I first came to Brighton in 1995, and I came to stay. Well, in fact my stay only lasted for five months, but some of the people I met their and the things they did and are still doing have stayed with me as something unique to this place. I will explain this in a minute.

As a student of literature, I had been assigned a place at Sussex University through one of the European student exchange schemes. Originally, I had applied for a place in London, but didn?t get one. Instead, they offered me a place at Sussex. Glad to be able to go to England at all, I accepted it.

When I came to Brighton, my knowledge of the town consisted of nothing but a handful of clichés: I had once seen a picture of the Palace Pier in an English textbook dating from the mid-70s, I had seen Quadrophenia with its romanticised mod/rockers riots, and a homosexual friend had told me about Brighton?s thriving gay scene.

I was yet to find on-site that, in some respects, Brighton is a city that seems to be particularly ridden with (perhaps even fond of?) clichéd images of itself: world-famous only for Graham Greene?s Brighton Rock (which actually contains a note for American readers describing this peculiar kind of candy) and the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the Grand Hotel in 1984, and with a domestic reputation as a popular place for either dirty weekends or rave parties, even the town?s symbol, the Royal Pavilion, is a curious assemblage of clichés - namely, stereotypical ideas about Indian architecture and Chinese interiors cherished by a colonial metropolis.

Like all stereotypes, these clichés don?t fit together when you try to describe the actual place, causing all sorts of potentially interesting contradictions. Yet, did it sound like a particularly comfortable place to live in? I had the feeling that I wouldn?t really be able to answer this question by remaining within the social boundaries of my student environment; I already knew that, as transitory inhabitants of a town, students often tend to keep pretty much within their own circles, students? union clubs and so forth. Therefore, I tried to find alternative venues where I could meet other people and find out what they thought this town was really up to.
Obviously, huge clubs with booming dance music are not really suitable for talking to people. It?s just to loud to begin with. Pubs seemed too unfocused. There?s just too many of them: where should I start? Concerts seemed a good idea - the more intimate, the better.

Some time in the winter of 1995/6, I found a flyer advertising a concert by local singer/songwriter Paul Chi in the upstairs room of a pub right next to the station. (It?s Finnegan?s Wake now, but it used to have a different name back then which I?ve forgotten.)

It turned out to be a very good environment for a conversation with both the audience and the performer, because only about three people, including myself, attended the gig. However, anybody who?s heard Paul can easily imagine that this intimate setting only made his playing, singing and his stunning improvisations all the more intense.

It was amazing. After the gig, Paul explained his idea of concerts in people?s homes. I became more and more enthusiastic. This sounded like somebody who took the idea of communicating through art more seriously than his own prestige as an artist. And it sounded like a good way of meeting people.

It turned out that it was ? and still is, I found, when I came back to Brighton in November 1999 to hear Steve Finn and Inter Ference in a basement flat in Sussex Square. As somebody who was new to the town and didn?t know anybody, I could particularly appreciate the way Healthy Concerts helped to get perfect strangers into conversation in a matter of minutes. I?ve rarely experienced this at conventional parties where, all too often, clumsy conversations soon fade out for lack of any solid common ground. Yet at a Healthy Concert, you can be quite sure that everybody in the room shares at least one thing: an interest in the music. A shared interest in music, in turn, is a good basis for talking about lots of other things as well ? at least in my experience. It?s a good basis for making new friends, actually.

All this is not to say that I found it impossible to make friends anywhere else in Brighton.But with some of the open mike events and poetry clubs that I also attended quite often to meet up with the regular crowd, I got the impression at one point that I was only part of a scene. Healthy Concerts, however, made me feel more like a part of a community. There, I got to meet people who tried to reinvent the places in which they lived ? starting from one flat at a time, but affecting my whole way of seeing the town in which we all lived. It made me feel at home. Needless to say, it was also the best way to ridicule and get rid of the clichés I mentioned earlier on. I think this is because the house concert environment allows you to meet people of relatively varied backgrounds. In my view, this is quite a precious thing in a culture which may be globalised on the whole, but is very much segmented and partioned when it comes down to everyday life ? and not the least, everyday entertainment.

Therefore, I think, it is great that Healthy Concerts as a non-commercial project has survived for more than five years now as a social phenomenon probably unique to Brighton. But if I could make a wish, it?d be that even more people should join the club, adding new friendly voices. And it should start in other places as well, perhaps incorporating not only acoustic music, but all sorts of sounds compatible with the home environment!

Perhaps it will: on my last trip to Brighton, I took a London-based friend with me to see Inter Ference and Steve Finn. He was really impressed with both their performance and the surrounding atmosphere and is now considering hosting a Healthy Concert in his shared flat in South London. As for myself, I?m hoping to get Paul Chi and Inter Ference to perform over here in Germany as a way of thanking them for making Brighton into a home for me. And as a way of opening the ears of German audiences to ? well, an alternative to corporate brit pop and smug slam poetry, for example! And that would be about finding real life people and real live culture behind the faded clichés of entertainment again ?