Richard Norris

My Sussex: Richard Norris

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?’

Anything else you enjoy doing in Brighton?

I love going to John Marchant’s gallery, though I missed the opening of his latest show of [recently deceased punk artist] Jamie Reid, unfortunately. John was Jamie’s representative: Sarah once bought a Jamie print off him, but it took a bit of persuading to get him to part with it, he’s got this sort of antimarketing tactic. I’ve never seen a price tag on anything, and it’s really hard to find his gallery down a little twitten off Ship Street. The sign is tiny with black lettering on a black background. I did a lot of work with Jamie and John before Jamie died, a project called The Pillars Of Wonder, including work on Jamie’s project at Heligan Gardens in Cornwall, which marked each equinox. I worked on the music with Matthew Shaw from Stone Club, Gwenno, and Rachel from the Order of The Twelve, our psych folk band from Lewes, which we ended up playing at his funeral, which was very poignant.

Last year you were involved with another pagan-style ritual in Kingston-near-Lewes…

Jem Finer [formerly of the Pogues] and Jimmy Cauty from KLF were laying down a frantic drum and bass track with Jem’s hurdy gurdy over it. For most people that would sound like a strange idea, but as a man who sold a million records of a techno track with a banjo over it I quite approved. They were looking for somewhere to place this enormous slab of slate – like a standing stone – and my friend Mathew Clayton who lives in Kingston found a place on a hill on Lovebrook Farm, which was better than my backyard, where it might have been put otherwise. As The Pillars of Wonder we led the procession to the stone, and that morning also got people to dance round an acid maypole, to the theme tune of Tales of the Unexpected  and Captain Pugwash .

Sussex is good for doing things on a small scale…

That’s exactly it, you can put things on without having to pay huge sums for the rent of the place. We’re running the East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club at the Westgate Chapel in Lewes, which has a huge screen and projector. We put Performance on, Ben Wheatley came down to show  A Field in England, and in April Peter Strickland joined us for Berberian Sound Studio. We put lots of local short films on, as well, made in Sussex. There’s room for 60 people and it’s word of mouth, so tickets sell out really quickly. We get local breweries like Beak and Abyss to do the bar in one room, and have plenty of time between performances so like-minded people can meet each other. The Lewes Psychedelic Festival is another case in point. I cofounded the festival with Chris Tomsett in 2009, and it’s still going. It couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Though the one time we did it at Zu Studios, in an old warehouse on the industrial estate, it was a bit of a disaster, but also the best night we ever did. There’s more of that in the book…

Were you ever tempted to move to Brighton?

A lot of people ask me that, but to me it makes absolute sense not to. Brighton has a temporary nature to it, compared with other cities. It looks like it was put up over a weekend, and because it’s on the sea, it feels like the end of the line. Anyway it’s easy to get to Brighton from Lewes, and I do go in a lot: we’ve been going to the Theatre Royal a lot recently, that’s been great, and I love the Dome, and its sound system. We also go to Hastings and St Leonards, we know a lot of people there, it seems like half the people from the early to mid-80s nightclub scene are there, you can’t walk down the street without bumping into Sue Tilley, or Wayne Shires or Princess Julia. They’ve got a couple of great cinemas, too, the Kino-Teatr in St Leonards and the Electric Palace in the Old Town of Hastings.

Tell us about your favourite restaurant…

Dill, in Lewes. It’s definitely a chef’s restaurant, they have guest chefs coming in and at the end they sit at your table and chat you through the food they’ve cooked. The first time we went for lunch and sat there until the end of the evening service trying different dishes. It’s incredibly high-quality food. There are lots of good restaurants in Brighton too, like 64 Degrees, Burnt Orange and the Japanese restaurant Kusaki. And do you want a tip? The best breakfast I’ve ever had was at the Ram Inn in Firle.

Richard Norris is the author of the memoir Strange Things Are Happening: Adventures in Music, published by White Rabbit Books, April 2024