Dave spent the rest of the day with his mouth open, rapping

I went to Brighton the other day. I love it when that happens. What’s more, I spent the afternoon there, freestyling with Dave Waller. Yeah. We were kicking rhymes over old school instrumental joints for a big chunk of time.

How much fun was it? A stupid amount. Actually, a stupid fresh amount.

Brighton’s a bit of a pain to get to, but I’m always up for a trip out there, and when my excuse was: to see Dave, see Dave’s new place, and hang out and make up raps, well, that actually seems like a whole great number of excuses.

We started out with a coffee and then warmed up with just straight-up freestyles over top of some hot instrumentals. It’s been a long time since I’ve just freestyled, for fun, with a friend. I was reminded how fun it is to listen to music and improvise on a beat.

Once we got into it a little bit we then tried some new freestyle games – different ways of structuring some rapping. Some of these things we’ll probably try – in some capacity or another – at next weeks Excursions.

Next Excursions. It’s next week.

If you don’t know Excursions it is, as always, an incredible opportunity for people to get together and hear a  sweet six-piece live band and some amazing emcees kicking powerful freestyle rhymes overtop. It’s all ably held together by keyboard wizard/musicmaster Rob Grundel and emcee/host Dave Waller. Oh, it’s also on a boat. That boat is certainly where I will be on Tuesday, ready to jump in on any occasion.

As for our Brighton session, well, I’m not sure if it was the sea air, the framed taxonomy of rap names poster on the wall, the chance to throw down some records on a turntable and scratch ’em up, catching up with Dave after so long, the presence of osteopaths and massage therapists in the house, or anything else in particular but we had a good session rocking those rhymes.

My train back from Brighton took over two hours (it usually takes less than an hour). But even that slow commuter frustration couldn’t slow my head nod.