With well over three hundred bands playing every venue to speak of across Brighton and neighbouring Hove there’s always the very real danger of being in the wrong place at completely the wrong time. The guy on pills rave-jerking away like an epileptic with an electrode up his bum to the mellow folk-rock of The Acorn being a prime example of this on Thursday night. The crowd, who might as well have crawled out of the Old Testament, were confused to say the least. With this number of bands you’re always going to get a few clunkers too. The inexplicably popular Mumford & Sons, who propagate the poisonous lies of Christianity via the medium of dull-as-ditchwater folk rock, and end up sounding like a ‘hillbilly Coldplay’, managed to be more tedious than a four hour liturgy from Pat Robertson. In addition there is an excess of the kind of soporific ‘dinner party’ folk which is the daily bread of most Brighton venues, although a haunting set from the unimaginably talented Blue Roses more than makes up for this.

There are advantages to TGE taking place in a fully fledged town, rather than the super-sized fun parks in which most festivals live out their days. Unlike events such as Reading you can bring as much booze, fireworks, pets or children under five as your little heart desires. If you’re narcotically inclined you can bring enough drugs to kill a racehorse without the fear of having to run the gauntlet past police sniffer dogs at the festival gates - there are none! The one urban disadvantage: after chants of ‘The streets are our toilets!’ all weekend the town really does start to smell like a giant urinal. Unpleasant, but a big step up from the Crawl. Camden is a public shithouse no matter what day of the year it is.

The true magic of The Great Escape is in its sheer unpredictability, you never really know what you’ll end up seeing or where you’ll end up staying. A friend passed out at the Black Lip’s hotel and woke up late the next day to rush straight to a job interview. It was only when she went to the loo afterwards that she realised the band had scribbled dirty great swastikas all over her face. She did not get the job to say the very least.