Mutations Festival

Mutations is the weekend of rock, indie and metal spread across the small rooms of Brighton. FORM, a promoter in London and in the city, produces it. The Argus, in 2015, says something else about the start: the idea is One Inch Badge's, out of the 2014 Drill, and the first one falls on 28 and 29 November 2015, with a thousand tickets. City Girl Network writes that FORM founded it. Both sentences stay. Circuit Sweet numbers 001 in 2015, 002 in 2019 in a room on the outskirts, 003 in 2021 back in the centre, and 004 from 3 to 6 November 2022. Isabel Meszaros calls November 2025 the seventh. Hayden Merrick writes that the year before ran five days and that 2025 was pressed into two.

Those two days are Friday 7 and Saturday 8 November 2025. Meszaros lists nine rooms: Chalk, Dust, Patterns, Revenge, The Folklore Rooms, Alphabet, The Hope and Ruin, The Prince Albert and Green Door Store. More than 90 performances. The wristband is collected behind Chalk and from there you walk. The price she notes is 50 pounds. In many rooms there is no barrier. Merrick writes that the staff watch bands from noon to night, that you can mostly get in, and that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs at Chalk is one-in, one-out. Alphabet, with Congratulations, is too. Friday rains. Caspar Motley, in Festivals & Gigs, writes another clock: after 22:00 almost every room closes and people pile up at Dust and at Hope & Ruin. Lambrini Girls finish at Chalk fifteen minutes ahead of the slot and the Dust line becomes impossible. Meszaros writes from 15:00 to 3:00. The three clocks stay side by side. There is no stage sponsorship. Merrick's exception is a cord he calls a Scratchcard Lanyard. Bands sell marker-pen shirts and zines on beer-stained tables.

On Saturday night, at Chalk, Lambrini Girls close in their own city. Phoebe Lunny puts to a vote a group enema, a human pyramid or the biggest mosh the festival has seen. Bassist Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez reads a text on the right of someone who migrates to live where they want, and closes by saying that anyone who does not feel welcome in the country is welcome in that room. Minutes earlier the room chants fuck JK Rowling. On Bad Apple the chant is all cops are bastards, and Merrick sees people leave in a mutter. Lunny says: Trans women are women. Trans men are men. They close with Cuntology 101, throw water and Lunny drops the guitar on the floor and launches herself into the crowd. Through a code they ask for money for the Peacehaven mosque, attacked shortly before. For every person who walks out, Merrick counts two who walk in: mothers, fathers, grandmothers.

On Friday, in the same slot, Fickle Friends, Ditz, UNIVERSITY and Dry Cleaning play. Merrick stays with Dry Cleaning. Florence Shaw, he writes, is like a spectre, and the room hangs on every syllable. He fixes no titles. Party Dozen is the only group that plays twice and the only Australian one: Kirsty Tickle on sax and Jonathan Boulet on drums. They fill the gap left by Mary and the Junkyard at Chalk, after Patterns. Ain't, by email, writes Mary in the Junkyard. Before the song, Tickle jokes that no one invited them and yells Ghost Rider, by Suicide, into the bell of the sax. Ratboys, from Chicago, are at Revenge, the LGBTQ+ club Merrick calls the city's main one. Dave Sagan's guitar crackles. He sings the riff of I Go Out at Night into the same mic as Julia Steiner.

Meszaros, the same week, sees Brown Horse at Chalk, from Norwich, with accordion and pedal steel, and Keo: the Keogh brothers, Finn Keogh on vocals, one official album, black clothes. Then Pigs, with Matt Baty jumping, little text and mosh pits. She closes her night at Hope and Ruin with Courting, from Liverpool. Shirts that say I Love Courting. Part of the crowd wanted new songs and heard the old ones. Ain't, on Saturday at Hope & Ruin, hands out an autumn zine. Hanna Baker Darch illustrates the posters. Ed Randall does calligraphy. George Ellerby designed the two latest sleeves, recorded in Hove with Theo Verney at the start of that year. Joe Lockstone built the booklets from cuttings and notes, looking at the counter of Peckham Books. Mandrake Handshake arrives with nine players. Elvis Thirlwell plays maracas the whole time, and sometimes an egg. Tooth, Teeth and Teethen are all three on that weekend.

What stays heard is Cuntology 101, Ghost Rider and I Go Out at Night. The homepage announces a Friday the 23rd and a Saturday the 24th of October, ten rooms and more than a hundred names, and puts Mike D 5D, of Beastie Boys, and dove ellis on the poster, with the site's lowercase. That poster is not a visit. The Brighton weekend is the one Merrick and Meszaros already closed.