Mutations Festival lets the bands do the talking

These are the options Phoebe Lunny poses to a hyperactive crowd on Saturday night. I’m barely exaggerating when I say Lambrini Girls – Mutations’ hometown headliner finale – are the coolest band on earth. And by ‘coolest’, I guess I mean the one that puts smiles on our faces and fire in our bellies like nothing else.

Because their live show is not only deliriously chaotic crowd interaction and aggy potty-mouth quips like an alternate-reality The Thick of It. It also makes time for sober, biting monologues about trans rights, police brutality, and how our governments and systems have so spectacularly failed us. And there’s the music itself: lose-yourself ragers led by Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez’s monstrous bass lines that demand you riot with your fellow punkmunchers (respectfully, of course; Lunny is an outspoken champion of mosh health and safety).

“Anyone who doesn’t feel welcome in this country, you are welcome here in this room with us,” Macieira-Boşgelmez says. This is the conclusion to the bassist’s pre-prepared speech about how immigrants have the right to live wherever the hell they want, and their worth should not be determined by their productivity. Given that minutes earlier we’re chanting “fuck JK Rowling!” and minutes later Lunny offers the group enema, these sincere pauses are still far from incongruous pivots.

Last year I suggested that “joyful defiance” is what Lambrini Girls does. In other words, you can devote your career to bringing down the bad guys, but you don’t need to be boring and stony-faced about it. Close your set with a song called “Cuntology 101” that gets even the back rows bouncing in the most nsfw, self-loving karaoke ever. Chuck water on the crowd and clamber over their heads. What always gets me is how Lunny will nonchalantly toss her guitar on the floor the second she’s done with a riff and leave it fizzing away as she hurls herself off the stage – our side of the barrier is where she came from and she’s seemingly intent on obliterating any hierarchy or division.

During “Bad Apple” and its “all cops are bastards” chant, I clock a few people taking their leave in a shuffle of disapproving murmurs. I’ll be generous to those people: some of Lambrini’s talking points won’t be super easy to swallow first time around if you’re coming from the “New Labour isn’t such a terrible thing” / “The West are the good guys” vantage point, a la your well-meaning, hapless floating voter. But each time I see Lambrini live, I understand more and more that we need to call it like we see it – because the other side is going further – and it should go without saying that any compromise with fascism is just fascism. When mainstream political parties are a half-step away from endorsing ethnic cleansing – in many cases zero steps away – it’s not actually that controversial for our side to call Starmer a cunt at a punk rock show.

If you can’t hack that, try harder. As Lunny confirms, “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. If anyone disagrees, get the fuck out of our show.”

Still, for every walk-out, there are two or more walk-ins. The crowd is not only bigger, sweatier, and more jubilant each time I see Lambrini Girls, it’s more diverse: mums and dads and grandmas and grandads – not just your textbook antifa ‘queer legends’. Viva incremental progress, hell yeah, but Lambrini understands more than anyone that it’s not solely about progress. We’ve got to have a good time along the way so we don’t go fucking insane.

There’s a bigger picture here centred on Mutations Festival – a two-day extravaganza that finds you smacking the pavement between the best independent venues in Lambrini Girls’ hometown (there are so many brilliant grassroots venues in Brighton, and we must protect them at all costs). Mutations is not an overtly political festival like Lambrini is a political band, but I’d argue that every festival of this ilk is inherently political. It’s that adage: I’m not interested in politics / Well, politics is interested in you, babe. Platforming and championing political bands and art is one thing, but the resistance-through-community aspect is just as big a deal. Several times throughout the weekend, I found myself thinking, as long as we can keep doing this, we might be okay.

Mutations is not an anticapitalist operation – it sells tickets, it makes a profit, and why shouldn’t it? – but it doesn’t constantly try to peddle you stuff or wring as much money as possible from the weekend in a way that worsens the experience of the attendees and leaves them feeling morally compromised and frustrated that this is how things are. The people behind Mutations actually want you to have a good time. Their website FAQs address anxieties regarding the overcrowding that afflicts most city festivals, and the festival staff members were, like us, back-to-back band-watching from noon to night.

