Richard Norris, countercultural musician and DJ.
How did you come to live in Sussex?
I have a friend from Lewes I met at university in Liverpool, Dinah Loeb, and I visited her in the mid-80s, going to the Gardeners Arms and feeling strange undercurrents going on (the pub hasn’t changed a bit since then). I came down again to visit Dinah when I was finishing off the lyrics for the first Grid album, realising I had an affinity for the town, which I equated with the creative process. Quite a few years later Sarah [his wife Sarah Norris, director of Women in Art] and I had a bright orange 70s camper van; we used to park next to The Snowdrop pub on the way back from festivals and explore Lewes before going back to Portobello Road in Ladbroke Grove, where we lived. We loved doing that so much we started doing it every weekend. And it got to the point where we thought ‘this is ridiculous, we should just move here’. So we did.
What do you think of the gig scene in Sussex?
They used to put all the gigs up on the wall in Resident Records in Brighton. I like Resident, because it’s the only record shop in the world that has a dedicated Richard Norris section, which Ella my teenage daughter was impressed with. Then during the pandemic they stopped posting gigs on the wall, and never started again. For a while I was lost. I found myself wanting to go to loads of gigs in Brighton, but only finding out about them the day after they’d happened. Then I discovered the weekly email gig guide The Early Bird, which tells you exactly what’s going on, so everything’s OK again. There’s tons on, at the Green Door Store, Prince Albert, Patterns, Komedia, the Old Market, the Dome… There’s a lot of good gigs in Brighton, but the best one I’ve been to recently was at the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill, where I saw Sparks. They were just blown away by the audience reaction, and you could see them thinking: ‘Bexhill? Who knew?’…