BONOBO + SAMMY VIRJI + HAAi & SPECIAL REQUEST + AVALON EMERSON + YUNÈ PINKU + LUXE – BRIGHTON BEACH 18.7.25
Almost a year ago to the day, on the 28th of July 2024, I was scheduled to review The Libertines’ ‘On The Beach’ performance in a blazing hot Brighton… sadly, due to illness I was not able to attend, leading me to miss out one of the most talked-about evenings in recent years, with appearances from The Big Moon, The Mary Wallopers and The Charlatans among others. Now, finally, I get the chance to attend the kick-off to this year’s ‘On The Beach’ bonanza, taking a firm foot in the review spotlight for Brighton-born Simon Green, aka Bonobo.
For the best part of 25 years, Green has cemented a sound of soothing, downtempo-based electronic music that has embraced DJ sets and full band renditions of his work, with the majority of his discography finding influential roots in trip hop, electronica, club and ambient music. Records like 2003’s ‘Dial M For Monkey’, 2010’s ‘Black Sands’ and 2017’s ‘Migration’ have become staples within his sonic canon, with his most recent creative endeavour found in the creation of the TV soundtrack for anime series ‘Lazarus’, alongside collaborations from electronic figurehead Floating Points and jazz legend Kamasi Washington. So, today on the 18th of July 2025, Brighton welcomes Bonobo for his ‘OUTLIER’ show on the beach to begin the first of seven shows of sun, sea and sound which also features line-ups from Eric Prydz, Bloc Party, The Human League, DnB Allstars, Carl Cox and Kaiser Chiefs.
LUXE: 14:00-15:00
After a minor hiccup with finding the correct entrance for our press passes, myself and photographer David Gyokos made our way to the Brighton Beach arena where we heard the beats of LUXE. Originally based in Brighton, LUXE, the pseudonym of one Lucy Hopson, assimilated a creative arsenal via classical music, flute, piano and vocals, before imbibing the club sounds of Manchester and London. Resident with Club Are, an LGBTQIA+ community-led club music and exhibition group based in Hackney, LUXE’s set welcomed the walk-ins of Brightonites, slowly but surely, as the visuals draped across the sides of the stage combined moving portraits of LUXE’s movements behind the decks, whether draped in silhouettes or visual effects, and the pacings of ‘On The Beach’ attendees. Throughout her hour-length DJ set, the illustrious sounds of club, electronica and deep house permeated the pebble-layered walkways, with a strong sonic callback to the sounds of the 90s and 2000s through deep beats and atmospheric soundscapes of synths and vocal samples. LUXE demonstrates a distinctive awareness for the sounds that her set pools from; among the waves of house music lies an aura of influence that reaches towards electro-acoustic leanings and a knack for understanding what sounds work well against each other.
Yunè Pinku: 15:00-16:00
In a seamless transition, LUXE concludes her set and hands over the decks to Irish electronic act, Yunè Pinku. Born in South London in 2002, Asha Catherine Nandy (aka Yunè Pinku), embraced the sounds of Irish traditional music as a youth before blossoming to experimentations of bedroom pop during the first COVID lockdown. Named after a combination of ‘Yunè’, the Japanese word for cloudy and ‘Pinku’, after her love of kids TV show ‘Pingu’ (a boss move coming from a fellow ‘Pingu’ lover), Nandy and her managers circulated demos to BBC Radio 1 invitees, leading to collaborations and remixes, heightening her popularity. As the spaces of the Brighton Beach arena began to fill up further, Nandy’s set entered full swing with a distinctive array of garage and electronica-laden music, complete with spoken word samples, hyperactive drum patterns and cycling synth passages. By the end of her set, Nandy had also introduced the sounds of French house and funk-tinged dance music (as well as interpolations of Madonna’s ‘Ray Of Light’ and The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’) into the mix, affirming her multi-genre approach to her performance. One impressive thing that coupled with Nandy’s set for me was the visual backdrop that accompanied her; an assemblage of close-ups and trippy shots of Nandy herself among dark rooms and nocturnal green fields, interlaced with erratic journeys of lightning bolts and brittle trees, created a unique, juxtaposing balance of mood underneath the bright (albeit slightly foggy) skies of Brighton.
