I could have joined West Brom or Brighton. What would have happened had I joined one of them? I do not want to think about it. I do not think about it.
I proposed to my wife on Brighton Beach, and she said yes. That’s pretty romantic. Even though I forgot to go down on one knee because I was too busy trying to compose the question.
I proposed to my wife on Brighton Beach, and she said yes. That’s pretty romantic. Even though I forgot to go down on one knee because I was too busy trying to compose the question.
I had some really early recordings when I was 16 or 17. I was rapping over jungle beats with my friends. We used to do pirate radio stations in my area, down near Brighton. They were pretty terrible.
I decided that the University of Sussex in Brighton was a good place for this work because it had a strong tradition in bacterial molecular genetics and an excellent reputation in biology.
Brighton gives me the heebie-jeebies. When I’m near the seafront I can’t sleep, I can’t eat.
For a while we were chasing a book by Graham Greene to do Brighton Rock as a musical. We didn’t get the rights, so we decided to create something from scratch, with Jonathan. By that time we were big fans of his work.
In fact, Moon came on tour with us for a bit just before a big festival in Brighton, I think.
I grew up with my stepfather in Brighton, but I did spend a lot of time with my natural father, and I was loved by both, so I suppose the advantage of this was that I wasn’t bound by one set of experiences; I always had an alternative.
From Brighton to Bradford, from Suffolk to Somerset, I have explored some remarkable buildings and structures that, in different ways, have helped to shed light on the way modern Britain has developed.
Few people have heard of John Hawkshaw, the engineer responsible for Brighton’s sewers, but he also built the Severn Tunnel and parts of the London Underground system. Such figures, largely forgotten now, conceived an infrastructure that was perfect in its fine detail and intended to last for a century or more – as it has.
I liked ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs,’ which I did with Neil Simon. I kind of was playing him, as Eugene Morris Jerome, and I played that a few times at the very beginning of my career.
Of course, New Brighton is very shabby, very rundown, but people still go there because it’s the place where you take kids out on a Sunday.
I talked my parents into sending me to Roedean at 16. I had this idea that if I could get into Cambridge, then I could join Footlights. My problem was that I went to a comprehensive in Brighton. I thought I’d have to start from a good school, and the best I could think of was Roedean.
I’ve just made a cancer drama, called ‘Now Is Good,’ directed by Ol Parker and starring Dakota Fanning. We filmed in Brighton and it’s about a girl dying of leukemia, although it’s not as depressing as it sounds.
I hate going out in Brighton now. It’s different in London. People respect you more there.
I like to spend time with my family. The majority of my time is spent in London, but I do like to escape and spend time with them in my hometown of Brighton on the south coast.
When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common.
It must be said that Brighton, unlike London, makes driving seem very appealing. Instead of glowering faces and angry horns on all sides, we have the coast road in front of us and the Sussex Downs just 10 minutes behind us.
I know that Brighton is famously a mixture of the seedy and the elegant, but in the summer of 2001 seediness swamped elegance hands down.
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