they’ve come and how much they’ve come to mean to those packed into the Edge, it’s Southsea’s message, bottled - you might not be the ‘next big thing’, but sometimes there’s far better treasures to be found.

Photos: Ben McQuaide.

Tags: Black Honey, Doe, The Big Moon, Southsea, Festivals, Reviews, Live Reviews