Unlike Brighton’s biggest multi-venue event of the year, The Great Escape, there’s no visible industry element to Mutations – no lanyards (besides “Scratchcard Lanyard”), no Amazon and Live Nation branding plastered everywhere. There are no stage sponsorships, and few if any official merch stalls. Bands sell their sharpie’d tees and deal hand-drawn zines on beer-stained tables and, in Lambrini’s case, solicit donations for the recently attacked Peacehaven mosque via QR code. There are no tie-ins with vape brands and “ambassadors” with clipboards getting you to say pre-approved soundbites for TikTok in exchange for a free energy drink or whatever. Mutations feels refreshingly dissimilar to festivals that more readily compromise with late capitalism, instead giving you the freedom to amble, unmolested, between your favourite venues, spoilt for choice.

Indeed, the weekend is scheduled in such a way that you can pretty much get into any venue, any time. There are a few exceptions (Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs at Chalk was one-in/one-out) and sometimes this leads to disappointing clashes, but it also prevents lines of frustrated ticket-holders being left to the Friday night downpours. For instance, Fickle Friends, Ditz, UNIVERSITY, and Dry Cleaning play the same headline slot on the Friday, and it works well – because you could feasibly hustle between venues to see a quarter of each set, or like me, you could commit to Dry Cleaning for the duration. Florence Shaw is like a spectre – simply too cool and alluring to be a regular person who wakes up, flosses, and takes a multivit. We all hang on her every bewildering syllable.

Wait, Fickle Friends were on? At the same time as Dry Cleaning? What the heck is this festival?

Well, Mutations showcases the best in mutated music – art that has, in a way, mutated from its more recognisable parent genre. Really, it’s an inspired theme if you wanna circumvent all the post-genre/genreless/genre agnostic bullshit and get to the point – that defining stuff is pointless. Mutations establishes a baseline of “everything is a bit out there” and is therefore free to wander where it likes from year to year. That goes for the music, even the band names (Tooth, Teeth, and Teethen all play this weekend), as well as the structure: last year it was a five-day event, for instance, whereas it was condensed into two this year – perhaps to avoid having to seek funding from the likes of Live Nation or Barclays, but don’t quote me on that.

A Mutations band is one that’s on the innovation frontline, but is also fun and in most cases easy to listen and maybe mosh to – not esoteric or avant-garde for the sake of it. You like emo? Okay cool well you won’t find anything that sounds like “emo” emo – American Football’s first album, say – but I can give you London band Tooth, who make this inherently American style of music sound like a British invention, like Pool Kids or You Blew It fronted by a blazer-wearing Gallagher cousin.

Nah, I’m not about that. Not a problem: try Mandrake Handshake. One of those bands that create buzz from name alone, Mandrake are part of the current crop of goofy-named ensemble-cast acts like Attic’O’Mattic. Out of London and Oxford, they work in hypnotic groovy-grooves that veer from krautrock to Elephant 6 to Grateful Dead to crate-digging funk. With nine members, they’re also refreshingly uneconomical in an almost subversive way – Elvis Thirlwell plays maracas the whole time (okay, sometimes an egg shaker), because why NOT take up space? We deserve to.

Party Dozen, conversely, has only two members – saxophonist Kirsty Tickle and drummer Jonathan Boulet – and are the only act to play twice, filling in for Mary and the Junkyard at Chalk after their set at Patterns a few hours prior. They’re also the only Australian band. “No one invited us,” they joke before covering Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”, Tickle yelling into the bell of her sax while pacing around the stage with the noise and charisma of a dozen people.

