I found out this morning that the Gilded Palace of Sin, the Brighton music promoters who have been responsible for nurturing Brighton’s Americana and alt-country music scene for the past 9 years, are wrapping up business after their final show next week.

I’ve blogged about this over on the Salter Cane MySpace page, but it felt right to say something here, too, since the Gilded Palace have not only been integral to our experience of being a band in Brighton, they’ve also shaped the way I see this city.

When Jeremy and I moved here in 2000, we already had a bit of band history behind us; we had played with our friend Chris (now the Salter Cane frontman) in a band called Beam in Germany. We only played for two short years, though looking back it seems much longer, and while we managed to get a fair few gigs, we never really encountered anything even approaching what you might call success. Nobody seemed to get what we were trying to do, and nobody else seemed to be trying to do anything similar, so we were kind of out on our own.

One thing led to another, and Chris moved to Brighton, and Jeremy and I moved to Brighton a year or so later, and after a while we toyed with the idea of playing together again, so that’s what we did. And I remember that, at around the same time, we saw a poster for something called “The Gilded Palace of Sin”, which appeared to be a group of people putting on the type of music we were interested in, and suddenly Brighton seemed full of wonderful opportunities for a funny little band like us.

Our first gig in Brighton was with an “alt-country” band, but it wasn’t for the Gilded Palace of Sin; we were the support band for Johnny Dowd at a gig put on by Brighton promoters Melting Vinyl, which happened to be attended by Dave Morrison, founder of the Gilded Palace of Sin, who, as it turned out, rather liked what we were doing. And thus began a long and lovely relationship with the Gilded Palace.

We played lots of gigs for the Gilded Palace, and we attended lots of gigs put on by the Gilded Palace. As I mentioned in the MySpace post, some of my fondest gig memories of all time are of Gilded Palace gigs. By putting on the concerts they did and supporting the artists they did, the Gilded Palace of Sin helped foster a thriving Americana/alt-country music scene in Brighton—and ultimately, they did their part to “keep music live” in the face of venue closures and an environment which can sometimes seem quite hostile towards live music. And even their iconic white-on-black posters influenced the visual texture of the city’s pubs, record shops and store fronts.

Even though we only made it to a fraction of the many, many concerts organized by the Gilded Palace, their gigs loom large in my mental image of Brighton. They’ve been putting on shows in Brighton for as long as we’ve lived here, and it was always reassuring to know that there was a promoter out there who could be counted on for quality live music and who was clearly doing what they did purely for the love of that music. They did great things for live music in Brighton, and for Salter Cane, and they’re going to be sorely missed.