Brand New Heavies - Borde Hill Festival 13th August 2026
The Brand New Heavies — Borde Hill Garden
13 August 2026
Review by Robert Corich
There are worse places to spend a Thursday evening than a country estate in Sussex with a cold drink in your hand, the summer sun beginning to disappear over the trees and one of Britain’s great funk bands preparing to make around ten thousand people move involuntarily from the waist down.
Borde Hill is a spectacular setting for a gig. This isn’t some anonymous concrete arena where the surroundings disappear as soon as the lights go down. The gardens and parkland are part of the experience, and on this particular evening they provided a suitably luxurious backdrop for music that has always had one foot in the jazz club, another on the dancefloor and several toes dangling rather dangerously over the edge of the funk abyss.
The Brand New Heavies were the perfect choice to commence the proceedings.
Before Nile Rodgers & Chic arrived to deliver the headline set, the Heavies had the rather enviable task of reminding everyone exactly where this whole acid-jazz, funk and soul revival came from in the first place.
And they did it without turning the exercise into a history lesson.
That’s important.
The Brand New Heavies have been around since 1985, emerging from London’s rare-groove scene before helping to define the British acid-jazz movement. But listening to them live in 2026, the word acid-jazz feels almost unnecessarily restrictive.
Because this is fundamentally a groove band.
The kind of band where the bass player doesn’t merely play notes — he establishes a legal jurisdiction.
The drums lock in.
The guitar slips between rhythm and melody.
The keyboards add colour.
And the vocal sits over the top with the confidence of somebody who knows that the rhythm section has already done most of the hard work.
Songs such as “Dream Come True,” “Sometimes,” “Dream On Dreamer,” “Brother Sister” and “Midnight at the Oasis” have become part of the band’s live DNA, while “Never Stop,” “Stay This Way” and “You Are the Universe” remain precisely the sort of songs that explain why the Heavies have survived several complete changes in musical fashion.
The interesting thing about hearing them in a setting like Borde Hill is how little those songs have dated.
The production styles may belong to another era. The clothes certainly do.
But the grooves?
Absolutely not.
They still sound enormous.
There is a warmth to the Heavies that separates them from some of the more clinical funk productions of the period. Their music has always retained a sense of musicians actually playing together rather than simply assembling a collection of sounds in a studio.
And live, that becomes the whole point.
The band stretches out.
The rhythm settles into that hypnotic pocket.
The audience begins dancing.
And then you realise that an awful lot of people who probably haven’t used the phrase acid jazz since the 1990s are having a bloody good time.
This is what The Brand New Heavies do best.
They make sophisticated musicianship sound effortless.
There are plenty of technically brilliant bands who can leave you admiring them.
The Heavies make you want to dance.
That’s a much harder trick.
And perhaps there was an added significance to their appearance at Borde Hill. Because waiting in the wings was Nile Rodgers — another musician whose career has demonstrated that the groove is considerably more durable than fashion.
The pairing therefore made perfect sense.
The Brand New Heavies may have emerged from London’s acid-jazz underground, while Rodgers helped define disco, funk and dance music on a global scale, but both understand the same fundamental truth:
If the groove is right, everything else follows.
By the time The Brand New Heavies leave the stage, the job is done.
The crowd is warmed up.
The temperature has dropped a few degrees.
The trees around Borde Hill are disappearing into the evening light.
And somewhere inside the audience, people who arrived thinking they were here to see Nile Rodgers have just rediscovered a band they perhaps hadn’t realised they had missed.
And then there were the people…
One other thing deserves a mention, because it isn’t actually about the music.
The organisation at Borde Hill was a refreshing change from the sometimes rather joyless experience of working at larger London shows.
From the general site staff and security through to the accreditation people, everyone we encountered was friendly, approachable and genuinely helpful. Questions were answered without the usual look that suggests you’ve just asked somebody to explain quantum physics while they’re simultaneously trying to evacuate the building.
Accreditation was straightforward, security were helpful rather than confrontational, and the general atmosphere among the staff seemed to be that they actually wanted you to have a good evening.
It shouldn’t be remarkable.
But compared with some London venues, where the word helpful occasionally appears to have been removed from the staff handbook, it was certainly noticeable.
There was no sense of being processed through a system. People actually spoke to you. They pointed you in the right direction. They helped when something needed sorting out.
And it contributed to the whole experience.
Borde Hill felt like a place that was pleased to have you there — not simply a site where thousands of people had been processed through a series of barriers before being allowed to buy an overpriced drink.
Sometimes the smallest things make the biggest impression.
The music might have been the reason we came, but the people running the place made it considerably more enjoyable to be there.
That matters.
Because a great concert isn’t just about what’s happening on the stage. It’s the whole experience from the moment you arrive until the moment you leave.
And Borde Hill got that part very right.
The music might have been the reason we came, but the people running the place made it considerably more enjoyable to be there.
Sometimes the smallest things make the biggest impression.
And on a beautiful August evening at Borde Hill, The Brand New Heavies provided the soundtrack.
Funk isn’t dead. Acid jazz isn’t dead.
And, judging by the number of people dancing in the Sussex countryside, neither is the groove.
Not by a very long way.
Photography by Michelle Fernandes