What about, you know, epic indie rock songs with psychy solos, punky verses, and the most uplifting singalong choruses ever? Oh, you want Ratboys! The Chicago band has a way of making you feel at home through their thoughtful, endearing songs that look to Superchunk as much as Sufjan Stevens. In the city’s premier LGBTQ+ club, Revenge, they masterfully navigate tech issues when guitarist Dave Sagan abandons his crackling guitar lead and sings the main riff to “I Go Out at Night” into the same mic as lead singer Julia Steiner. It’s a sweet moment of collaborative making-do that is emblematic of this band’s all-round good vibes.

But my new favourites are Ain’t, whose indefinable songs wind up and then freewheel into “fuck, I was not expecting that” moments. Their feuding guitars make you ruminate through every other great band led by guitar acrobats – Sonic Youth? Pavement? Smashing Pumpkins? – in search of comparisons before deciding that no comparison is doing this shit justice. The gothy, darkly majestic stage presence of singer Hanna Baker Darch is likewise one-of-a-kind, reminding me of Catrin Vincent from Another Sky or Hop Along’s Frances Quinlan in her shock-to-the-system intensity and – paradoxically, I realise – her incomparability.

What actually inspires Ain’t, they tell me, is “rock bands who play very quiet or very loud, or very quiet and then very loud; the various adventures of Bevis of Hampton; Clive Barker’s Hellraiser; and playing around with cassette tapes.” But more recently, they add, they’re also inspired by “playing lots of gigs and hanging out with bands we love and admire and consider our friends.”

Besides vintage horror flicks, medieval prose, and kicking it with their buds, Ain’t are proponents of arts and crafts. Darch herself illustrates the tour and gig posters, guitarist Ed Randall does calligraphy, and vocalist/guitarist George Ellerby designed the artwork for their two most recent singles – recorded down the road in Hove at the start of this year with Theo Verney (English Teacher, Lime Garden). At the end of their set at Hope & Ruin on Saturday night, Ain’t hand out mini zines – their Autumn ‘25 issue, a pocket-sized intro to the band, with fun illustrations, details of forthcoming tour dates, and a few FFO artists to set the record straight (Neutral Milk Hotel… it all makes sense).

“Joe [Lockstone, drums] put the zines together a few days before we went out to Rotterdam to play Left of the Dial in October,” the band tells me over email the next day, “which was amazing because we’d run out of merch otherwise. He spent the day cutting and printing elements from books and post-it note doodles. A big source of inspiration was our local independent book store – Peckham Books – who always have zines and DIY pieces for sale on the counter.”

With Brighton's own Crafting Room label bringing out the second issue of its zine, plus the undying buzz around HALLOGALLO and the Chicago bands in its orbit, this scrappy DIY art form seems to hold increasing sway – why? According to Ain't: “Zines are so liberating, and I feel like working with a physical medium means a much more personal style comes through compared to digital. We’re probably not going back to the xerox golden age of DIY punk and riot grrrl zines any time soon, but I don’t think that matters. When the world is so saturated with completely throwaway digital content, something as simple and tactile as a handmade booklet feels kind of revolutionary in a small way.”

It probably shouldn’t be a radical concept to walk away with some carefully folded paper doodled with rabbits and Charlie Brown-like self portraits rather than merely adding another band to your social media feedback loop. But it does feel special: it cements your interest, helping you fill in the bio gaps and complete the picture after seeing someone live for the first time. As Ain’t tells me, “The excitement whenever you show up to play a festival like this as a smaller band is that someone who wouldn’t come out to see lil’ ol’ Ain’t might give you a go. Seeing yourself up – or down, in the tiny font, as the case may be – on a poster with bands we all listen to and really love like Mary in the Junkyard, Lambrini Girls, Hotline TNT, etc. turns that feeling up to 100.”

That is one of many great things about Mutations: the open-mindedness of the people it attracts. To mutate is to be flexible, and Mutations succeeds because it knows this, because it doesn’t set a rigidly defined aesthetic or MO from the top down. It is content to keep out the way, to be steered by the acts it hosts – those in tiny font as much as big bolded names like Lambrini Girls and Dry Cleaning. If you ask me, this is a multi-venue city festival done right.