Jens Lekman/Bill Wells/The Legend!/Esio Trot
St Andrew’s Church, Hove

I’ve always seen words in blocks, shapes – not sentences or letters, but blocks, shapes, like patterns coalescing on a chessboard, fluid. I see concerts as birdsong: unfettered, inspiring but oddly limited to the same five or six notes, the same patterns forming and un-forming and reforming. All I seek for are the odd moments of magic – my baby Isaac smiling, innocent of hurt and hatred, smiling with unquestioning love in his eyes; a half-empty church, icy-cold, high arches, low eaves with a few troubadours singing songs of rejection and hope on stage, coloured in by brass and a tinkling keyboard. All I look for are those moments of magic: someone or something slightly askew – the girls on the door selling the most delicious chocolate cake for 50p a slice, or the tea steaming up gratefully in our chapped hands, anything to stave the cold, Jens Lekman with the power suddenly blown out, picking up an acoustic guitar and continuing on anyway to the accompaniment of finger-clicking and a softened saxophone, a teenage girl transported from the mundane, in raptures, twisting and turning through the church aisles with her partner.

On stage myself, with Chris Anderson playing his tinkling Omnichord keyboard, strumming moments of beauty behind my un-amplified voice that takes strange turns and twists soaring up to the rafters as I sing of death and Girls To Share Your Life With, breast feeding and decayed ambition. On stage myself, jacket thrown off, jumper thrown off, because as Jens says when he appears – and does same – it’s the best way to keep warm in a snowstorm, strip naked and huddle up to a companion. Watching from the crowd as Esio Trot charm and beguile, transported back to 1988 and it’s a village hall in Hertford and The McTells and Beat Happening are on stage, and The Legend! plays a set with his electric guitar unplugged, and everything is discordant and jangling, out-of-tune but so mesmerising, Velvet Underground filtered through a secondhand tape-recorder and a collection of Postcard Records. Watching from the crowd as Bill Wells soothes and excites us mightily with his jazz-inflected firestorms, the female brass section from Gothenburg improvising harmony and rhinestones like I’ve continually missed from rock music, Jens playing a bass – a favour that Bill then returns.

Watching from the crowd as Jens sings his own Beat Happening sample; and afterwards, sated by the tea and cake and wonderful chilly atmosphere, we watched Jens Lekman play half-a-dozen songs to half-a-dozen fans (by request) as most folk shuffled out anyway, figuring that concerts really ought to have a proper end, and we discussed Scout Niblett and Television Personalities before braving the bitter storm outside.

Chris Anderson said: “Well, isn’t there something wonderfully English about this whole evening?” and it would be hard to deny him his observation. Fortitude, beauty, village halls, music…sometimes I’m still proud to be living here in Brighton (and Hove actually).