Avalon Emerson: 16:00-17:30
The vocal snippets of Ice Spice’s feature on PinkPantheress’s ‘Boy’s A Liar’ sees the end of Yunè Pinku’s set, and the introduction of Avalon Emerson. Born in San Francisco and raised in Arizona, Emerson spent most of her musical upbringing, listening to 80s synthpop by the likes of Propaganda, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Depeche Mode (any Depeche Mode fan is a friend of mine!), before crafting her tools of the trade through making electronic dance music and throwing warehouse parties whilst working as a software developer. After moving to Berlin ten years ago, Emerson began to make a name for herself in the public eye through releases on Spectral Sound, and the launch of Buy Music Club, which focuses on the building and sharing of music lists on Bandcamp. Within a perpetuity of energy lasting 90 minutes, Emerson handed to the crowd a colourful array of EDM that remained consistent in sonic quality, stretching across the sounds of drum and bass, hypnotic synths and vast textures of rhythmic grooves as red geometric shapes took control of the projector screen. There’s something extremely human about her interaction with both the music and the crowd, embracing the sound of the set in a relaxed and chilled manner. P.S. I made a side note from my research of Emerson before I arrived on her apparently making a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ ‘Long Forgotten Fairytale’… as a huge Magnetic Fields fan, this is something I’m desperate to hear!
HAAi B2B Special Request: 17:30-19:00
Following Avalon Emerson came a team-up of DJs between Teneil Throssell, aka the Australian artist HAAi, and Paul Woolford, an English DJ under the name Special Request. With the former originally venturing in rock bands before making a name of herself through London club residencies and collaborations with artists Fred Again and Jon Hopkins, and the latter cementing himself through Ibiza DJ spaces and his record label Intimacy, the head-to-head infusions of the duo’s respective styles of DJing wins over the Brighton Beach crowd in a haze of garage and house rhythms, glitchy 90s-style electronic melodies and a warped array of visual imagery emulating wildlife creatures. Both Throssell and Woolford take moments on and off the decks, leaving whoever remains on stage to flex their muscles on the beats. It’s also at this point during the entire nearly nine-hour spectacle that pyrotechnics and smoke cannons start coming into play, turning the amplification on the crowd up several notches. The entire atmosphere for the night ahead shifts with the appearance of these two, with nearly full capacity for the beach reached, among the sounds of garage that take hold of the thousands in attendance.
haai.os.fan & specialrequest187.bandcamp.com
Sammy Virji: 19:00-20:30
Bringing the primary slew of DJ sets to a close before we reach Bonobo, comes London-born Sammy Virji. With his first original musings stemming from the sounds of Motown, African music and Michael Jackson, as well as his father Fayyaz Virji playing trombone on the classic Lauryn Hill album, ‘The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill’, Virji traded his biology studies at Newcastle University for the sounds of dance music after watching Flava D at a club, before adapting himself musically to the styles of bassline, a style of UK garage music from the West Midlands. Following the release of his debut album ‘Spice Up Your Life’ in 2020, and two subsequent EPs shortly after, Virji achieved moderate chart success with top 100 single ‘If U Need It’ as well as Skepta collaboration ‘Cops & Robbers’. Taking over from HAAi and Special Request’s set, Virji re-energizes the sound of the night through an elevation in sound with recognisable tracks swarming the set as well as increased pyrotechnics unfurling around him. Throughout his DJ set, he introduces tracks with so many colourful vocal backdrops, propulsive grooves and some of the biggest beat drops of the entire night. Virji’s undeniable charm behind the decks is welcomed by the crowd, now packed like sardines, as they avert their gaze to colourful visuals and an enigmatic DJ, towering over the beach.
Bonobo: 20:30-22:30
Half past eight, the beach is adorned with attendees, boats are sailing stage right, joining the party from afar, people filtering their way in and out of both the arena and the VIP deck…! The crowd has bid farewell to Sammy Virji, and welcomes the headliner of the night, Simon Green as Bonobo. The DJ decks that have lit the stage for the last six and a half hours have been replaced with the personalized gear of Green’s, plinths of projectors and lights, placed strategically across the platform. A different aura takes hold of the beach with Bonobo’s set; windswept garage and subtle dance beats fall onto the crowd, bringing 10,000 people back down to earth, all dancing in technicolour.
The music feels organic, circular and euphoric, with the sounds of cascading percussion and ethereal vocal samples painting the backdrop of the set. Throughout this plane of moving bodies, a select few in orange Malibu cowboy hats, you can see the effects of Bonobo’s music; there’s a clear artistic shift from the feel-good spontaneity of all the sets that came before to the deep and meaningful arrangement of sound that Simon permeates from his arsenal of Pioneer DJ decks. All drops culminated by the previous DJs, as magnificent as a lot of them were, pale in comparison to the huge rollercoasters that Bonobo takes the crowd along, and even though I’m not familiar with many Bonobo tracks by name, witnessing the song ‘Cirrus’ in this stature was nothing short of astonishing. As someone who very rarely goes to shows like this, the atmosphere found on these pebbles is unlike anything I’ve had the privilege of seeing for myself.
